Idaho Shakespeare Festival is opening its season with the non-Shakespearean play The Crucible, written by the late Arthur Miller. Since The UnShakespeare have been featured in some of my recent blogs about Shakespeare Festivals, Idaho Shakes’ production provides the perfect continuation to the discussion. Though written over three hundred years after Shakespeare’s works, The Crucible has many attributes that make an appropriate companion piece to Will’s works.

While The Bard admittedly wrote most of his tragedies about royalty (or at least military figures), his humanizing of his heroes brought them down from the pedestals upon which Greek tragedies had placed them. King Lear is less interesting as a story about a ruler losing his political power; it succeeds much more as a drama about a father at odds with his children and friends. Indeed, it is the personalization of the action that adds weight to any political content.

In The Crucible, John Proctor fails in the same way Shakespeare’s heroes do. He is doggedly out of touch with his own vulnerability and overly invested in his own self-righteousness. In true Shakespearean fashion, his downfall ruins many people around him, including people he loves. True, Miller was commenting on the fanaticism that surrounds (and ultimately condemns) Proctor, but this too smacks of Shakespeare. King Lear also endures nefarious forces, some even within his own family. In both cases, however, things might have turned out better if both the heroes had recognized their precarious circumstances and played the game a little better.

Agatha Christie, you might ask?  What on earth does Agatha Christie have to do with Shakespeare?  Nothing, really…and everything if your drama troupe is currently in production with And Then There Were None!

After the success of Much Ado last summer, a parent at our school asked if I would mind if he directed a play during the school year.  Would I mind???  Good heavens, I would have to be out of my mind to be upset by an offer like that!  I was especially excited for this parent in particular to make the offer - It just so happens that he minored in theater when he attended college, and has quite a bit of experience with plays!  How fortunate for our little school to have such a knowledgeable person to help keep our drama program going throughout the school year!

Prior to this parent’s offer, several people asked me if I would consider running a drama program during the school year.  Being the crazy person that I am, my first reaction was, “Oh my goodness…that would be AWESOME!”  Then I remembered that during the summer, I don’t have any classes to teach…my kids aren’t in school themselves, so I’m not helping them with homework…which is why the summer play worked for me.  As much as I would love to have been able to do drama 12 months out of the year, I knew in my heart that it just wasn’t feasible, unless I was willing to give up teaching some of my classes.  So having a parent volunteer to direct a play for three months was the perfect opportunity for our drama troupe to not only keep going nearly year-round, but also to hone some other acting skills.

I read up on how to direct and act Shakespeare…not how to do theater in general, so what I learned how to do last summer will be very helpful to students in their ability to learn and understand Shakespeare, as well as be true to the text when interpreting.  But what this other parent can give our students is a more well-rounded theatrical education which includes other playwrights, acting styles, methods…the list goes on!  Ultimately our students will have a better understanding of the theater arts, and even if none of them pursue drama in college, they will still have gained a great deal from the experience.  And by studing other playwrights, they will just end up being more well-read than they would have been otherwise.

Wait a minute…did I just say there are other playwrights besides Shakespeare!?!?

Was Arthur Miller “the Shakespeare of our time,” as a recent article suggests? Although this question has been raised before, both here and elsewhere, perhaps we are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Theatre and Shakespeare buffs are forever using Shakespeare as the measurement of greatness; however, the standards of that measurement are rarely clear. Some might rightly say that there was only one Shakespeare (authorship naysayers be damned) and scoff at any attempt at comparison. Still, that response seems to indicate the limits of the question. Since no one writes in iambic poetry anymore (well, mostly), how do we find a method of comparison?

What if we instead asked the question in reverse, so that we could say that Shakespeare was the [fill in the blank] of his time? This way, the onus is no longer on some poor contemporary writer to live up to the near-religious level of adoration Shakespeare has received. Could we say that Shakespeare was the Arthur Miller of his time? On some levels, yes. Although The Bard dealt with kings and rulers and Miller focused on everyday people, both were masters of tragedy. Still, that genre did not solely define either’s career. In fact, both wrote in many genres, often mixing them freely (witness Miller’s unique, but ill-received The Creation of the World and Other Business). Perhaps the most salient trait linking the two is their timeliness. Although Shakespeare’s plays are often transported to various times and places, when you think of Elizabethan Drama, his name is first on the list. Miller similarly embodied mid-twentieth-century American Drama. Comparisons among writers do not have to favor one over the other; instead, they can highlight commonalities as well as each author’s unique gifts.