The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 2, 1953

The Crucible (by Arthur Miller) shows more fieriness of purpose than of vision. The author of Death of a Salesman has turned back to 1692 and the Salem witchcraft trials, clearly gripped by their hideous drama, clearly haunted by a conviction of their relevance today. He has watched, across the centuries, the hallucinations of children and the hearsay of grownups swell to an epidemic of accusations and arrests, confessions and hangings. In that unhappy time, any human doubt or protest was called the work of the devil, and the one way to avoid...

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