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| How is music going be used within
the play? |
| We are using it minimally. There was very little sensory stimulus
of any kind and the singing of psalms would have been hugely
potent in that environment as indeed would basic human touch
have been in a world where that was pretty much denied. So music
is a potent force and Miller himself, in the stage directions,
mentions singing twice. At one point he says a psalm is being
heard sung below and at the beginning of Act 2 he talks about
Elizabeth Proctor being heard singing to her children offstage.
Also when the girls are accusing Tituba of inducing them into
witchcraft they say that she sung her "Barbados songs"
to them. I am going to use this to create a link between acts.
I am going to use it between Act 3 and Act 4 when the world
has cracked open and the madness of the accusations about witchcraft
seem to be seeping into the very structure of the world. At
that point, I am going use Tituba singing her Barbados songs.
We have done a lot of research and found a 15th century field
holler from Africa which is one of things that the slaves would
have brought over to Barbados which has a primeval, explosive,
organic, wild tone to it. So for all of the rest of the play
it is going to be this very Christian, very contained sound
and then when the play starts to veer towards its insane conclusion,
this much darker, much more essential sound will be used to
link from one act to another. |
Anna Mackmin, Director, in her interview with
Susan Weaver, Education Projects Officer on 22 December 2003.
|
Michael Gould as Reverend
John Hale and Ruby Turner as Tituba in The Crucible, photograph
by Manuel Harlan |
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