The Crucible (1994 Audiobook)

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, Massachusetts, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town. In the ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor, The Crucible mirrors the anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s.

(P)1994 L.A. Theatre Works

The Crucible
by Arthur Miller

Full cast audio play
Starring:

Richard Dreyfuss
Stacy Keach
Ed Begley Jr.
Michael York

Directed by Martin Jenkins

"The Crucible" is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93.

Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. Miller was questioned by the "House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities" in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.

"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria.

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumours that women are practising witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial.