For three nights this weekend, the Kelsey Theater in Saint Clair is Salem, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1692. Lisa Hollenbach is counting on it not feeling as far away as it should.
“Salem is not so far away,” Hollenbach said.
She is directing The Crucible for the Actors Guild of Schuylkill County. The production opens tonight and runs through Sunday, Sept. 18 to 20. Friday and Saturday performances begin at 7 p.m., and Sunday’s matinee is at 2 p.m. Tickets are $15 and available online through the link in the information box below.
Most people come to The Crucible already knowing how it goes. Hollenbach and co-director Megan Murray are staging a version of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials that refuses to stay on the stage. Actors break the fourth wall and speak directly to the crowd. Judges may address them. Characters may confess to them.
“Maybe they’ll get accused of being witches,” Hollenbach said. “It depends what happens that day.”
Anyone walking through the doors, she said, should stop thinking of themselves as patrons of the arts.
“In that moment, they’re people of Salem,” she said. “It’s to invite them in to not just watch a show that somebody else is doing, but to really be a part, to get swept up in the hysteria, to get swept up in the madness with us.”
The set is working on them before the first line is spoken. Nooses hang over the stage and stay there all night.
“There’s a reason that they’re hanging there,” Hollenbach said. “The whole show, the threat of this hanging is looming over this production the entire time behind them, and they just go on with life, pretending that they don’t see it.”
A single stage becomes every location in the play. It is the forest, the courtroom, the Proctors’ kitchen and the jail, with only the walls moving between scenes. Much of what the audience sees was scavenged: free shipping pallets, stained and mounted on casters; a platform rebuilt from the pirate ship in the guild’s production of Peter Pan; furniture pulled off curbs with “free” signs taped to it.
“People don’t have to go to New York to see a good show. This cast deserves a full house.”
“You have to be scrappy when you’re in community theater,” Hollenbach said. “We want things to be as beautiful as they can, but also we know we don’t have a lot to work with.”
Every dollar the nonprofit theater spends on productions and on the building itself comes through the box office, she said.
Hollenbach teaches history, and she said that’s part of why she wanted this show. Miller wrote it in the 1950s, when Congress was investigating communist sympathizers and he was one of the people accused. Instead of writing about that directly, he wrote about Salem in 1692 and let readers make the connection he saw. Hollenbach said the play still works that way.
“I feel like the theme of the show is very evergreen, and it is something that you can take that same allegory and the same pattern and you can apply it over time,” she said. “Over the past 10, 11 years, our conversation has devolved,” she said. “And this is really what’s happening in Salem.”
The cast numbers about 25, unusually large for a company where most shows run about 10. None of them are paid.
“Nobody’s going to get famous at the community theater in Saint Clair, and everybody knows that,” Hollenbach said. “We’re just here to do good art and to invite our community members to come see us and share it with them. People don’t have to go to New York to see a good show.”
“This cast deserves a full house,” she said.
Asked what she would tell someone still deciding whether to come, Hollenbach did not hesitate.
“Come for the courtroom scene, because it is likely one of the best theatrical scenes in history, and they are killing it.”
Months of rehearsal changed the question she started with. Hollenbach began by asking her cast to identify the villain. She no longer thinks the play has one.
“Everybody here is a little bit of a villain, also traumatized in some way by the society that they were living in,” she said.
“I want people to leave with more questions than answers. I started with the question, who’s the villain? And where I’m left at the end of directing this is the question of who looks most like you.”
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