house, but last year the junior class went to a performance of The Crucible on Broadway and Lila had been so struck by the production that she decided to emulate it. The girls are wearing traditional school uniforms, which haven’t been worn at Haywood for over a decade, and there’s an electronic white board at the center of the stage. I feel Harmon shift in his seat and I know what he’s thinking: all of this electronic gadgetry is distracting from the spirit of the play.
I see, though, how the board is being used. When the Reverend Parris asks Abigail Williams if her name in town is “entirely white” and she answers “there be no blush about my name” a text message appears on screen: OMG did you hear why Goody Proctor fired Abigail Williams? Hint: It has something to do with John Proctor! [winky-face emoji] The audience laughs, a release of tension that soon evaporates when John Proctor and Abigail square off against each other.
I’m tense the moment Rudy appears onstage, afraid he’ll forget a line or falter under the scrutiny of the whole Haywood community. But I’ve never seen my son so self-assured. He plays John Proctor with a wry charm and confident swagger. It makes him seem older. It makes him seem—
It makes him seem like Luther.
I have always tried very hard not to see Luther in Rudy. It is not Rudy’s fault that his father was what he was, and while I don’t know what made Luther into the man I knew, I have struggled against thinking it’s anything genetic that Rudy could be heir to. And mostly it hasn’t been hard. Rudy is gentle and diffident where Luther was brusque and boastful.
Now, though, with Rudy dressed to look older and projecting John Proctor’s confidence, Luther is stamped all over him. Perhaps it’s inevitable. The Crucible was one of Luther’s favorite works to teach. He loved talking about the Puritans’ fear of the wilderness, the dark sins and secrets that festered in their hearts and ran riot when released. Puritans had no means like the Catholic confessional to exculpate sins, he’d say, and so the trials became a public ritual to air old grievances and confess secret lusts. If I fantasize about some young girl—he’d looked straight at me—I’d say she came flying in through my window at night to sit on my chest. If you had a crush on an older man, you might accuse his wife.
He loved using The Crucible as a parable for the persecution of the individual by a corrupt society. He loved John Proctor’s speech at the end where he declares he will not sacrifice his reputation to save his life. When Ashley Burton accused Luther of molesting her, he called it a witch hunt. But when I pointed out that he could explain his innocence by revealing his affair with me, like John Proctor does by confessing his affair with Abigail, he said it wasn’t the same.
We make our allegories by choosing what part of the story to remember.
Watching the play now it strikes me that the story of persecution Miller fashioned as an allegory for 1950s McCarthy-era communist-hunting is less the point than the story of John Proctor sleeping with his seventeen-year-old servant and then calling her a whore when she accuses his wife of witchcraft. Why was the relationship with Abigail Williams even in the play? In real life Abigail Williams was eleven and John Proctor was sixty. It feels like victim blaming. Like a convenient way to discredit an accuser. Hadn’t Woody Hull also called the accusations against him a witch hunt?
I look over to see Woody Hull smiling smugly. That’s why he wanted to come to the performance. See, I can imagine him saying, it’s all the fault of these hysterical girls.
Lila’s production lends itself to this interpretation. The girls’ accusations against the townspeople appear as texts and tweets on the white board. When John Proctor confronts Abigail, the other girls circle them, taking pictures with their phones that appear on the screen, and when John Proctor confesses his affair with Abigail a Snapchat banner appears with the headline: “John Proctor is a lech!”
I glance over at Harmon to see if he’s enjoying the sly critique of Internet culture and am shocked to see that there are tears streaming down his face. Is he thinking about how the police accused him of “untoward” behavior? While guilty Woody Hull is watching this play as a vindication of