The news from the Belasco, where Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater is reviving Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” is pretty depressing. It could hardly have been otherwise, given that Mr. Randall’s idea of how to found a repertory company of national standing was to throw money and publicity at the problem. The plan to launch the National Actors Theater was announced last year, at which point Mr. Randall set about raising funds and trying to interest potential benefactors. He put in over a million dollars of his own money and raised seven hundred and fifty thousand more by giving a once-only performance of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” with himself and Jack Klugman in the title roles. He announced a season featuring three celebrities not particularly known for their stage acting—Martin Sheen, Michael York, and Rob Lowe. He placed a two-page ad in the Times listing other big-name actors who had not categorically refused to have anything to do with the project. And he ran print and broadcast ads suggesting that the National Actors Theater would rival London’s National Theater, the Comedie-Francaise, and the Moscow Art Theater in intellectual weight and historical importance.
Weight the company certainly has. So plodding is the production—and so empty of any of the underused first-rate stage actors one sees just in New York, let alone elsewhere—that it would break your heart, if this revival were not exactly what Mr. Miller and his play deserve. The one bright spot in the evening is Maryann Plunkett, who plays Elizabeth Proctor with great insight, skill, and intelligence. She’s the only actor in the cast who is able to control her voice; certainly she’s the only one playing to anyone or anything that’s actually there. The others all seem to be pitching their performances at some abstraction—an idea of what classical acting is, or of what’s worthy of an important playwright like Mr. Miller.
Mr. Randall has clearly been at pains to do Mr. Miller justice. Except in the case of the director, Yossi Yzraely—of whom one is not surprised to learn that English is not his native language—he has assembled an all-star creative team. There are costumes by Patricia Zipprodt, lighting by Richard Nelson, musical direction by John Kander (of Kander and Ebb), and a ferociously gloomy set by David Jenkins, which plunks down a lot of furniture in the middle of a stage darkly hemmed in by giant tree trunks. But it’s all for naught. Between the portentous music and the portentous lighting cues, the dust flying off the props and costumes, and Miller’s addled notion of how seventeenth-century America talked, the audience is more likely to experience church giggles than catharsis.
The actors are like so many school-children performing in an end-of-term play. Mr. Sheen, always a strong screen presence, is out of his natural habitat in a Broadway theater. He plays John Proctor honestly enough—if you consider that he has almost no voice—falling down only on Proctor’s most trumpeting utterances. In his rush not to seem actorly, he cuts off a lot of Miss Plunkett’s lines, but at least he doesn’t seem actorly—which is more than you can say for the rest of the company. Fritz Weaver, in the role of Danforth, is playing Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments.” But the show’s true anti-star is Michael York, who gives an eye-popping, arm-waving performance as the Reverend Hale. The well-meaning but deluded character he’s playing is there to make human error more human to us by demonstrating how a relatively rational man could believe in the Devil; Mr. York seems, rather, to be trying to approximate various alien life forms, but settles in the end for merely playing a bad actor. (He’s wrestling with the accent—you can see that—but it’s no excuse.)
Next hardest to take is Patrick Tull (albeit in a comparably minor role); after that, it’s difficult to choose. It’s a company of such flamboyant ineptitude that an actor like George N. Martin actually looks good. Here he is Giles Corey, the saintly Salemite who, while being pressed to death, has only two words to offer his tormentors; “More weight.” Giles is a true naïf—a man who inadvertently incriminates his own wife. It should be possible to see how his innocence could be preyed upon, but as Mr. Martin plays the role, it’s difficult not to suspect that what he’s really thinking about is marrying again.
Similarly, it should be possible to see why the people of Salem find the malevolent Abigail (the source of all the trouble) either virtuous or vulnerable. Madeleine Potter’s Abigail seems dangerous, cagey, and shifty-eyed. You wouldn’t let her near a potted plant. But, of course, that’s the way Miller wrote the role: it’s one of the things that make “The Crucible” such a nonstarter. In order for Miller’s allegory to work and for his play to have any impact, the “bad guys” would have had to have a point of view. And for that to happen Abigail would have had to be effective as a dissembler. But, although Miller describes Abigail, in his stage directions, as a girl with “an endless capacity for deception,” the play itself, instead of giving us an accuser who seems holy, makes Abigail as transparently ugly as Joe McCarthy.
Why Miller failed to make the character of Abigail into an effective literary device—whether it was a function of his own inadequacy as a dramatist or because American realist theater has always favored literalism over metaphor—is an interesting question; and a production that sent us out wondering about it would have been worthy enough. Unfortunately, Mr. Randall has merely succeeded in erecting yet another monument to bad acting in the name of lofty intentions.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 23, 1991