It’s a good thing set designer Narelle Sissons is up for the challenge! PlayMakers’ production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is seated “in-the-round,” a diversion from the Paul Green Theatre’s usual three-sided thrust stage.

By Mark Perry, dramaturg
In a 1960 interview, playwright Arthur Miller described his motive in writing The Crucible as follows:
“It was an attempt … to say that one couldn’t passively sit back and watch the world being destroyed under him, even if he did share the general guilt … I was calling for an act of will. I was trying to say that injustice has features …”

Some unsettling things have come up as we’ve been rehearsing… Plays are, of course, always about more than the specific story that happens… So, while adolsecent girls in the play experiment with dancing in the woods and thinking about love (and sex), the grown-ups are searching desperately for the cause of a mysterious illness that seems to be striking them… And there’s fear in that search.

Although Arthur Miller’s The Crucible takes place in the late 17th century, no theatrical element can bring the play to life in a new, redesigned perspective more clearly than Grier Coleman’s costume design. As soon as the lights up come, our audience will realize, as Grier puts it, “This isn’t your grandmother’s Crucible!”

This week we had a our first “stumble-through” with the first-pass at the staging…Exciting, but “miles to go before we sleep…”

Dramaturg Jacqueline E. Lawton sat down with a panel of students and faculty after the October 2nd matinee performance of to discuss connections and similarities between the play and recent events concerning the black community and police brutality in Charlotte, NC.

PlayMakers company member Jeffrey Blair Cornell is keeping a journal of his impressions of the process for creating our upcoming production of The Crucible. Keep […]

Detroit ’67 takes place nearly 50 years ago in that Motor and Music Mecca in Michigan, 656 miles away from Chapel Hill. The subject matter, however, feels immediate to us now as similar stories play out just down the road at this very moment. For David Adamson, the events of Detroit ’67 are especially close. David and his wife were living in Detroit in 1967.

DirectorLisa Rothe has been captivated by the story of Detroit ’67 since she saw its premiere in 2013 at the Public Theater. “At the heart of it all is a family, and everyone can relate to that on some level. We experience their love, anger, joy, loneliness, passion & rage as if it were our own,” she relates.