Ivo
Van Hove likes
to deconstruct texts onstage, putting his stamp on other people’s ideas. This typically means that a 2-hour play will
run 3 or even 4 hours because of the extra bulk. The “stamps” don’t necessarily add anything,
but may rather detract from the original piece.
For instance, in
his current version of Arthur Miller’s
The
Crucible playing at the Walter Kerr Theatre, he adds “supernatural”
effects. If you know Mr. Miller’s play ,or American history, you know the girls in Salem never saw a witch or a
spirit. A group of adolescent girls in
Salem were trying to get themselves out of trouble for getting caught dancing
in the woods in the dead of night — dancing at any time was forbidden in their culture
— by pointing accusatory fingers at others.
If you don’t immediately understand (and it was quite clear in this
production) that the girls were lying, you must have nodded off halfway through
the first act. So when Mr. Van Hove adds
interludes of a girl levitating and the wrath of God in the way of a lightning
storm with high winds blowing singed paper into the schoolroom as if there’d
been an explosion in the next county, he confuses the issue. He creates a lie on top of the lie that does
not help get the point across. At least
not the point of Arthur Miller’s play.
He gives an excuse to the adults who go along with the girls and their
lies and the hell they create in Salem village.
And there is no excuse for the actions of the “righteous” adults in
Salem in The Crucible.
First Van Hove
brings the action forward to a more modern time. The classroom the curtain rises on had a generic bland look, the hard chairs occupied by girls in their 'tweens
and teens. They wore conservative
private school pleated skirts, knee-highs and white blouses. Modern and neat. The scene designed by Jan Versweyveld is open and light, with a large blackboard at the
back of the stage covered in drawings and occasionally words. The greatest flaw to this scenic design is
its freedom. There is no ceiling, and
the walls reach out to the edges of the stage.
It’s wide open and bright. Salem
was neither bright nor open. Just as importantly, Mr. Van Hove’s loosey goosey staging
uses all the corners of the set, so the audience sitting house left or right
cannot see what goes on there. I’ve
written about this issue in the past, when directors ignore the audience
viewpoint by staging action where only those who can afford front and center
can see it. This is the responsibility
of the director along with his designer.
This problem would not have arisen had Mr. Van Hove 1) considered the
claustrophobic society that trapped his characters and 2) walked the auditorium
to see what parts of his staging needed to be adjusted to the theatre. Not everyone sits orchestra center.
The action starts
on that banal classroom disrupted, desks and chairs overturned — perhaps to give
the actors something to do later. Van
Hove (with his costume designer Wojciech
Dziedzic) makes the Reverend Parris look like a modern Jesuit in a sloppy
sweater. The adult women wear something
like loose gaucho pants with baggy tops, the men somewhat deconstructed
business suits. Once the play begins,
the girls’ white blouses come untucked. Hardly
fitting for an overly restrictive society.
 |
| Abigail vs. Mary in the foreground surrounded by, L to R, Hathorne, Parris, Danforth, Proctor. Photo Credit 2016 Sara Krulwich, NYTimes |
Jason
Butler Harner as
Reverend Samuel Parris did fine work, showing us the preacher’s desires for
monetary recompense and the respect he believes should come with his position,
revealing him to be an articulate but weak man. It is impossible to trust that he ever truly
believed the girls, but maybe that’s as it should be.
Tina
Benko does her
job as Ann Putnam, but still doesn’t make that hard-hearted character come to
life, any more than Thomas Jay Ryan
does for her husband Thomas Putnam. Brenda Wehle does not embody Rebecca
Nurse when she enters, seeming to rely too much on her age to appear a village
elder. She does not reflect the strength
of character Goody Nurse has that makes the whole village respect her.
Everything was
rather dreary and stiff in not-old Salem with not-old-fashioned people speaking
Mr. Miller’s lines intended for 17th century characters, until Ben Whishaw entered the playing
space. He cast the perfectly competent
Mr Harner into the shade. Whishaw,
while not physically imposing, took over the stage and the theatre, with his
dark voice and straightforward talk. He embodied John Proctor, the voice of reason from an imperfect man in a
world gone mad. For the rest of the
play, we only wait for him to return to the stage. He did have a rather unfortunate habit of
jumping on people, which became distracting in his penultimate scenes. I get it.
I just don’t think it worked.
The greatest
disappointment of this production was Saoirse
Ronan, whose film work I quite like.
As Abigail Williams, the teenaged seductress, she was shrill, stiff,
“johnny one note” throughout. She clearly
had no vocal training or prior stage experience, which is unfortunate if her
film experience led her to believe all would be fixed in the editing room. It’s easy to see why the other girls fear
her, hard to see why anyone would feel “softly” toward her.
As for the other
girls: Jenny Jules’ turn as Tituba, the Reverend Parris’ slave from
Barbados, is grounded and appropriately amusing until threatened into
submission. Elizabeth Teeter as
Betty Parris has fine powers of concentration as she’s mauled about while
“sleeping,” Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut
as Susanna and Erin Wilhelmi as
Mercy Lewis were barely noticeable.
Standout here was Tavi Gevinson
as Mary Warren. Initially Ms. Gevinson
rather annoyed me as she seemed to be attempting to channel Scarlett Johansson. By the second half, though, she’d gathered
her strength and wits and did fine work as the torn participant in the travesty
that was the Salem witch trials, suffering through her dilemma: To be a part of the in crowd and do evil is
one thing. To step outside of that crowd
and do good is dangerous.
 |
| Elizabeth Teeter, Saoirse Ronan, and Tavi Gevinson |
Jim
Norton played
the litigious Giles Corey with heart and humor.
It was easy to believe this man was a friend of many in his community,
making that community’s betrayal and murder of him and his wife all the more appalling.
The revered Reverend
Hale entered Salem full of pomp and confidence and left broken. His blind arrogance had a great deal to do
with the growth of this ridiculous story told by guilty children into an all-consuming
monster. Bill Camp was competent enough in the role but neither deep nor
varied.
By the time we met
Francis Church, his wife Rebecca was already falsely imprisoned so Ray Anthony Thomas had only the
opportunity to plead for justice for his wife, his friends, and himself. His performance was on the mark for the scene
that leads its hearers to assume the play is really about the McCarthy hearings
and naming names. This is echoed at the
end of the play by John Proctor when he retracts his false confession because
his name is all he has left. Nicely
done, Mr. Miller and Mr. Thomas.
Sophie
Okonedo was
rather dull as Elizabeth Proctor offering us none of the character’s layers. I expected more of Ms. Okonedo.
 |
| Ben Whishaw as John Proctor with Tavi Gevinson as Mary Warren, and Ciarán Hinds as Deputy Governor Danforth.. |
I looked forward
to the entrance of Ciarán Hinds as
Deputy Governor Danforth in the second act, and was not disappointed. Mr. Hinds can command a stage and every other
person on it as if he were born to that power.
His embodiment of Danforth assured us that the real Danforth is still
burning in hell. The only fault was that
he seemed too intelligent to be so easily taken in by Abigail Williams,
especially Ms. Ronan’s Abigail.
Teagle
F. Bougere as
Judge Hathorne postured and recited lines, as did Michael Braun as Ezekiel Cheever. Those characters had beliefs and flaws, but these
actors did not seem to know it.
Philip
Glass music
underscores the story, rarely overpowering it.
Favorite scene (that Mr. Miller did not write) gave us a wolf examining
the stage. A nifty scare.
Two final points
about Mr. Van Hove’s direction. First,
the staging was clumsy, the playing space overlarge. Bring the set in a little tighter or don’t
stage scenes in the far corners. Finally,
I must wonder: Are the dull performances
of some of the secondary and tertiary characters the fault of the actors or the
director? Does Mr. Van Hove prefer the
characters who are not primaries to fade into the background like chairs? Does he not bother to work with those actors
to develop their performances? If all
his focus was on Ms. Ronan, he surely failed.
Somehow despite
the three hours it took Mr. Van Hove to tell this tale, his production did not
tell the story of the play. It is an
important story and always relevant, and this lost opportunity is a shame.
In short, I prefer
Mr. Miller’s version of his play to that of Mr. Van Hove.
~
Molly Matera, signing off to re-read a play I first read when I was 12 years
old. Full disclosure: Decades ago, I played Abigail Williams in a
touring production of the play with far fewer actors and a portable set. It was one of the joys of my life as well as
an extraordinary education. Maybe it’s better to not have as big a budget as
Mr. Van Hove clearly had. Kudos to the imaginative
director of that past traveling production, Eric Hoffmann. And R.I.P. to its fine Reverend Parris, the
late Michael Graves.
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