Allegory In The Crucible

By Kevin E. Meyers, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER May 12, 1999
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Arthur Miller, the world-renowned playwright widely regarded as a pioneer of American drama, recounted his experiences with the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s and the creation of "The Crucible" in a lecture Monday afternoon.

Miller's lecture, titled "History Around the Crucible" and delivered to a standing-room-only audience in the Science Center, focused on Congress's investigation of his personal life and his sense that he was living in "a perverse work of art."

"In one sense," he said, "'The Crucible' was an attempt to make life real again."

"The Crucible," a dramatization of the 1692 Salem witch trials, was written as an allegory for the "witch-hunt" atmosphere

When he realized that the witch trials bore a direct connection to McCarthy's communist hunt, Miller spent three days in Salem's library reviewing court transcripts. He said he was most struck by the preponderance of "spectral" and circumstantial evidence in the proceedings.

"You could be at home asleep in bed, but your spirit could be out at your neighbor's home, feeling up his wife," Miller said.

Because of the connection he made to Salem, Miller said he more clearly understood the actions of the government in the 1950s.

"Salem...had taught me...that a kind of built-in pestilence has nestled in the human mind," he said.

In his introduction to Miller's speech, Director of the Loeb Drama Center Robert S. Brustein called Miller "our theater's elder statesman."

"For 50 years now, ever since 'Death of a Salesman,' the name of Arthur Miller has been synonymous with, indeed inseparable from, American drama," he said.

Miller's lecture was the opening of the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization. Past lecturers in the series include Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty and Gore Vidal.

Miller, who is 83, received an honorary degree from Harvard at the 1997 Commencement