The Crucible Previews — Page 3

I'm just getting home from tonight's preview (the play got out at 11pm) and I feel like I'm once again left on the outside of another Ivo van Hove production, and make no mistake, the Playbill cover may say Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but this is Ivo van Hove's The Crucible from start to finish. From Abigail going full on Carrie at the prom to the dystopian Hunger Games-esque world this seems to be taking place in, I personally feel like all the trappings take away from the evening rather than enhance it. I don't think you have to work so hard to make Miller's plays work. The Crucible is already a parable about McCarthyism; Miller himself has provided the layers for the play. He doesn't need any "help" getting the point across. 

Of course the text is still wonderful and the performances are strong, but I just can't get past what I consider the self-indulgent direction of van Hove. The critics might rave and I know many here loved View From the Bridge and could easily feel the same about this production, but it's just not my thing. 

SPOILERS (kind of) BELOW

Well... I'm not really sure how to feel about that. In some ways, the approach is as minimalist as van Hove is known to be; in others, the whole production feels totally overblown and swallows itself up. The casting is uneven, ranging from the near-perfect (but somehow underused) Saoirse Ronan to the sadly miscast Ben Whishaw. She is all rage and cool evil, throwing herself head first into the material and - more specifically - the production. He, however, never fully shows us John Proctor's backbone, resorting instead to fits of shout-acting that do nothing but diminish him. (I would also like to give shout out to Tavi Gevinson, who I very much enjoyed in THIS IS OUR YOUTH and continue to enjoy in this. Mary Warren is maybe my favorite character in the play and she really gets her.)

The physical production has moments of the white knuckle power we saw on display in this season's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: a fight erupting between Abigail and John in the courtroom, a stray animal sniffing and prowling in the dark, the quintet of girls in schoolgirl uniforms hinting that there may actually be a touch of the supernatural at play. Everything is set in what appears to be a schoolroom, complete with a large chalkboard, wall-to-wall windows on one side, mismatched linoleum tile floor, and plain wood and metal desks and chairs. The girls are the students in this hellish high school, while the adults are... parents? teachers? I'm unsure. The costumes do nothing to differentiate class (save Sophie Okonedo, who looks and plays Elizabeth as though she were a recently lobotomized homeless woman, a choice that would only be effective at the end if we had seen what a proud, honorable woman Elizabeth was before her imprisonment) and, frankly, look like an afterthought. It all feels like a half-baked concept that could have become a delicious multi-layered cake, but mostly it tastes of slightly burnt cookies.

I'm just not sure what I was meant to take away from this production. It has nothing new to say about the text, not enough raw brute force to enliven its 3-hour run time, and the actors can't decide if they're going for realism or something beyond naturalism. Given that this was the first preview, I'm sure many of my qualms will have either fixed themselves or settled into something resembling comfortability. But I left feeling a mix of exhilarated and deflated.

I should add that I loved VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE and felt it did an exceptional job deconstructing the text. This... not so much.

Updated On: 3/1/16 at 11:50 PM

For me the text felt obscured rather than illuminated. I paid more attention to Philip Glass' wall to wall underscoring than the dialogue at times, and the hypnotic beats had me fighting a few drowsy moments. 

To piggyback off what colorthehours wrote, I don't know what I was meant to take away from this nor any other van Hove production I've seen. I don't get the point of all his weirdness and concepts that sometimes make interesting stage pictures, but ultimately leave me cold. I feel like his productions try so gosh darn hard to be devastating and all the extra effort has the opposite effect on me. It's like when you see a performer emote too hard and cry when they sing. Nothing. Hold back the tears, give us some subtlety and you'll make us cry every time. Basically, stop trying so hard. 

This is so disappointing to hear. This is one of the greatest plays ever written and to hear these things about it make me sad, since I've really been looking forward to this. 

QueenAlice, I guess I just need to come to terms with the fact that van Hove's productions just aren't for me. I keep giving them a chance, hoping to see what so many others I respect see; I've caught his Little Foxes, View from the Bridge, Lazarus and now this. Oddly, I think I enjoyed his vision for Lazarus the most because the piece itself was so weird and basically was a lump of clay waiting for a director like van Hove to mold it. 

I will say that the poster is the most beautiful of the season. Love that design. 

WhizzerMarvin said: "QueenAlice, I guess I just need to come to terms with the fact that van Hove's productions just aren't for me. I keep giving them a chance, hoping to see what so many others I respect see; 

Whizzer, I feel the same way about Eric Shaeffer, whose career I can not understand. And hey nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks. At least you've been open to seeing something different!

"

The big missing puzzle piece in these discussions is Ivo van Hove's Angels in America, which I wish more people saw so we can could hash that one out.  Tony Kushner was in the audience the night I saw it and always otherwise engaged or I would have tackled him during a break and asked, "How did this happen?"

The performance was immediate and raw and devastating (with probably the best Roy Cohn I've ever seen), but what it wasn't was Tony Kushner's Angels in America.  

Lazarus was a gorgeous gooey Bowie-themed mess and I loved A View... but what I would love to know is how the hell does he get to do what he does?  Who gives him the permission?

Updated On: 3/2/16 at 12:30 AM

I can't remember the text of THE CRUCIBLE well enough to remember, but isn't it one of those plays Arthur Miller continued to tinker with and so there are several different versions of it?

I frankly think the play could use a little bit of trimming, but I know thats probably sacrilege to say so.

Except in a pre-interview with Kushner before the BAM performances of the Dutch Angels in America he said somebody, maybe somebody from the Signature, called him from Amsterdam and said, "You have GOT to come over here and see this production of Angels in America."  I don't know why Kushner would agree to the changes.  It had more politics than the operatic adaptation had, but even deeper cuts.  There was no final benediction scene at all.  And my sense from the way Kushner talked about going to see it was that Ivo had already van Hoved the thing before he got there.

It was a fantastic night of theater to me, but it was not really Angels in America.

It was devastating, I agree!  ESPECIALLY (somehow) the Cohn storyline.  I guess I'm just so used to a world in which writers don't readily agree to the evisceration of their work that I am left wondering if Kushner saw what Ivo did after Ivo had already done it and thought, "I'm not going to fight this, because it works on a different level"?  I mean, people who've only seen that haven't really seen Angels in America.  They've seen Essence of Angels in America sans Conclusions. I imagine if they did see the full show later it would be like a kid who had seen a bunch of school editions of shows later seeing full blown revivals of the real deals and realizing they are different animals.

And the self destructive cycle of institutional ignorance present in the Crucible once again proves him right in doing it with a purpose.