Perhaps the most ringing message to emerge from Miller's masterpiece is that, because of our own transgressions, we must not put ourselves in a position to judge others for theirs.In school, many of us learned that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is “an allegorical lens through which Miller examines the nature of McCarthy’s Red Scare” via a tragedy set during the 1692 Salem witch trials, writes Bag & Baggage Productions artistic director Scott Palmer in his program notes to the company’s new production. Many innocent people fell prey to the Committee's damning accusations and the resultant popular condemnation and blacklisting cost hundreds their jobs and reputations. Department of State and other government offices. Those hearings fueled the fear that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. And so, it is not wholly surprising that it fell prey to the cataclysmic event that we now generally call 'The Salem Witch Trials.'Īrthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 at a time when the United States was seized by the mania of Joseph McCarthy's senate hearings. Petty grudges and rivalries, land-grabbing and liberal thought also threatened this most Christian society. That forest was considered to be the last bastion of the Devil - as was evidenced by the attacking armies of naked red men (the Devil's spawn) that would emerge from it to do battle. A vast forest surrounded their tightly knit communities. Theirs was a holy mission that faced many threats. When the Puritans settled in New England in the mid-1600s, they believed wholeheartedly that they had been chosen by God to create a new righteous society - one that would not fall prey to the ornate trappings of the Catholic Church. A gripping cautionary tale of individual courage in the face of mass hysteria and misguided morality. A classic drama about the Salem witch trials.

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