Almost everyone who went through high school English had to read The
Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic drama set during the madness of the Salem witch trials. So most people would understand why the two leading actors in the university Department of Theatre’s version started practicing like mad when they found out they had to memorize all their lines before the first rehearsal.
Sophomore theatre performance and design major Joanna Higbee pored over her script as she criss-crossed the country over winter break, muttering to herself all through the night in a plane seat. Senior theatre performance major Art Hall talked to himself during some travels of his own.
“I ended up basically walking back and forth, up and down the sidewalk in front of my house, doing pages and pages,” Hall says.
Sidewalks and plane seats finally led to the stage in front of an audience when The Crucible opened Thursday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, with Hall playing John Proctor and Higbee as Abigail Williams.
The play starts after Abigail and some of her friends are caught chanting and performing rituals in the woods outside Salem, Mass. The girls try to escape accusations of witchcraft by pointing fingers elsewhere, and soon every woman in the town seems to be on trial. When Abigail accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, whose husband Abigail had an affair with, John Proctor must decide where his loyalties lie as hysteria takes over Salem.
When Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the early 1950s against the backdrop of widespread paranoia and fear of communism, he used the play to draw analogies between the witch trials and the congressional hearings of accused communists. The play is still relevant today, in light of the current controversy surrounding national security issues such as surveillance and detainment, says director Jerry Whiddon.
But, he says, the show is primarily about what the viewer decides it’s about.
“It’s about love, matrimony,” Higbee says. “It’s about how people deal with trauma, pressure, fear, mass hysteria.”
It can also be about the often difficult decision to stand up for one’s convictions, Hall adds.
“Most people who have read it say, ‘Oh, it’s boring, and it’s boring because it’s long and about something silly like witches,’ but it’s so much more,” he says.
Whiddon, who played John Proctor more than 30 years ago in a Rockville theater company’s production of The Crucible and has also directed the play once before, said he was initially unsure he wanted to do it again. But once he started, he found he was hardly treading a beaten path.
“Those productions are so far back in memory that I don’t even remember what the costumes looked like, and I don’t remember what the set was,” Whiddon says, “And this is such a new experience for me that I would even say I didn’t know The Crucible before.”
This production is different because of the work the actors did to constantly discover new aspects of their characters and of the play, Whiddon says.
As an award-winning former artistic director for Round House Theatre, one of the area’s premier theater companies, Whiddon found university students could be just as professional as the professionals.
“There’s a wide range of experience among the cast members, but there is no less a desire to do the work necessary, which I found heartening,” he says.
Some of the character development process – being “off-book” before the first rehearsal and going through packets of history, music and pictures relating to the play’s time period – was the same for the entire cast, but some elements were a little more individualized.
Higbee, for example, kept a journal about Abigail, and enlisted her iPod to help her feel more like her character.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of Alanis Morissette, I’m not gonna lie,” she says.
With a background primarily in stage management and scenic design, Higbee, who never took an acting class until this year, says she has been running an emotional marathon since she found out she got the lead role.
“I freaked out and went around all day with this freakish, contorted half smile on my face, and then figured I should take some more acting classes,” she says.
But no matter how much nerve and preparation was needed to put the play together, Whiddon and his cast feel The Crucible is worth all the effort.
“On one level, it’s a wonderful parable for our time, and on another level, it’s just a heck of a story, and Miller tells it well,” Whiddon says. “It’s the stuff of theater.”
The Crucible will run through Saturday at CSPAC. For a full list of showtimes, a schedule is available at
http://claricesmithcenter.umd.edu.
Contact reporter Alia Malik at malikdbk@gmail.com.
