Abigail: “My name is good in this village! I will not have it soiled! Goody Procter is a gossiping liar!”
Abigail’s disgust at this could be implored by her shouting loudly and pacing around Parris, to show the change from Parris being angry, to Abigail being the one with the anger.
Abigail and her friends are now in the bedroom of the deathly still Betty. The show of selflessness by Abigail is shown as she tries to wake her young niece:
Abigail: “Betty? Now Betty dear, wake up now. It’s Abigail. I’ll beat you Betty!”
This shows she will go to any lengths to keep this troubling incident from surfacing and to also save herself. Waking Betty would make things much better. To emphasize this, as she says each short sentence she can get closer and closer to Betty as Abigail gets more and more impatient with Betty. Red light could be used on Abigail and Betty, getting darker and more intense as she goes. I would use red as it symbolises danger and anger, reflecting on the situation.
Betty wakes and runs to the window. She shouts and screams for her mother and tries to “fly” out of the window. However her attempt to take flight is thwarted by Abigail and her friends. Unfortunately for them Betty retaliates by revealing the truth behind the not so innocent games in the woods:
Betty: “You did it! You did it! You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife!”
This has to be the most dramatic part in the first scene. It needs to stand out and big as big as possible as to shock and stun the unsuspecting audience. To make this larger than life, you could stop all other sound and just have Betty’s speech ring out to piece the silence and the suspense that she has built up by playing dead. A green light would then descend over them like soft rain to indicate the evil present here. Abigail could stop and stand back shocked by her niece.
Betty drops to the bed. She sits sobbing like a baby as the burden has been lifted from here chest. Mary Warren and the other girls just stand and stare. Abigail stands solitary at the centre of this small group of naive young girls:
Abigail: “I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you…”
She does this to show her leadership over the group and her hard pressing speech set the line straight, so no holes appears in their story. It also turns her into a dictator as she would punish them if they stepped out of line. The words “pointy reckoning” suggests she would use something pointed and shape, a knife for example, to cut them through if they so much as breathed a single word to anyone. To demonstrate this she could point at them, lunging forward at each one. As she does this, all the time she is staring at each one with a menacing glare as she threatens them. Furthermore you could cast a dim light over her and each unfortunate girl as they cower back in fear.
John Procter, a large, self confident farmer from just outside Salem, is not of such a religious nature as Parris. However he still has his firm beliefs and stands strong beside God. His wife hired Abigail to work in his house, but Abigail was fired when Goody Procter found out Abigail and John were having an affair. He then turned his back on Abigail even though she was still madly in love with him and when he reveals this to her she reacts badly:
Abigail: “You loved me, John Procter, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet.”
She says this through tears of hate and desperate disbelief. I would imagine she would grab him by the shirt and shout this at him like an order, as if him loving her is written in the law, almost crouching as she goes weak at the knees. John realizing that he is hurting the poor, young Abigail, would turn away from her unable to look into her tear filled eyes.
Upon hearing this, Betty wakes. The soft sound of a joyful psalm drifting lazily up through the floor of Betty’s attic room as John and Abigail run to her side. Betty wails and cries as loud as she can; placing her hands over her ears as her father Parris enters. He is followed shortly by Mr and Mrs Putnam, feverish with curiosity, with the only intention of stirring everything up as much as possible:
Mrs Putnam: “The psalm! The psalm! She cannot bear to hear the lord’s name!”
This implies that she resents God and therefore, in the eyes of the religious puritans who follow God’s word to the very letter and believe fully in witches and other superstitions, would not look on this to lightly. Also as Mr and Mrs Putnam are not the greatest followers of Parris, they would do anything to bring him down. Therefore Mrs Putnam would be doing anything but being calm. I would have her running round the room waving her arms in panic and despair and generally trying to make a big fuss over everything.
All the hysteria and panic that is caused in Salem when someone is accused of being a witch is much the same as what was happening in America at the time Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible.
In 1953 the people of America and Russia were interlocked in a “cold war”. Though it was a called a war, no real battlefield fighting went on. The two great military superpowers at the time were greatest of enemies and were extremely suspicious of each other; the slightest slip up could cause either side to launch an attack at the other. All this confrontation was caused mainly by the way they were run.
America was and still is a capitalist society. This means the American citizens could do what jobs they wanted and could earn as much as they could as long as they paid taxes. On the other hand, cold and windy Russia was a completely different society. They were Communists. This meant no matter what you did or how much you earned, the government would receive it all and then each person would be paid an equal share of this money. Maybe in a perfect world this might work but in reality the people were selfish and their government corrupt, thus their perfect world collapsed and the Russians fell into poverty.
During the 1950’s many Americans believed that Communism was an evil ethos. They were worried that if they did nothing they might end up in a Communist society. John McCarthy was a senator at the time of this Communist scare in America. He believed strongly that Communism was evil and that all Communists should be eradicated from America. He set up a nationwide campaign against Communism and its believers, in a hope to rid America of these Communist ideals, thus commenced the “witch hunt” for the Communists.
Arthur Miller wrote this play to show the American people that if they did not change their ways and stop all the paranoia that history may repeat itself and their fate would be that of the people of Salem.
Meanwhile hundreds of year before the adults of Salem met downstairs and argued intensely about the current issue at hand. Parris was arguing about having to various bills and wanting the deeds to the meeting house as the preachers of Salem have had before him. John Procter, being a man how says want he thinks, is accused by Parris of joining some party that renounces everything Parris lives and stands for:
Procter: “Against you?”
Putnam: “Against him and all authority!”
Procter: “Why, then I must find it and join it”
Procter saying this is a great shock for those watching. Up till now you have not found out much about Procter but he does come across as a simple level headed man, but now all that has changed. To show this change, Procter could slam his hand down on the table as he speaks out his last line, staying totally serious the whole time. Parris could then step back in shock, but still stay fixed on Procter hateful glare.
An exorcist priest, Reverend Hale, arrives to solve the mystery of this witch hunt. Hale questions the girls intensely and Abigail “breaks” and tells him that Tituba makes her do evil witch like activities and then, in the night Tituba comes to her and makes her practise black magic. Parris then turns in disgust to Tituba and beats his poor black slave before pulling a whip on her. Hale runs to stop Parris and asks the poor Tituba what she saw, what the devil showed her:
Tituba: “And I look-and there was Goody Good”
This is the first name to be revealed to the people of Salem, the first move, the first bullet to trigger them all. This causes great panic and hysteria amongst the surrounding people. This can be shown by a sudden rush of voices from them, speaking in frightened, shocking tones. Suddenly the crowd’s voices fade as the girls and Abigail speak for the first time, confessing to what they have “seen”. They then speak, chanting together in an inaudible rabble, declaring the names of others, as they stand and look to the sky shouting the “accursed” names. The entire crowd would suddenly then fall back in a flash of light as a beam of dark red light falls on the concession of girls. As the crowd cower away the lights dim and the curtains fall, the words “….Goody Procter with the DEVIL” echoes into the darkness.
The Crucible has many moments in Act 1 that uses dramatic techniques to emphasize the rising emotions in Salem. In fact the whole of the first Act is the ignition for the deadly bomb that is portrayed through the rest of the play. However I believe that the last part of the first act is the most dramatic. It must have filled the people of Salem with dread and fear as they hear these small naïve, young girl chanting as if in an estranged trance, sending poor innocent women to their deaths. Ironically they only want to save their own lives from what started as such a small act, as to dance in the woods!
