BLAST Meeting, December 15, 6:30 p.m., 202A, Collegium Novum

“Miller's great tragedy about the Salem witch trials was a response to McCarthyism, the anti-Communist hysteria which gripped the US at the height of the Cold War. Written at the height of his dramatic powers, The Crucible is one of the four great plays in which Miller's ever-present urge towards didacticism is tempered by a passionate fascination with human frailty and contradiction. Here the domestic and the political ignite a volatile engine that drives towards a cathartic revelation of civil and judicial wrong.”