The Crucible

In the rigid Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a group of girls is discovered dancing in the forest. To escape punishment, they begin to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft, and a village already primed by fear, envy and old grudges tips into full-blown hysteria. As the accusations multiply, the courts reward confession and punish honesty, and ordinary people find their lives and reputations at the mercy of spectral evidence.

At the center stands farmer John Proctor, a flawed man carrying a private guilt, who must decide how much he is willing to lose to tell the truth. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 as a barely veiled response to McCarthyism and the anti-communist witch hunts of his own era, and its portrait of conformity, scapegoating and moral courage has lost none of its force.

A cornerstone of American theatre, The Crucible remains a searing study of how communities turn on themselves — and of the price of integrity when a lie is safer than the truth.