Scenic Designs by I. Christopher Berg

Director Fontaine Syer embraced the idea that The Crucible might be able to speak about many things while telling a specific story of 1692 Salem. Under her direction, designer I. Christopher Berg created a scenic world that, in its abstraction, could be Salem or anywhere. This design actually reflects Miller’s own approach to the play: five months after its opening, the playwright restaged The Crucible, eliminating the static direction of the original director and removing the original realistc scenery. The original Broadway production was, as his biographer Martin Gottfried writes, “played against a simple black drop cloth using basic props.” Berg’s scenic design reflects Miller’s wish that The Crucible take place in “a physicalization of infinite space so that the play wouldn’t be going on now or in 1692, but was instead going on forever.”

Rendering
Photo of the set model
Photo of the finished set

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION:

• The Crucible homepage
• The People of the Production
• John R. Armstrong
• Costume Designer Katherine Garlic
• Press Release
• An Interview with Dan Kremer
• Arthur Miller, Joseph McCarthy, and The Crucible, an essay by Dramaturg Tom Shafer
• Documents on Poetry and Metaphor, prepared by Tom Shafer and Deanna Nichol
• An Artist of a Special Class, a pre-show lecture by Nick Cullather
• Costume Designs

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