A Dance Around the Cauldron

Between 1692—93 twenty people were accused of being witches and executed in Salem, Mass. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, and one elderly man was pressed to death by heavy stones after he wouldn’t enter a plea. Several others died in jail. My purpose in this collection is not to retell what happened, which is widely known, or to give an account of Arthur Miller’s powerful, play, The Crucible. Instead, I’ve chosen to use his technique and blend characters together with people we know living among us. In Miller’s play, two judges are used as a composite of several involved in the trials. He keeps the real names of people but changes ages, and other basic facts. Rather than use all the play’s characters, I decided to work with those characters who are most easily recognizable and together, create a community, a town, a city. The point isn’t accuracy of historical fact, as much as to convey the atmosphere that led up to what happened. Little is known about the individuals involved, but much about the paranoia, and hysteria, as well as sexual tensions and wrangling over land boundaries that exploded in Salem. While for Miller, it was partially an allegory for the Communist witch-hunt during the 50’s that inspired his play, the situation has much wider implications, as he knew. What is going on now in this country makes it especially poignant for me, but to restrict it to that, is also too limiting. I see the situation as something ongoing, barely noticeable, until an accumulation of incidents makes it impossible to ignore, its darkness sweeps down on us, and we have no choice but to rise up and confront it. --From the Introduction by Linda Lerner.