ere except in his own country. This could certainly be said of the author of The Crucible when it first opened on Broadway on January 22, 1953. No one missed the parallels between 1692 Salem and 1953 America. "But," many said, "witches never did exist, then or now. Communists are real." Some critics complained that the play was too cold and intellectual. Others said it wasn't a play at all, but some kind of outburst, a political speech. Most people found a way of saying that it wasn't worth bothering with. The play ran for a few months, playing to almost empty houses. Then it closed. But the witch-hunt went on.Arthur Miller had drawn a lot of attention to himself, and he soon got into trouble. In 1954 he was denied a passport to see a production of The Crucible in Belgium. In 1955 the New York City Youth Board began an investigation into his political beliefs. In 1956 he was called on to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to name names. He was cited for contempt of Congress. He was finally exonerated by the courts, but not until 1958. By then, more and more people were refusing to testify against others, and the witch-hunt was running out of steam. The hearings had gone on for ten years, and the country's attention span was near its end. In all that time, no real Communist conspiracy was ever uncovered. Just as no real witches were ever found in Salem.Another important thing happened in 1958: The Crucible was put on again, this time in a small Off-Broadway theater. "The same critics reviewed it again," Arthur Miller remembers, and "this time they were fairly swept away, the drama was as real to them [now, in 1958] as it had been cold and undramatic before [in 1953]. Reasons were given for the new impression; the main one was that the script had been improved." Miller hadn't changed a word in the script. He began to think that the real reason had more to do with the audience than the play: "...when M...
