I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of “Incident at Vichy,” showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. Fear doesn’t travel well just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. I remember those years-they formed “The Crucible” ’s skeleton-but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. But there they are-Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle’s money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind.
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