No weak links in local troupe's production of Miller's Crucible

Grant Kerr, Telegraph Journal, May 26, 2006

"...you can do what Stephen Tobias and the Saint John Theatre Company have done, and play it for its most immediate appeal: as a straightforward human tragedy with a strong whiff of operatic excess. They begin with Patrick Clarke's simple concept of a set: essentially, the interior end of what looks rather like an aging barn, with exposed beams and plank walls, pierced here and there with plank doors and mullioned windows; and they place that set out in the middle of the vast Imperial Theatre stage. Ostentatiously, as the lights go down black curtains slowly descend to hide the exposed backstage work area on either side of the raked acting space -- now visibly small, even claustrophobic, surrounded (as Miller wanted it to be) by the misty darkness. Costumes and furnishings are all authentically late-eighteenth century colonial and rough: we're reminded regularly by the look, the stylized acting and Miller's artificial but authentic-sounding colonial dialect, that this isn't our time and isn't our place. Most importantly, the delivery of lines and gestures are all intense and melodramatic: from the opening panic about the comatose Betty Parris right through the screaming climax of Act I, as the gaggle of adolescent girls, each pinpointed by an overhead spot, yell out their overlapping accusations about all the people they've seen "with the devil," the production feels like nothing so much as an opera: a Verdi Macbeth, perhaps, with its headlong rush to destruction, its impassioned, tremendous arias, its supersized characters....

In spite of the overblown, operatic quality of the production (or perhaps partly because of it) , the first act achieves the powerful momentum that Miller clearly wanted, and if we lose some of the lines in the bedlam of overlapping, passionate exclamation, we gain a power that makes the more disciplined and shaped second half -- in which the noose is tightened gradually and inexorably around the victims of the hysteria -- more effective. If an amateur company is going to err in producing a play like The Crucible, it is far better to do it on the side of passion and power than on the side of discipline and restraint.

It takes many cooks, of course, to stir such a broth, and while it's impossible to mention all of them, it's worth noting that Brian Dobbelsteyn's John Proctor has just the right weight of authority: a large, normally stolid figure with enough suppressed rage to make him feel genuinely dangerous, and to make him a more genuinely tragic figure than Miller's Willy Loman. Bob Doherty's Danforth is a worthy opponent: powerfully declamatory, moving visibly from over the top oratory to flashes of visible uncertainty. Alex Goldrich makes the Reverend John Hale into just the right kind of complicated, self-questioning intellectual who can become in many ways the real tragic hero of the play.  Kizzie Kaye's Elizabeth Proctor is properly restrained and perhaps even repressed: her inability to forgive her husband's "lechery" is nicely tempered...

The Crucible is a mammoth undertaking (even allowing for such cuts as the disappearance of Miller's comic relief, the voluble Sarah Good), and the production manages to create solid performances for almost every role in Miller's twenty-person cast, but, as always, the production lives or dies as a whole: ensemble is what matters, and in this case the ensemble works -- especially the pace and timing of the production: entrances and exits and the pell-mell rush of overlapping dialogue, the appearance of onlookers in scenes and their absorption into the focal action, all keep our attention focused throughout. This is no small achievement; it's easy for a production involving twenty characters to slip into a sort of pageant in which characters on stage become simply elements of the set, waiting for their lines..."  Click here for full article

Russell A. Hunt, Professor of English, St. Thomas University, May 2006