Robert Ward, The Crucible (1961)

To me, The Crucible is the ultimate high school text (along with The Scarlet Letter, I guess: why are we so fixated on Puritans?): you read it, you talk a little about witch hunts and McCarthyism, it's all very Worthy in the semi-pejorative British sense, and then you never think about it again. The play was written at the height of McCarthyism, which was certainly a gutsy thing to do, but I dunno. I'm certainly not implying that we're immune to that kind of panic in the modern world--remember the "Satanic Panic," that insane thing with supposed satanic sex cult in preschools, that was self-evidently nuts even at the time and yet destroyed a lot of innocent people's lives--but still, I find The Crucible kind of overly obvious and pedantic. Also, isn't it implicitly suggesting that, while witch hunts may be bad, that's just because there aren't any actual witches: if there were, all bets would be off (and as for Communists in the State Department, well, it could be worse.  They could be capitalists). Obviously that's not an intended reading, but really now. I think Death of a Salesman is significantly better.

But! I saw the opera, from Opera Santa Barbara, still watchable on facebook. You probably know the story, and if you don't--sucks to be you, I guess! Various girls pretend or really think they are possessed by the devil, and in the end, ol' John Procter bites it, along with some others. What more can I say?

I guess I kind of hoped that seeing it in a musical setting would kind of punch up the story for me, but I'm sorry to say, I didn't find this overly interesting, even if it did win a Pulitzer Prize (I feel like even more than Nobels, Pulitzers are a very tenuous indicator of actual merit).  There's probably a justifiable reason it's not commonly performed today.  The music is pretty generic stuff, with not much that I found memorable. Exception: "The Devil Say He's Coming," a haunting lament from the Barbadian slave Tituba. Why can't we have more like that? We just can't, durnit! And as I said, the story itself, eh. Someone should make an opera out of Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom. That's the kind of Puritan opera I could get behind!