About Arthur Miller

Conversation Starters

Community Conversations
& Other Programs

Films of Power & Fear

The Crucible on the web

About Tacoma Reads Together

Return to Library Events Page

 

"I am not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play—the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days"

Arthur Miller - "Why I Wrote The Crucible" New Yorker - 10.21.1996

Arthur Miller's acclaimed play has transcended the playwright's barely camouflaged intent to explore the evil at the heart of McCarthyism and the 'witch hunt' of the early 1950s. Today, more than fifty years later, the play doesn't need the 'blanket' of McCarthyism to bring audiences (and readers) to thoughtful silence. The play explores issues of truth, injustice, faith, the role of law, the power of a lie, using the threat of an outside force to create fear and hold onto power, and the price of retaining one's sense of self-worth when social coercion works to destroy it.

The play simply refuses to lose its relevance. In recent memory we have seen waves of hysteria about satanic cults and child sex rings, attempts to remove a president for his sexual adventures, political rhetoric eerily reminiscent of Judge Danforth's comment that " a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between....," a melding of religion and politics, media-fear mongering and the mob rule of political correctness.

Now in its fifth year, Tacoma Reads Together is a community wide reading initiative that brings people together to discuss issues raised but great literature. Through book discussions, films, community conversation and other special events, the program gets people talking and thinking about issues that impact our community and our lives. Please join the conversation.