we're entering the backstretch and heading for the finish line. It's probably a good time for a big of reflection, but I'm a bit busy at the moment. - The #1 question I am asked? "What's your favorite play so far?"
- The answer? Love Song and The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot.
The Crucible is really a tale of two acts: the third and the fourth. Sure there are two others, but lets' call them what they are: setup and nothing but. Miller's just getting his pieces in place for the showpiece moments to come. (Though I must mention those gorgeous essays that fill the first act. They sweep me away with their power, and it seems a waste to leave them unspoken. Are they available in all editions of the play? Have they ever been staged? As I read them, I was imagining a stripped-down version with a Miller-esque narrator. )
There is such delicious tension in that third act, such a blurring of lines. Though we come into that courtroom antechamber knowing who is on the right side and who is on the wrong, Miller starts flirting with true suspense and shades of gray. There are moments where I don't know what Danforth is going to do, and moments where I think this play may be finally taking the witch hunters seriously and crediting them with intelligence and honor. It's in this act that I see people fighting to protect their community with a pure purpose, but disagreeing on the means to do so. It's this kind of balanced view that makes for compelling political theater, as opposed to didactic choir-preaching. To set up straw men and dismiss our ideological opponents as hollow idiots is a disservice to all involved, and sells short the struggles in the situation. The witch hunters are on the wrong side of history, but that does not mean they were evil or stupid: they were simply wrong. We intellectual progressive lefties are sometimes wrong, too ... but it doesn't mean we were stupid and venal. And it's in the delicious theatricality of the girls' hysteria that Miller starts to ask: what if they were right? For just a moment, we could launch into another play.
But then there's that unfortunate fourth act, isn't there? After all the complexity, we hit the brakes and make a u-turn to head back to the safe morality play where we feel most comfortable. We need to re-establish our progressive bonafides, and clearly state what side we're on. Miller coldly accomplishes this by ignoring character and carefully moving his chess pieces into place. How many actors and directors have struggled to find the reason Proctor suddenly embraces confession? It must be a crushing assignment, because he's only confessing so that Miller can set up the the setpiece where he rips up that confession in a heroic moment of defiance: Proctor can't rip up the confession until he signs it. So sign it he must, and we must want this alien character get manipulated into place. Miller the activist has wrenched control back from Miller the dramatist, and the play suffers for it.
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1 comments:
You're right, Proctor just ends up looking wishy-washy. Not at all the man with the strength we see in the other 3 acts. If he had made a decision and stuck to it, no matter what the consequences, it would have been a much more complicated and compelling ending.
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