"The curtain came down and nothing happened....People sat there a good two or three minutes, then somebody stood up with his coat. Several men--I didn't see women doing this--were helpless. They were sitting there with handkerchiefs over their faces. It was like a funeral....I didn't know whether the show was dead or alive. The cast was back there wondering what happened. Nobody'd pulled the curtain up. Finally someone thought to applaud, and then the house came apart." (re: Premiere, 2/10/49, more...
"The curtain came down and nothing happened....People sat there a good two or three minutes, then somebody stood up with his coat. Several men--I didn't see women doing this--were helpless. They were sitting there with handkerchiefs over their faces. It was like a funeral....I didn't know whether the show was dead or alive. The cast was back there wondering what happened. Nobody'd pulled the curtain up. Finally someone thought to applaud, and then the house came apart." (re: Premiere, 2/10/49, Philadelphia)less...
Arthur Miller, the son of a coat manufacturer and a schoolteacher, grew up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. After graduating from high school he worked at an auto supply warehouse. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1938; he also worked as a mouse tender in the university labs, and a night editor for the Michigan Daily. His plays began winning awards in 1936 and in 1938 he won the Theatre Guild Award; he has also received several New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, the Pulitzer more...
Arthur Miller, the son of a coat manufacturer and a schoolteacher, grew up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. After graduating from high school he worked at an auto supply warehouse. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1938; he also worked as a mouse tender in the university labs, and a night editor for the Michigan Daily. His plays began winning awards in 1936 and in 1938 he won the Theatre Guild Award; he has also received several New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and has served as president of PEN. In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery. They had two children, Jane and Robert, but the marriage ended in divorce. In 1956 he married Marilyn Monroe; that same year Miller was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When he refused to name names, he was held in contempt of Congress, and it wasn't for another two and a half years that his conviction was overturned on a technicality. In 1962, after his marriage to Monroe also ended in divorce, Miller married Ingeborg Morath with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca. He was honored as the Distinguished Contributor to American Letters by the National Book Foundation in 2001. Miller died at the age of 89, of congestive heart failure, at his Roxbury, Connecticut, home.less...
Okay, so all sorts of historical details are altered for the sake of character drama, but so what? It does not change the fact that this is one heck of a great play that offers it all: romance, betrayal, psychology, murder, and more, all set in a sleepy little Puritan town obsessed with witches that has become the victim of the "games" of a few young girls.
While I would hardly recommend it to someone going for deep facts of the Salem Witch Trials, this still draws on historical characters and does an excellent job of portraying them as real people. You feel for them, even the ones you hate.
"The Crucible" is well-named as the pot that heats everything up, and Miller takes minor events and shows how they become the tragedy that was the witch trials.
This is an incredibly powerful and important story that teaches messages as the drama entertains.
Okay, so all sorts of historical details are altered for the sake of character drama, but so what? It does not change the fact that this is one heck of a great play that offers it all: romance, betrayal, psychology, murder, and more, all set in a sleepy little Puritan town obsessed with witches that has become the victim of the "games" of a few young girls.
While I would hardly recommend it to someone going for deep facts of the Salem Witch Trials, this still draws on historical characters and does an excellent job of portraying them as real people. You feel for them, even the ones you hate.
"The Crucible" is well-named as the pot that heats everything up, and Miller takes minor events and shows how they become the tragedy that was the witch trials.
This is an incredibly powerful and important story that teaches messages as the drama entertains.
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