The Good John Proctor

Abstract

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 mentioned and ultimately becomes the emblem of the hypocrisy and abusiveness of the Puritan culture—and indeed of our culture today. With the exception of the last scene, which portrays an event years later, the play ends before the trials begin. Monahon focuses on the year leading up to the trials by exploring the experience of four girls, whom Monahon gives varying ages, which makes a difference in how the trials affect the outcomes of their lives.Betty Parris is a child of ten. She shares her bedroom with her cousin, Abigail Williams, who at age twelve still is willing to play childhood games but clearly eager to move on. Mercy Lewis is a more worldly fifteen or sixteen; her foul-mouthed cynicism at first provides a comic background for events before it turns toward the tragic in the play’s last scene. Mary Warren has lost her home in Wells, Maine, and comes to Salem looking for work. At eighteen, she seems ancient and odd to young Betty, who wonders why Mary is not married. All the girls speak in the vernacular of American teenagers today, which highlights the way the play is a commentary on our current culture. With the exception of Betty, who still enjoys the security of her parents’ home, these girls must make their own ways through the world. Their awareness of their fragile positions and their dependence on others determines their actions, no matter how much bravado or self-affirming fantasy they try to bring to their lives. The play’s theme focuses on how the Puritan culture limits them and encourages their victimization, most pointedly in Proctor’s sexual abuse of Abby. Monahan challenges traditional hagiographic views of The Crucible’s hero, raising the same questions that Susan C. W. Abbotson did in “A Reassessment of the ‘Goodness’ of John Proctor: Fair or Foul?” (Arthur Miller Journal 7.1–2 [Fall 2012]: 15–21). Returning Abigail closer to her original historical age colors this treatment the worse.Abby finds a freedom on the Proctor farm that her repressive society has allowed her nowhere else. Working joyfully outdoors with Proctor in the fields—“like a boy,” as Betty says in amazement about the tasks—and assisting him at the birthing of cattle, Abby comes to admire his skillful manliness. It is easy to understand how she develops an adolescent’s crush on him, and how the repressed innocence in which her culture has enclosed her makes her unable to imagine that any action he takes toward her could be something other than an act of kindness and caring.The last time we see Abby in the play, clearly after Proctor has seduced her, she is wracked by confusion and guilt, describing herself as “filled with the devil” but also professing her continuing belief in Proctor’s goodness and her love for him. Whatever guilt there is here she can see only as her own—and that may be the central point Monahon is making about our society’s use of the concept “the devil.” The devil is that evil in which we indulge as an individual so that all the guilt falls back on us personally, while all our surroundings are left innocent. In this view, the addict’s addiction is merely a function of their personal choice; it has nothing to do with social circumstances, whether these are the pressures and hypocrisy of a high-level corporate job or poverty and hurdles against opportunity. As a society, we have no obligation to consider the social arrangements that favor some groups by exploiting others. The individual sufferer has been “possessed by the devil,” and all the rest of us can continue in our comfortable innocence.The most dominant presence in the play is the woods that surround Salem, although we never see its trees. Like Marlow’s Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, this is a place where the restraints of the village do not exist, making it both fascinating and terrifying, an effect made real by Isabella Byrd’s lighting. The woods’ power is highlighted by Cate McCrea’s set: simply a large platform supported by two A-frames, a set typical of the sparse but highly effective staging that Bedlam has made iconic of its theater aesthetic. At first the platform serves as the bed Betty and Abby share, but as the scenes shift in the audience’s imagination, it comes to be a kind of raft of solace and safety amid a frightening and turbulent world. There is a Nietzschean theme here. We try to rest comfortably, even if repressed, by accepting the myths and mores of our society, which protect us from the turbulence that can ensue from questioning these norms. The unexplored “woods” around this restrictive village can be an area of liberation, but liberation can be frightening and chaotic.The cast was excellent. Sharlene Cruz as Betty moved impressively from evoking a spoiled but also lonely and ignored ten-year-old to being a young mother in her early twenties, already world-weary, having seen life unfold in ways that were more complex than she had imagined. Susannah Perkins filled Abby with the hopeful, innocent enthusiasm of an early adolescent taking her first steps toward independence and a sense of identity. She is betrayed by a world that never is what it appears to be, that is more self-serving than she can anticipate, and that leaves her no explanation for her crises other than her own “engagement with the devil.” Her crises and her culture’s inability to take any responsibility for them are the center of the play. Monahon presents Mary Warren as a mystic who copes with anxiety about the reality around her by escaping into realms of what she hopes might be. Brittany K. Allen handled the challenges of the role well, helping us to appreciate Mary’s responses without making her seem merely flighty. Throughout most of the play, Mercy Lewis seems a shallow and self-impressed hipster who is introduced primarily for comic relief, but Monahon makes her the center of the play’s last scene, which takes place a bit more than a decade after the trials. Having moved away, Mercy now returns to Salem without a male protector and with a child she has had, although she remains unmarried. She has returned only for a visit with Betty, realizing that Salem never could accept who she has become. Nonetheless, Mercy wants her child to know Salem because of the place it has had in her life. Mercy looks back on her role in the trials as her most valuable work, a time when she did something significant to make the world a better place. Pronouncing on Proctor, she says that even if he was not a witch, he deserved to be hanged for what he did to Abby. Tavi Gevinson showed fine comic talent in portraying Mercy the hipster and was chilling in the final scene as the voice of implacable vengeance, a woman filled with rage at abusive forces she cannot completely identify or understand, who as a result now is a nihilist, happy just to “burn it all down.”The Good John Proctor has little direct relevance to The Crucible, other than Monahon’s contemporizing of Miller’s characters and the play’s setting in the Salem witch trials. For those who believe Miller wrote only condescending and chauvinistic portraits of women, Monahon’s portrait of how these four women are exploited and abused by Puritan culture might be taken not just as a critique of American society but as a critique of Miller himself. Nonetheless, we also must recognize that Monahon is writing in the tradition of Miller and of Ibsen before him: this is drama as critique of contemporary culture, as critique of how people often are abused by the values, conceptual schemes, and mores their cultures unquestioningly hold most sacred. Thus, Monahon’s play shows Miller’s influence as a shaper of modern American culture. In his plays, Miller not only responded to events and attitudes in the culture that surrounded him but also shaped the ideas his audiences would come to use to examine and understand that culture. Miller’s ideas became part of the cultural narrative we all now use to understand ourselves. One way or another, a dramatist who wants to critique contemporary American society will find themselves needing to revisit Arthur Miller to find the roots of the current stories we tell ourselves about who we are.