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The 1953 premiere of The Crucible confirmed Arthur Miller's reputation as one of America's most important and serious playwrights as it underscored the earlier success of Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning drama, Death of a Salesman. While dealing with the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, The Crucible reveals Miller's concern with issues of individual conscience and guilt by association - issues that were manifest in the social and political problems of his own time. The drama is both a historical play of 17th-century colonial America and a parable about the communist witch-hunts in the United States of the 1950s. Miller uses the moral absolutism of Puritan Salem to parallel the infamous congressional hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy The events which frame Miller's tragic drama are separated by some two hundred and sixty years, but are joined by circumstances where elements of disparate societies seek only evidence of guilt and ignore or suppress all evidence to suggest otherwise. With universal themes that transcend time and place, including national borders, The Crucible remains one of the most often produced American plays worldwide. In The Crucible: Politics, Property, and Pretense, James J. Martine extends his analysis beyond the standard critical appraisals that compare the drama's setting only to the time in which it was written - the McCarthy era. Martine examines in detail Miller's historical sources and the ways in which he adapted this material to his contemporary audience Martine suggests the play should be "read" within a variety of contexts, that is, as a product of and reaction to the McCarthy era, as a milestone in the development of Miller's work, as an exemplar of the genre of tragedy, as part of the tradition of American theatre, and as a basis for later adaptations. in his discussion, Martine considers both the written text and the play as public performance. He examines the play's settings, props, and exits and entrances, and draws attention to the various ways in which Miller built these directions about the play's performance into the written text. Martine argues convincingly that The Crucible should not be approached as a monochromatic written text as it often has been, but as a multifaceted performance text. His study includes photographs of a contemporary staged production, in addition to commentary on Robert Ward's Pulitzer prize-winning opera based on Miller's drama
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