Question
Chunk Four
19. The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common
experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen
talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on.
Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their
Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before
their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was
quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As 1 learned from
non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mised with "Well, they must have
done something" Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense.
The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable.
And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
23. On opening night, January 22, 1953, 1 knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness
of the crowd was not a surprise; Broad vay audiences were not famous for loving history lessons,
which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play
opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL 13 REDS GUILTY" a story about American Communists
who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow
of goverriment." Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director Jed
Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each other The
critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word," wrote
Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable"
The Times was not much linder, saying "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in
The Crucible." But the play's future would turn out quite differently.
24. About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less
accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel
ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times
required, and The Crucible became a hit. The play stumbled
parable: story that teaches a
lesson
fervor enthusiasm
into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily
demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more
than six million copies. I don't think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn't
been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first Jean-Paul Sartre, in
his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners
conspiring to persecute the poor (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of
substance, and two or three were very large landowners)
Why was The Crucible
received differently
immediately upon
Type Here
Answer
The Crucible was initially received poorly by critics, but a year later, with younger, less accomplished actors performing with the fervor the script and times required, it became a hit.