The play starts with a stricken father at the bedside of a daughter who won’t wake up, continues with a community turning on those it believes its secret enemies, the powers of state and church believing, or at least using, the hysterical testimony of little girls that good people secretly served the devil, and closes with an innocent man who must decide whether to save his life by lying or tell the truth and let the community kill him, leaving his wife a widow and his three sons fatherless.

The play is “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s slightly fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials of the early 1690s, first performed in 1953. My daughter and I saw it last Thursday at the Paragon Theatre in Coraopolis.

I had not realized the play was so intense and the story so gripping. Nor that t

See Full Page