The Crucible

The play also has Quaker themes, and one actual Quaker joke. In the first scene, Proctor says, “I think I may speak my heart, may I not?”, to which Parris replies “What? Are we Quakers here? We are not Quakers here yet, I think!” The Puritans viewed the Quakers as heretics and hanged a few on the Boston Common. But in an echo of Bownas, to be a “covenanted Christian” – essentially a member of the Puritan church community – you had to testify to a transformative Christian experience. Like Quakers, Puritans looked for signs of divinity in the events of daily life; unlike Quakers, they also looked for signs of demonology. Hale arrives at a theology which frightens and confuses him. Nothing is fixed in it, and God seems to change the “rules” with each new moment. One of Hale’s last lines is, “Before the laws of God, we are as swine. We cannot know his will”. But a Quaker, raised in the wonder of continuing revelation, might say to him, “Do not try to know the unknowable, friend. Only feel where thou are led.” Hale follows Fox in his gradual withdrawal from book learning, and his increasing reliance upon his experience, what we might call his intuition. Hale’s journey in the play might be roughly described as the journey from knowing to believing. In matters of faith, knowing is a false certainty used to vanquish doubt, believing acknowledges doubt, but chooses devotion. It is the braver course. And Hale’s sudden appearance in the jail to pray with the prisoners could be a scene from Quaker history.

In a life-imitating-art way, I found myself wading into difficult interpersonal experiences recently, guided by a strong sense of faith, like Hale. In the matter creating difficulty at my meeting, I had a couple of one-on-one meetings with people in various states of distress, and found myself feeling much like Hale might, sitting at the Proctor’s table on that warm summer night. And in an echo of Jason, I find myself again in a play in which spiritual searching is at the core of its ministry. Like Hale, I am trying to find my way in the midst of an ever shifting landscape of events. And I see so clearly that my willingness to live with this uncertainty is tied directly to the fact of my being an actor. Exploring without knowing is what actors do. We grope. We stumble. But we cling to our odd creative faith that if we throw ourselves into the moment at hand, we will finally bring something truthful to the surface. The process-focused life of the actor has deeply informed the way I wade through the result-focused culture I live in. The world is addicting to being right, it frequently seems to me, and I just want to caress the moments as they come.

I have found myself drawn down deeply into the life-altering journey of the Reverend John Hale of Beverly of The Crucible. I wonder sometimes if my not being able to go to meeting for worship has shifted my spiritual longing on to him. I have found myself fighting for choices in rehearsal with an energy I haven’t felt in a while. These debates revolve mainly around the last scene of the play in which Hale, having denounced the court and after going into what I imagine to be three months of spiritual retreat, comes back to try and convince those in the jail to lie and “confess” in order to spare their lives. I am interested in presenting a shattered man, whose absolutist and idealistic spiritual world view has been blown apart, and who is groping for meaning in a new world in which faith is mixed with doubt. I also sense that he feels deeply betrayed by Danforth, the strict judge in who’s court he convinces his Salem friends to put their faith, only to watch them bound for the gallows one by one. This has led me to confrontational choices in that final scene, and choices which are out of character for the Puritan social mores of the time. I had him enter and sit on his butt on the floor, for instance, exhausted and despondent at not being able to garner a single confession after a whole night’s striving. David was interested in something else, some not quite so “weirdish” – to borrow a term from the play. The conversations we have had have been robust and probing, and have included the others actors present. Their clear opinions and thoughtful observations have made me re-think my position that we don’t have as many “thinking actors” in America as Britain. Perhaps it’s just that not many publish books.

I burst into tears driving to rehearsal today. I was singing along to Francis Dunnery’s Riding on the Back and when I came to the chorus:

I’m riding on the back (horns!)
I’m riding on the back (horns!)
Of a giant bird
Bigger than you
Bigger than me

I totally lost it – heaving sobs, nearly had to pull over. It happened twice; I had collected myself and the chorus came again and - it was like I was puking up feelings. I saw myself on that bird, and felt so small and powerless, and I felt the fear of having no choice but to hold on tightly, and love that dear bird like my mother and child combined. I felt the breathless shock at riding with my eyes open, seeing the great fall that awaits my letting go, and the amazing view of the glorious world all around. The bird is God of course, and faith is my grip on the nape of her neck. It isn’t easy, and occasionally the bird throws in a barrel roll or two.

No wonder then, that I have been so gripped by Hale’s spiritual ride into the unknown. Here I am, a modern man, more equipped perhaps than Hale to factor doubt into my spiritual life, feeling relatively shattered myself in the face of my uncertain future. Am I personalizing this performance too much?

The Crucible began with an enormous gathering of artists and staff for what we call the “design presentation”, but is really more of a kick-off, or christening of the new production as it begins. It was an astonishing mix of artistic disciplines, with Jeep giving a wonderful talk about how the woods represented fear to the Puritans, and the shaping of their houses was a literal cutting of safety out of fear. His design is a kind of architectural frame surrounded by tree trunks. The walls and the frame gradually disappear as the play gathers to its somber end. Marla has designed gorgeous period costumes: layers of darkly dyed and textured wool, black and brown leather, simple linen. After coming off of Jason (needless to say a radically different look) I find myself thinking of this husband and wife design team, really, these two are living treasures.

Gathered around several tables that afternoon for the first read through were a various “ages” of our Philly theatre community: the elders, actors like Tom (who plays Cory) and Marsha (Anne Putnam), and the other married couple in the play, Ceal (Rebecca Nurse) and Peter (Rev. Parris); the middies, 30 – 50 year old actors like Susan and me, Chris who plays Proctor (and who played opposite Susan in the Panto); and the youth, twentysomethings at the beginning of their careers, like Julianna (Abigail), Jeb (Willard) and Kristy (Mary Warren) – who is also a former student of mine. I find myself feeling comfortably in my place in this “lineage”: admiring of those who have come before and proud of the younger ones, some of whom I feel a direct connection to. Jeep is there too. We get swept up in the momentum of the play, and the great emotion of it. I find myself blowing my voice out and banging the table at one point, and Susan is awash in tears as she says goodbye to her “husband” for the last time, the first time. Jeep told me later he was watching the younger actors watch the rest of us mouths agape, and I thought it too: what an astonishing first read it was. Again: the payoff of a company of Citizen Actors, at ease with each other and ready to go for it.

David spoke about how the play has opened up the further away we get from the McCarthyism of the 1950s, how it has almost attained a mythic quality like the Greek plays Miller loved. It seems to speak to the slippery ease with which we choose to obey fear, and invent the cause of it by scape-goating the most vulnerable among us. Miller’s condemnation of the racism at work beneath the witch hunting leaps out at me, as Hale is front and center in identifying the slave Tituba as the first witch. In a society in which fear is the driving force, absolutist doctrines can take hold, and horrible crimes can be committed as long as the fear may be plausibly said to be remedied by them. I think of the skill with which the Bush administration has used our fear of terrorism to justify a criminal war and erode our civil liberties. We gasped the first time we heard Danforth say “You are either with this court or you must be counted against it”.

With Susan and I both being in the play, it has brought the Citizen Actor paradigm to the front of my mind very often. How I long for a Monday – Friday, 9 – 5 work week. After going to great lengths to describe to the director and stage manager what we are up against, and asking for one of us to be let go in the afternoons in time to go pick up Griffen and Ella from school and daycare, that request was virtually ignored. Susan and I have large roles, it’s true, and the director felt that it was impossible to arrange rehearsal so that only one of was needed three out of the four weekday afternoons. I thought this was folly, and had to restrain myself from offering to draw up such a rehearsal schedule. In any case, Susan and I were left to buy a lot of “extended day” coverage for Griffen, and more weekday afternoon babysitting than we had budgeted for. We just spent $500 on babysitting to cover tech week, so perhaps I am bit raw about this just now.

“Why do we rehearse on the weekends?” I asked a friend in the theatre the other day. “Why do we have Mondays off?” He thought about it for a moment and couldn’t come up with an answer. I think I know: it’s a cultural left-over from a business paradigm that caters to the Vagabond Actor. It’s a theatrical affectation that has lost any necessity. The professional theatre is constructed on the assumptions that if you work in the theatre, ipso facto you don’t have children. And, I might add, you don’t go to church, meeting, mosque or synagogue either. No wonder we have had to live down the suspicion that we a godless bunch of libertines. Weekend rehearsal also contributes to a cultural diminishment of the actor’s work: working weekends is what people do who have real jobs during the week. To this day, after 20 years of professional acting, parents of my children’s friends are surprised to hear I get paid to act. Working on the weekends turns acting into an avocation in the public’s eyes.

Then there are all the things Susan and I can’t do that the rest of the world can: take our kids to parties, go to their athletic games, work as volunteers, work for our spiritual communities, and perhaps most important, just hang out with our kids and be a family together. My longing for Griffen and Ella is almost visceral, and twice recently Susan and I have kept them home on Mondays so that we could have at least one day all together. I occasionally drive by Ella’s day care on my way to work, and the thought of her in there, experiencing moments of revelation, joy, heartbreak that I will never witness is almost too much to bear. I want to strap her to my chest in a papoose, arrive at rehearsal and say: deal with it. I have been at the center of a difficult negotiation between our meeting and the school attached to it, but my involvement with this work has been hamstrung by my weekend rehearsal calls.

I wonder: what is so complicated about our work that it can’t be done in a regular 40 hour work week like the rest of the world? Is our work so much more involved than that done by corporations around the world that we need an extra day? Of course, once tech begins everything changes, and we must perform on the weekends. But for the bulk of rehearsal, I can see no good reason to void the weekends for all involved and tack on an extra day by virtue of habit. Perhaps my grumpy mood leads me to say this, but I wonder if the 40 hour work-week I propose might lead to a more efficient use of human resources?

The grumpiness is due in part to working with a director who works “organically”. By this I mean, he essentially allows the actors to follow their impulses and he slowly begins to shape what he sees. Ordinarily I would sing his praises – he puts the actors’ work first. But with a play as large and complex as The Crucible, with big scenes with upwards of 12 actors on stage, I have found myself longing for the old-school blocking approach to staging, in which the director says “you go here now, right, and on this line she comes here, good” etc. There is a way to split the difference, I believe, in which such blocking is presented as a blueprint to get us started, and the actors are invited to deviate from it when they feel moved to. But David has many gifts, and as his actor, I am called to work in the format he presents.