The Cruzible

Members of the 1953 Broadway cast, via Hana Theatre.

...if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair. Ted Cruz, frankly, wouldn’t enter into his thinking.
(Charles C.W."Cheese Whiz" Cooke)

Act 1

Spring 1692, a bedroom in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, where his little daughter Betty lies, apparently paralyzed, Parris kneeling in prayer at her bedside. The door opens, and the minister's enslaved Barbadian maid enters, rushes toward the girl, then steps back.

TITUBA: My Betty be hearty soon?

PARRIS: Fuck out of here, bitch!

TITUBA, backing away: Let you not be creating no hostile work environment in here.

PARRIS, rising in fury: Out! She is gone. Out of my sight! He is overcome with sobs. God help me! He goes to the bed and gently takes Betty's hand. Betty, child, will you open up your eyes? Betty...

He is bending to kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, enters—strikingly beautiful, 17, and an orphan, with an endless capacity for giving out mixed signals. Right now she is all concern.

ABIGAIL: Uncle? Susanna Walcott's here from Doctor Griggs.

PARRIS: Oh, Let her come in.

Susanna, a little younger and more nervous than Abigail, enters.

PARRIS, eagerly: What does the doctor say, child?

SUSANNA, craning around to catch a look at the sick girl: He bade me come and tell you, reverend sir, that he cannot tell what is wrong, unless it be the triggerin' of some traumatic memory...

PARRIS, his eyes going wide: No—no. There be no triggers here. Tell him I have sent for Reverend Hale of the Sexual Offense Policy Task Force, and he will confirm that. Let the doctor focus on appropriate medications and put all thought of triggers out of his mind.

SUSANNA: Aye, sir. She turns to go.

ABIGAIL: And tell nothin' of it in the village, Susanna.

PARRIS: Go directly home and say nothing of triggers and traumas.

SUSANNA: Aye, sir. I pray for Betty. She goes out.

ABIGAIL: Uncle, rumors of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression are going around, and Goody Putnam is there in the parlor with about forty other people asking questions. I think you'd best go down to the parlor and deny it all. I can sit with Betty.

PARRIS, pressed, turns on her: And what should I tell them? That I found my niece and my daughter acting all slutty in the forest? Also, wherefore did you drop out of that Creative Rhetoric class with Freddie DeProctor? I have heard it said, and I tell you as I heard it, that he rarely shows up for faculty meetings due to some grave anxiety....

Well, you get the idea. Needless to say, if Miller was alive today he would not be writing The Crucible because he wrote it already.

Add Miller to that lengthening list of radicals our crazy conservatives are trying to appropriate, from Jesus and Paul to John Rawls, for their own intellectual purposes, one of the oddest choices since Martin Luther King, Jr.

He did once complain about the stiffness and conformity that had taken over his alma mater, the University of Michigan, but the political correctness that bothered him was that of the height of the McCarthy era:

The Michigan of his time had been “full of speeches, meetings, and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues.” But on first interaction with students in 1953, Miller sensed a different energy. A postwar obsession with competition seemed, to him, to have killed the creative iconoclast and free thinker at U-M. Older now, he sensed “the University has a feel of a professional workshop these days,” with a goal-oriented emphasis on achievement, where everything is defined. “The place is full of comportment,” he laments. “Maybe I have been around theatrical folk too long but it seemed to me that everybody had turned into engineers.”

I don't think "speech codes" would concern him anywhere near as much as careerism, and I'll bet he'd have a pretty sensitive ear for intersectionality issues in spite of his hatred of censorship. He'd never have any difficulty distinguishing free speech from linguistic oppression, though I realize respect for women was not his native language. He'd be delighted by the political ferment that has arisen since the terrible climate of the early Iraq war at the time of his death, and the breaking of a few eggs in the form of Cand. Doc. DeBoer's feelings (as expressed in the plaintive Tweets that were the unwitting cause of Cookie's agitation) would not upset him much, especially since DeBoer can, and does, Tweet about it all he wants. As material for plays, he usually found much more interesting stuff, and he would surely have remained fixed, as he did till he died, on the main thing:

Another passion that Miller has maintained throughout the years is his outrage against social injustice. These feelings are allied with his belief that art must serve a political function—"remaking humanity in one way or another..."