Here’s what you need to know

We’ll get started at 7:00 PM in the Peggy Dow Performance Center.

This event is FREE

No experience necessary

Fun and informal: You can sit and listen or participate as much as you want

We will read “The Crucible,” led by Autumn Lowry. More information about the play and table reads below.

About the Work

“I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history,” Arthur Miller wrote in an introduction to The Crucible, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria.
 
In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.
 
Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch-hunts” in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing: “Political opposition…is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.”

About Table Reads

Athens Community Theatre hosts several opportunities to read plays and musicals for fun each season. Participation in a table read is a great way to “dip a toe in” to see what working with ACT is like. The play is read casually: you can let us know if you want to participate or just listen in. And you can change your mind at any time.