https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3719-1571
Caitlin Sullivan’s production reminded me of Ivo van Hove’s 2016 staging of The Crucible, which seemed to make everyone—not just the condemned, but their Puritan judges and youthful accusers—victims of social forces that overwhelmed them. (See the “Symposium” discussing this production in Arthur Miller Journal 11.2 [Autumn 2016]: 200–213.) Van Hove was not showing us good guys versus bad guys in a metaphorical McCarthyism of the 1950s. Everyone in his production was destroyed in the complex matrix of collapsing but still dominant social mores and power structures that surrounded them. The culture was the abuser here rather than any individuals. That production was a portrait of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, a socially induced “curious inability to think.” It was a production for the political ethos of our own times.
Talene Monahon mounts this same kind of social critique in a play where Proctor himself never appears but is...
