Time has played some odd tunes upon Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, just revived as the first offering of the National Actors Theatre, Tony Randall’s grandiosely styled group. The new production begins attractively. We are lost in a forest: great beetling green treetrunks tower weirdly over a barely suggested bedroom. Set designer David Jenkins suggests a darkness lurking both outside and inside the Calvinist interior. (It is an expressionist vocabulary used also in the Dancing at Lughnasa set.) For a second, we await a rich, complex drama. Then, alas, the play starts; actors take the stage in wigs and in colonially monochromatic cotton and gingham, and they commence to utter the pseudo-colonial cotton-and-gingham prose of Miller: “On Sunday let you come with me, and we’ll walk the farm together; I never see such a load of flowers on the earth,” etc. This purports to be the speech of an upright yeoman...

 

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