For a play that was often dismissed as a political tract for the times, Arthur Miller's The Crucible has survived uncommonly well. In addition to wide use in English and drama courses, it has become a staple of courses in American Civilization both in high school and college. In the theater its popularity continues undiminished, both in this country and abroad…. Next to Death of a Salesman, The Crucible remains Miller's most popular play. (p. 8)
The contemporary appeal of The Crucible can hardly be attributed to any analogy it draws between the Salem witch hunts of 1692 and Joe McCarthy's Communist hunts, however, since the majority of those who see or read the play today are probably too young to remember the Wisconsin Senator. Foreign audiences must be even less conscious of the analogy. Why then has The Crucible held up so well? What makes it still worth reading and performing? One can perhaps begin to answer these questions by quoting something that Miller said in an interview about his later play, After the Fall: "I am trying to define what a human being should be, how he can survive in today's society without having to appear to be a different person from what he basically is." Despite his seventeenth-century setting, he might have been talking about a central theme of The Crucible, not only for audiences of the McCarthy years but today as well. Certainly the play more than bears out Miller's belief that drama is "the art of the present tense."
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