In lieu of a formal summery to my rough examination of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible against the theoretical assumptions of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, I would like to offer a revelatory, longer passage from Miller’s 1987 autobiography titled Timebends, which poignantly reiterates my crude efforts to view Miller’s play as an enduring ‘autonomous art-form’ that expresses a critical, if circuitous, relation to social history and cultural life as we (American- or foreign-bred) take them to be. On page 348, Miller memorates:
In less than two years, as always in America, a lot would change. McCarthyism was on the wane, although people were still being hurt by it, and a new Crucible, produced by Paul Libin, opened in one of the first off-Broadway productions in New York’s history, at a theatre in the Martinique Hotel. It was a young production, with many of the actors neophytes who had none of the original cast’s finish, but it was performed this time as it was written, desperate and hot, and it ran for nearly two years. Some of the critics inevitably concluded that I had revised the script, but of course not a word had changed, though the time had, and it was possible now to feel some regret for what we had done to ourselves in the early Red-hunting years. The metaphor of the immortal underlying forces that can always rise again was now an admissible thing for the press to consider.
And, if I may add, too powerful of a ‘spectacle’ to be ignored.
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