Accusations of witchcraft will fly in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School (HLS) next month when a cast of law students and undergraduates stages The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s critically-acclaimed play about the infamous 1692 trials in Salem, Mass.

HLS Professor of Law Bruce L. Hay, the show’s producer and director, said the play is the first in a series of semiannual on-campus productions that he will organize to “educate and entertain” the University community and the public.

“My motivation for doing this,” Hay said last week before rehearsal, “was that the new dean [Elena Kagan] is trying to augment the intellectual life of the law school here by holding various forums and conferences where people come and speak on legal issues.”

Hay, who is teaching a new class at HLS on the connection between the law and drama, said he wanted to complement those events by staging dramatic performances that address legal and moral questions. “It’s sort of like an aesthetic or artistic counterpart to formal conferences,” he said.

For this show, Hay has interpreted the play in a unique way and included a scene which was written in the original script but was omitted in later productions.

A MODERN INTERPRETATION

While the 1953 play could be viewed as a commentary on the McCarthy era, Hay said he decided mid-way through casting to approach it with a different interpretation.

“The idea occurred to me rather quickly that you could easily read it as a parable about racial injustice,” he said. “There’s so much language in the play about separating black from white.”

Hay said he recognized that the playwright used the terms symbolically, but felt they could be taken more literally.

“Miller was clearly using the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ metaphorically to refer to ideological differences,” he said. “But I just think that that’s very ironic because he wrote it in 1953, and it was only a year later that Brown v. Board was handed down and it was only two years later that Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus and the Montgomery boycott started and Martin Luther King became famous and the Civil Rights movement became the leading national issue.”

“So it’s odd that he was using the terms unmetaphorically when they were about to become the literal center of debate in the country,” Hay said.

The production corresponds with the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a fact which Hay called “a happy coincidence.”

Hay said the play resonated with research he had done in the past on the history of lynching and “extra-legal justice.”

“It also really struck me that the trials all begin when a black woman steps out of her boundaries and gets the girls to start dancing,” he said. “The play is about the perceived troubles that begin when whites start mixing with blacks.”

For these reasons, the production will be “relatively modernist,” according to Hay. Actors will not be dressed in period costumes and Hay has decided to incorporate “some musical accompaniment that calls to mind blues and black music of the first half of the 20th-century, so much of which in one way or another was about the injustices that blacks faced, how hard life was as a black person,” he said.