Allan Appel Photo
Kathryn Kuhn, as Abigail, in a moment of devilish transport, with Joey Abate, in the background, as Rev. Danforth.
‘Why were there pictures of police brutality between the acts?”
“People are afraid to talk when they feel they’re alone.”
“The women don’t get any kind of attention; that’s why they’re flipping out.”
And “I love John Proctor.”
Those were among the responses by students of Co-Op Arts and Humanities High School after sitting through a rehearsal and run-through of their colleagues’ gripping production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Christian Segy as John Proctor and Nicole Padula as his wife Elizabeth try to save each other’s lives, and souls.
In the play, Miller adapted the 1692 Salem, Mass. witch trials to mirror the House Un-American Activities Committee fear and anti-communist smear campaign of the early 1950s. The Crucible is one of the icons of the American theater canon.
The show at Co-Op, with propulsive music and a backdrop of contemporary projections — of masked young people brandishing Kalashnikovs, anti-police brutality demonstrations, and young immigrants desperately seeking asylum — features a cast of 25, with 30 behind-the-scenes actors, everyone a student.
The performances are open to the public at the school’s little black box theater Thursday at 6:30, Friday at 2:30 and 6:30, and Saturday at 6:30.
The talented students are dressed in Puritan-style long skirts and the boys in dark waistcoats, and not a word of the original script is altered, said the play’s director, Co-Op theater teacher Charley McAfee.
(L-r) Nomble Tanner as Mrs. Putnam, Kathryn Kuhn as Abigail, Tatinia Mojica as the prostrate Betty, and Sumiah Gay as the stalwart Rebecca Nurse.
Yet the projected images, ripped from the headlines, of young people driven by fear or fearful ideologies, along with the bomb-about-to-explode musical rhythms, make certain that the play feels very contemporary.
“To me this piece is social justice theater. I didn’t want to get lost in the bonnets and history,” McAfee said before the run-through. “We’ve tied this play to modern issues.”
The idea of the in-school run-through was to have the sophomores who are reading the play in their English classes as well as the theater tech class, which also read the play, see it in performance and pick up what they didn’t in the reading — for, after all, a play is an outline for performance.
Friends Terew, left, and Lowhar saw new things in a play on the stage rather than the page.
“I loved it because so many are accused for nothing,” said Roza Terew, a sophomore from Milford.
Her friend, Isis Lowhar, a junior from Bridgeport, read the play and wasn’t sure she liked it. In her reading she had focused on how she would light it, since the context was her theater tech class. “I was more focused on if I pull up dark lights” at a particular juncture in the action, what might happen, she said.
By the brief intermission between acts, Isis was excited and converted to an admirer, and she had learned things: “I didn’t know John Proctor’s wife was accused [from my reading],” she said.
“If you confess, you get to live to pick out the other witches [before they then kill you]. It’s mind-boggling,” she said, meaning she really now understood the play on the stage in a way she hadn’t before. “Crazy,” she added.
The talk-back, where teachers tried to steer the discussion to protecting the innocent from false accusation.
The play has powerful moments. When the young girls, led by a vindictive Abigail (played by Kathryn Kuhn), stop at the end of one scene, they line the circumference of the performance area and point out at the audience, accusing us as well.
“It is the contention of the court that heaven speaks through the children,” declares Rev. Danforth, the high justice who has come to Salem to preside.
Played with wonderfully modulated yet scary authority by senior Joey Abate, Danforth declares to John Proctor in prison, where he struggles mightily to resist saving himself from the noose by lying, “You must confess your soul or you cannot live in a Christian country.”
Visual arts major Fernando Ortiz (at left) thought the projections worked best at the end, when the play’s gathered violence erupts.
Yet most of the comments by the kids picked up less on parallels between this moment in history — or the Red Scare, which the kids had studied in their readings — or on the habits of groups like the Taliban or the Islamic State. What seemed to grab the kids most was the frustration of the young girls, which perhaps caused them to seek freedom in the sorority of their wild accusations.