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Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/theater/review-in-arthur-millers-crucible-first-they-came-for-the-witches.html


In Arthur Miller’s
Crucible
First They Came for
the Witches
By BEN BRANTLEY
MARCH 31, 2016

From left, Elizabeth Teeter, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, Saoirse Ronan (foreground) and Erin Wilhelmi in
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Walter Kerr Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


The Devil has returned to Broadway, with the power to make the strong tremble. It is time to be afraid, very afraid, of a play that seemed perhaps merely worthy when you studied it in high school English class.

The director Ivo van Hove and a dazzling international cast — led by Ben Whishaw, Sophie Okonedo, Saoirse Ronan and Ciaran Hinds — have plumbed the raw terror in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which opened on Thursday night at the Walter Kerr Theater. And an endlessly revived historical drama from 1953 suddenly feels like the freshest, scariest play in town.

That its arrival also feels perfectly timed in this presidential election year, when politicians traffic in fears of outsiders and otherness, is less surprising. Miller’s portrait of murderous mass hysteria during the 17th-century Salem witch trials was written to echo the “Red menace” hearings in Washington in the 1950s.

Parallels between Miller’s then and latter-day nows have never been hard to reach for. What makes Mr. van Hove’s interpretation so unsettlingly vivid has little to do with literal-minded topicality.

Instead, following a formula that has proved golden for him in recent seasons, Mr. van Hove divests a historical work of period associations, the better to see its inhabitants as timelessly tragic and as close to you and me as the people in the seats next to us — or, if we’re honest, as our fallible selves. And more than any of the many “Crucibles” I’ve seen, this one insists that we identify with not only the victims of persecution but also with those who would judge them.

We are made to see what the terrified residents of Salem think they see, in visions formed from a collective, paranoid fever dream. In rendering these effects, Mr. van Hove and his astonishing set and lighting designer, Jan Versweyveld, borrow freely from the imagery of horror movies. Then there’s Philip Glass’s icy, rhythmic music, which seems to emanate not from the stage but from your own rushing pulse.




Ben Whishaw, left, as the farmer John Proctor, and Sophie Okonedo as his wife, Elizabeth, in
The Crucible. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


There is no hint of shabby desperation in these effects, of the sense of a spook house jerry-built over a well-worn drama. As in his recent masterly reimagining of another Miller classic, A View From the Bridge, Mr. van Hove is aiming for a scalding transparency. It is the kind of openness that lets us see the divided soul beneath the skin and, in The Crucible, what one character describes as “the wheels within wheels of this village, and fires within fires.”

The impact of that “View,” which presented a Brooklyn longshoreman’s doomed family within the starkness of an ancient Greek amphitheater, was such that I feared that this “Crucible” would suffer by comparison. Then there was the matter of this production’s chic global casting.

The changeling beauty of Ms. Ronan, fresh from her Academy Award nomination for Brooklyn, made sense for the diabolical teenager Abigail. (And, yes, she’s absolutely smashing in the part.) But that willowy, sensitive plant Ben Whishaw as the strapping, rough-hewed farmer John Proctor? Really?

But Mr. van Hove knew exactly what he was doing here. All the members of his large ensemble find revealing new shapes within archetypes and insist that we grasp and even sympathize with their characters’ perspectives.

There are other forms of magic afoot, as Mr. Versweyveld’s single set seamlessly becomes everything the script says it must be. As first seen, occupied by straight-backed, chanting girls at their desks in a fleeting, imagistic prologue, this would appear to be a contemporary schoolroom of a dreary institutional nature.

You could imagine it doing duty for civic events, such as a town hall forum or a local election. Those who gather here match the walls in their drab, functional clothing (designed by Wojciech Dziedzic). A chalkboard — over which is scrawled a prayer encouraging good will to men — occupies upstage center. And without giving too much away, let me urge you to watch that space. (The uncanny video projections are by Tal Yarden.)

The play’s unwitting catalyst is Mr. Whishaw’s John, whose sexual encounter with a young servant, Abigail, has left her determined to claim him for herself. She gathers a group of other girls in the forest to invoke the powers of darkness against John’s wife, Elizabeth (Ms. Okonedo). These would-be witches for a night are spotted by Abigail’s uncle, the Rev. Samuel Parris (a marvelously soggy-spined Jason Butler Harner), setting off a chain of accusations that results in scores of deaths.




From left, Teagle F. Bougere, Saoirse Ronan (seated), Jason Butler Harner, Ciaran Hinds,
Ben Whishaw and Tavi Gevinson in a scene from the play. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times


John Proctor has often been portrayed (by the likes of Liam Neeson and Daniel Day-Lewis) as a stalwart Gary Cooper type, and part of the tragedy in that context is seeing a big man brought to his knees. The slighter-framed Mr. Whishaw looks more vulnerable, and we fear for his safety from the beginning, not least because his cardinal virtue appears to be his sanity, and the sane rarely flourish in a world gone mad.

Ms. Okonedo, who brings a welcome earthiness to the role of Elizabeth, exudes a similar spirit of common-sense humanity. But living far from the town on their farm, they are unaware of the madness that is taking over Salem. When an officer of the court comes to arrest Elizabeth, they have the incredulity of people caught unawares by a tide of history that they simply can’t believe could happen in the world they know. Nazi Germany comes to mind. Certain pundits might even think of the United States today.

Feasible sexual chemistry onstage is fairly common; the bonds of a quieter, deeper-reaching love, less so. It’s that connection that Mr. Whishaw and Ms. Okonedo so beautifully embody here, and it ennobles their characters as much as their moral stances. When we see them in their last meeting, broken by incarceration and fearful of hurting each other by embracing, the heart shatters.

One of the miracles of this “Crucible,” though, is its success in presenting all those onstage as all too human and all too hungry to see themselves as good people. It’s their self-protecting, self-deluding rationalizations that conjure the devils of distrust that rip a social fabric to shreds.

If I had space, I would single out every one in the cast. But allow me to mention the scheming, petty burghers of Thomas Jay Ryan and Tina Benko; the anxious, spiritually challenged man of the cloth portrayed by Bill Camp; Tavi Gevinson’s malleable, craven and poignantly credible serving girl; Jim Norton’s folksy and unexpectedly heroic farmer; and the suave, snarling hanging judge given such unassailably authoritative life by Mr. Hinds.

In the end, everybody loses, and everybody suffers, with one blazing exception. That’s Abigail, the girl who cries “witch” and who, as Ms. Ronan so beguilingly plays her, has the power to become alternately invisible and radiant with focused intent.

The Crucible has a diverse and spectacular assortment of moments that make the flesh creep. But there’s nothing quite as scary as the sight of Ms. Ronan’s Abigail, seated stock still in a chair, bending a vulnerable girl to her will with the force of a malevolent stare.

Aloysius J. Gleek:


Ben Whishaw seems unconventional casting for John, a role often played by older, brawnier types — But the actor brings stirring truth to Proctor's fatal progression from a man already somewhat suspicious of doctrinaire thinking and its cowering followers to one who openly condemns the blind religious and legal zealotry that have ripped apart his community. He holds nothing back in the play's harrowing final emotional crescendo, a scorching indictment of fear mongering and its cost to individual freedom.




http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/saoirse-ronan-crucible-theater-review-879646


The Crucible
Theater Review
Saoirse Ronan leads the accusers in this revival of Arthur Miller's morality play
about the Salem witch trials, with Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo as John
and Elizabeth Proctor.

The Bottom Line:
Searing performances make the hysteria frighteningly real.

by David Rooney
5:00 PM PDT 3/31/2016


Elizabeth Teeter, Saoirse Ronan and Tavi Gevinson in The Crucible
Jan Versweyveld



After enlivening the downtown theater scene for years with his iconoclastic takes on classic texts, Ivo van Hove continues his bracing entry into the Broadway arena with his second production of an Arthur Miller drama. While The Crucible is a very different play from A View From the Bridge, which the Belgian avant-garde director staged to ecstatic acclaim earlier in the season, the two works can also be seen as companion-piece tragedies. Both end with an accused man's wrenching refusal to be stripped of his name. However, in The Crucible, that man's innocence of the crimes with which he is charged adds blistering heat to the corruption of power that Miller so vehemently targeted.

Van Hove knows how to channel that heat. Almost operatic in their intensity, his productions are designed to leave audiences agitated and uncomfortable, which is notably the case with this distressing 1953 drama, with its steadily amplified sense of horror and indignation.

Like the director's View From the Bridge, the mesmerizingly acted new production trades the play's specific period and milieu — the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 — for a pared-down look and non-naturalistic, indeterminate setting. Wojciech Dziedzic's utilitarian costumes and Jan Versweyveld's single set, a vast, high-ceilinged schoolroom, suggest the 1950s. But the intention appears not to evoke Miller's allegorical subject, the McCarthy scourge, when citizens were coerced to name suspected Communist sympathizers, ruining lives and careers. Nor does van Hove seem interested in underlining contemporary parallels in an election year in which one of the leading candidates has fueled support by trading on fear and hostility.

Instead, the production presents a chilling account of the institutional arrogance and ignorance that are a threat to civil liberties in any age, particularly when the dividing lines separating politics, religion and the judiciary become blurred. Episodes of mob-mentality recklessness and its consequences are present throughout history, and Miller's cautionary tale remains a trenchant illustration of the dangers of demagogic leadership destroying a community by disseminating distrust and paranoia.

The face of this production is Saoirse Ronan, icy and commanding in her first stage appearance. She follows her breakout film work as the timid Irish girl who blossoms so tenderly to self-possessed maturity in Brooklyn with a sharp pivot to simmering resentment and reflexive cruelty that erupt out of sexual, religious and class repression. Her Abigail Williams in fact could almost be an older version of one of Ronan's earliest screen roles, the vicious little minx in Atonement. Her accusing finger is what sets the accelerating hysteria in motion to the point where nobody is safe. And when it comes vengefully to rest on the blameless Elizabeth Proctor (Sophie Okonedo), who dismissed Abigail after the servant girl had sex in the barn with her guilt-ridden husband John (Ben Whishaw), the fury of the inquisition is multiplied.

The production opens with a brief curtain-up on the girls singing a prayer while seated facing a rear-wall blackboard on which the Puritan text, "The Dutiful Child’s Promise," is written in chalk. Their piety thus inferred, we then witness their gullibility as Abigail, the natural leader, grasps to cover up the reasons why they were found dancing in the woods. Ronan's steely calculation is beautifully contrasted by the guilelessness of Mary Warren, the innately good, not terribly bright girl who tries to speak out about their dangerous make-believe tricks. She's played with affecting openness by Tavi Gevinson, who continues to emerge as a remarkably instinctive actor after last season's This is Our Youth.




Sophie Okonedo and Ben Whishaw in The Crucible



One element of the production that no doubt will be divisive is van Hove's decision to visualize the supernatural manifestations that the girls succeed in conjuring in the fertile imagination of a populace primed for hellfire. While many productions have staged the unscripted nocturnal frolic that causes the trouble, van Hove skips it. But he includes levitation, a prowling wolf and electrifying scenes of the group's feigned trances. Those interludes are choreographed as convulsive ballets by Steven Hoggett, accompanied by jittery animation that spreads across the blackboard. The intention is clearly not to show that the witchcraft is real, but that the power of suggestion has made it so, for the girls as well as the onlookers.

Van Hove observes the careful mechanisms of Miller's construction, with a first act that expertly defines the various townsfolk and their roles in the gathering calamity. There are incisive performances from Jason Butler Harner as Abigail's uncle, the slippery Rev. Samuel Parris, eager to steer the suspicion of witchery away from his afflicted daughter; Tina Benko and Thomas Jay Ryan as Ann and Thomas Putnam, loathsome alarmists who feed the panic; and Brenda Wehle, superb as Rebecca Nurse, a charitable pillar of the community who dismisses the adolescent girls' feverishness as the "silly season" she recognizes from her numerous children and grandchildren. The price she pays for her clear-sighted skepticism is as shattering as the fates of the Proctors.

Also on the victims' side of the uproar is the disputatious old farmer Giles Corey, played with fiery irascibility by the wonderful Jim Norton. The character with the most complex moral arc is Rev. John Hale, the learned religious authority brought in to oversee the proceedings. Bill Camp makes a strong impression in the part. Initially swallowing the fraudulent testimony of Abigail and her pawns, he's solemn and self-important, before realizing too late his role in sending innocent people to the gallows. There's no such awakening of conscience in Ciaran Hinds' imperious Deputy Governor Danforth, who sends a chill into the air from the moment he strides onto the stage, full of rigid certainty before he's even interrogated a witness.

Some will argue that Miller's already somewhat preachy, portentous text doesn't need any emphatic help, though the original score by Philip Glass — an almost wall-to-wall sonic carpeting of needling percussion, mournful chants and funereal strings — contributes to the production's ever-tightening noose. Also tremendously effective is Versweyveld's unforgiving lighting and Tom Gibbons' creepy sound, nowhere more so than in the startling stagecraft that blows the turmoil of Salem directly into the Proctors' farmhouse.

As strong as the ensemble is, the indispensable anchoring forces are Whishaw and Okonedo, both of them devastating. Miller wrote Elizabeth as a virtual saint, so it helps that Okonedo plays her early scenes with an almost brittle detachment. But the stoicism she exhibits through her suffering is heartbreaking, as is the pain behind her refusal to judge her compromised husband as he agonizes over whether to make a false confession and save himself.

Whishaw seems unconventional casting for John, a role often played by older, brawnier types — Liam Neeson, Iain Glen and Richard Armitage in recent stage productions; Daniel Day-Lewis onscreen. But the actor brings stirring truth to Proctor's fatal progression from a man already somewhat suspicious of doctrinaire thinking and its cowering followers to one who openly condemns the blind religious and legal zealotry that have ripped apart his community. He holds nothing back in the play's harrowing final emotional crescendo, a scorching indictment of fear mongering and its cost to individual freedom.


Venue: Walter Kerr Theatre, New York
Cast: Ben Whishaw, Sophie Okonedo, Ciaran Hinds, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Camp, Tavi Gevinson, Jason Butler Harner, Jim Norton, Tina Benko, Jenny Jules, Thomas Jay Ryan, Brenda Wehle, Teagle F. Bougere, Michael Braun, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, Elizabeth Teeter, Ray Anthony Thomas, Erin Wilhelmi
Director: Ivo van Hove
Playwright: Arthur Miller
Set & lighting designer: Jan Versweyveld
Costume designer: Wojciech Dziedzic
Sound designer: Tim Gibbons
Video designer: Tal Yarden
Movement director: Steven Hoggett
Executive producers: Joey Parnes, Sue Wagner, John Johnson
Presented by Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Roger Berlind, William Berlind, Len Blavatnik, Roy Furman, Peter May, Jay Alix & Una Jackman, Scott M. Delman, JFL Theatricals, Heni Koenigsberg, Daryl Roth, Jane Bergere, Sonia Friedman, Ruth Hendel, Stacey Mindich, Jon B. Platt, Megan Savage, Spring Sirkin, Tulchin Bartner Productions

Aloysius J. Gleek:

Aloysius J. Gleek:

Ben Whishaw, Tavi Gevinson (foreground), Jason Butler Harner, Bill Camp, Jim Norton, Ciarán Hinds,
Teagle F. Bougere, and Ray Anthony Thomas (background)

Aloysius J. Gleek:

Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw play characters whose past affair informs a witch hunt
in the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
(Photo: Robert Deutsch, USAT)




yours truly and the wee, lovely Ben Whishaw. March 21 2016
http://drinkbloodlikewine.tumblr.com/post/141254773016/yours-truly-and-the-wee-lovely-ben-whishaw




attoliancrown: Tonight I met Ben Whishaw. Words cannot describe how amazing it was to watch him act live. March 31 2016



 

unabellaavventura: Ben signing autographs.

MAR. 31 2016 VIA UNABELLAAVVENTURA 61 NOTES

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/unabellaavventura/142011792598
http://nothingsweeterthanben.tumblr.com/

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