The Crucible

Crucible, The

    Author: Arthur Miller

    First Performance: 1953, New York

    Published: 1953; rev. 1954

    Genre: Trag. in 4 acts

    Setting: Salem, Massachusetts, 1692

    Cast: 10m, 10f, 1 child (f)

Salem's minister Revd Samuel Parris prays for his 10-year-old daughter Betty, who with other local girls had been dancing at night in the forest. Parris is concerned that, led by his black slave Tituba, the girls had ‘trafficked with spirits’. At first, his beautiful niece Abigail Williams denies witchcraft. When Thomas Putnam and his wife declare that they have been bewitched, Abigail admits that Tituba and the Putnams' daughter Ruth conjured spirits, but she persuades the other girls to remain silent about Abigail's curse on John Proctor's wife. As Proctor's servant, she had had an affair with him, until his wife threw her...

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