What’s on in Eugene? REVIEW: The Crucible at University Theatre

Kylie Dehaven as Abigail Williams, Andrew Poletto as Reverend Parris. Photo by Ariel Ogden

In what I feel sure is a self-reinforcing loop, I couldn’t help but think of Dar Williams’ song “Holly Tree” as I watched Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the Hope Theatre at the University of Oregon.

The singer-songwriter’s lyrics speak of arable land in New England before the Revolution, and just exactly how men of power and rank got their hands on it when women and children, among others, were vulnerable. Miller’s 1953 play, which many people will remember reading in American Lit in high school, reveals this power grab as well.

The Crucible concerns both colonial history and what Miller was experiencing as he wrote it – the Joseph McCarthy era. The play still holds a fair amount of power because of its injustices and complexities; it doesn’t need any justification about “the terrorist era” to make it relevant now and anytime, for at the heart of it lies both a question of personal morality and a question of institutional rot. Those will never be irrelevant.

Just in case you don’t remember the particulars, or in case you didn’t have it assigned in high school: A young woman, Abigail Williams (Kylie DeHaven) covers up her and her friends’ nighttime activities in the forest with accusations of witchcraft. Abby and the other young women of the town were dancing, drinking love potions and listening to Abby’s uncle’s servant Tituba (Naomi Wright) sing songs from Barbados – and they’re discovered by that uncle, Salem’s Reverend Parris (Andrew Poletto).

Kylie Dehaven as Abigail Williams, Riley Shanahan as John Proctor. Photo by Ariel Ogden

This is a problem for the young women. They’ll be publicly whipped for their sins, and they’ll be whispered about all over town and farther. Most of them are servants who need employment or young women of good families who want husbands. The girls find themselves in a bind; this Puritan society has no give to it, no way for them to enjoy themselves without being considered sinful. Meanwhile, they can see that Reverend Parris’ parishoner Thomas Putnam (Karl Metz) wants land and wants to blame certain people in the town for his wife’s miscarriages. They’re clever girls, and they’re stuck in a terrible society for young women – and to get out of their trouble, they play the men against each other and end up killing many of their neighbors. Miller never meant The Crucibleas a play striking a blow for women’s rights – the main antagonist is a young women who wants to get her married lover back and manipulates an entire town, killing people, in order to try for that – but nonetheless, it’s easy for a modern audience to see how girls with no apparent power found horribly damaging ways to take any power they could.

And in the play, the Salem and Boston men enable them time after time by being more willing to believe the girls’ ravings of spirits and their self-inflicted bruises and wounds than being able to consider the political undercurrents of accusations.

Director Theresa May, a professor in the UO’s Department of Theatre, has a cast comprised of mostly inexperienced actors, but they perform admirably. As John Proctor, one of the main focuses of the play – Proctor would not accuse other witches, just as Miller and some others would not give names of fellow former Communists to the McCarthy hearings – Riley Shanahan bears a heavy acting burden that he carries well. Proctor had (consensual) sex with Abigail Williams when she was his servant, and ever since, he’s been trying to reconcile with his wife Elizabeth (Antonia Gomez) and work his farm outside of town. He doesn’t like Reverend Parris’ preaching, so he skips church sometimes, and he’d like to hire a different pastor. And he’s still attracted to Abby. All of that comes even before Elizabeth is accused of witchcraft and before he himself ends up with a death sentence for witchcraft – commutable if he’ll only name others as witches.

Andrew Poletto as Reverend Parris, Riley Shanahan as John Proctor, Antonia Gomez as Elizabeth Proctor. Photo by Ariel Ogden

Part of the strength of the second act comes from the crossing trajectories of two other men: Reverend John Hale (Michael Sugar), who starts out with the intense desire to ferret out witchcraft and who realizes where his well-intentioned but terrible errors have led; and Deputy Governor Danforth (Michelle Yeadon), who takes his authority all too seriously and practically foams at the mouth to enforce what he considers the laws of church and state. (And thank you, Thomas Jefferson, for dividing state from church after the American Revolution!) Sugar, strong in this role, and Yeadon, superb in her depiction of a self-righteous blowhard, show the tensions within and between those who question and those who can’t afford to question, lest the entire social framework come crashing down.

A Fisher King sense pervades the final scenes – the town is wracked by wandering cows; orphans roam from house to house, looking for food, work and affection; crops rot in the fields. That’s all because authority has sickened and been corrupted, not by some evil spirits but by lust for property, power, and righteousness. The land won’t right itself until authority does – and judging from Danforth’s actions, that’s going to take some time.

This play runs about two hours and 45 minutes with an intermission. The Hope Theatre, thanks to its size and lighting grid, is always hot (wear layers that you can take off, and you’ll be happier). But this production of The Crucible keeps the audience in a firm, worried grip as it barrels toward the anguished cry of conclusion.

The Crucible only runs through St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Tickets are $12 for seniors and students, $14 for the general public, and free to UO students with ID who arrive at the box office between 7 and 7:30 p.m. on the day of the performance (or 1 and and 1:30 p.m. on March 11, the one matinee performance). Tix here or at the door. Getting to the University Theatre is quite easy– there’s free parking just across 11th Ave.; the EmX stops right at Dad’s Gates; or you can park a bike at numerous spots near the building.

If you haven’t read it since high school, or if your high school was too concerned about your possible rebellious tendencies to let you read it, now’s the time to see this deservedly classic play.

What’s On in Eugene? REVIEW: Fahrenheit 451

A little learning, as one character quotes to another in Fahrenheit 451, is a dangerous thing. So dangerous that no one should be learning at all – at least in the world of the 1953 Ray Bradbury book, adapted for the stage also by Bradbury (in the 1970s) and playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre through March 24.

In the way of dystopian futures – though perhaps they all seem that way because Bradbury’s story influenced so many later writers – the world of Fahrenheit 451 is circumscribed, narrow, stifling and fairly violent. That violence and oppression come in the form of continuous government monitoring via wired, artificial-intelligence houses that can report whether their inhabitants are sleeping, eating, laughing or enjoying the forbidden – that is, reading books.

The firemen in Fahrenheit 451 don’t put out fires. All news houses are fireproof, so they’re not needed there. Instead, they make fires to burn books and burn knowledge. In Steen V. Mitchell’s clever set (a set whose generous size makes it clear how much the Leebrick needs to get into its new, larger space on Broadway), each house and building has a direct line to an incinerator, and that’s where books go.

Sorry if this is review – probably you know this already; most people seem to have read the book in junior high or high school, at a time when young people really feel the injustices of others controlling their lives and are ready to believe in a better, different world out there beyond the confines of the adults’ damned rules. That’s a good time to read dystopian novels about unfair, capricious authorities; Bradbury’s genius was to make those terrible authoritarian figures into a kind of rebellious teenage hater-of-books state, wherein videos are superb and books are outlawed. I never read it, but I’ve got my chance this year as Eugene and Springfield participate in the National Endowment for the Arts’ many-locality Big Read program – the Eugene Public Library had 100 free copies of the book, which is also pretty inexpensive at any local bookstore.

Back to the play. It’s long, y’all. But somehow (perhaps because Mary at the Leebrick told me the first act was an hour and 10 minutes, and I gulped half a cup of coffee before the play began) I didn’t find the first act boring or tendentious, though it’s not exactly subtle. Part of this is because I usually enjoy watching Cameron Carlisle act, and he’s on stage about 99 percent of the time as fireman Guy Montag. Montag’s not quite sure that he likes his job. Then there is Montag’s muse/ not quite seductress (as I said, Fahrenheit 451 is a little … heavy-handed) Clarisse (Arun Storrs), who feeds him sips of information and ideas that make his job a lot harder to do. And one of the absolute rewards of this production is watching Stanley R. Coleman, who plays fire chief Beatty with a menace and control that keep the wordy script going. I want to see Coleman a lot more. His playing of the cleverly revealed secrets of the fire chief – the war of quotations, especially – sustained the less interesting second act until he left the stage.

Montag looks sickly and withdrawn the entire play; that’s one part of the script, but still, Carlisle could play Montag with a little more vigor as he realizes that his life means nothing, that he’s been propping up a regime that only harms people, never helps them.

Aside from the acting, the star of the play is indubitably Ryan Rusby’s media design. Where I was sitting, I could hear someone, probably stage manager Jacs Bruscato, calling cues just about all night long, and that’s understandable: There’s a video every other second, and the incorporation of LOLcats and other cute animal videos as distractions from serious thought make for a modern update on the 1970s play. (Though what were those weirdly thick tabletphones? Pretty sure iPads would have worked better.)

The part of the play that gets too long, really, is the utopian end. OK, we get it. People memorize books. Oral culture. Also a hippie woods culture with free love, just in case you were wondering. (Not to spoil it – oh, but you’ve read it, haven’t you? Or you’ve read Scott Westerfield’s Uglies or Pretties, or Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, or any of the dystopian city/utopian country novels – I think there’s a paper in here for a scholar of young adult books, just in case anyone wants that idea. Shakespeare’s Green World, continued in dystopian lit.)

In any case, if you grab some coffee either before the play or at intermission, you will probably enjoy this DOOM WARNING play even if you wonder, as I inevitably did, what happened to all of the e-books? Can’t burn those.

Tickets run about $17-$20, and you can get them (if any are left – it’s selling out fast) here.