The St. Thomas Theater Club performed “The Crucible” as the second play to be produced at the university in over fifteen years April 25 and 26 at Brady Educational Center
The play was published in 1953 and has since become a well-known name in theater amongst other Miller classics like “Death of a Salesman” or Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
“Upon coming here, I didn’t realize there was no theater here, and so I got here and there (were) no opportunities for me to do what I love most,” said senior Abigail Elfner, performance director of the club.
Theater has been Elfner’s “extracurricular of choice” since she was young, so she set out to continue that journey.
“The Crucible” is a true story of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the 1690s in Salem, Mass. The story follows young girls being accused of practicing witchcraft, which was an ungodly action associated with the devil. Instead of taking the blame for truthfully attempting witchcraft, the girls spin the accusation to be true of other women of the town. The church and members of a judgement council must try to uncover the truth of whether the girls are lying and accusing innocent women of witchcraft or if they are truly being tortured by the witches as they claim.
When “The Crucible” took to the stage at St. Thomas, a cast of 21 people and minimal props were needed to transform the story.
“All the props and set pieces were achieved through community goodwill; I got a bunch of props from a director friend, and costumes were pieced together from pulling from our closet,” said junior Cole Logelin, who plays John Proctor.
Logelin’s performance alongside first-year Brenna Bellenir, who played Elizabeth Proctor, received standing ovations and whistles from the crowd.
The play proved challenging to the cast as they were tasked with memorizing long and heady monologues in Early Modern English.
“Rehearsals were brutal because it’s a club,” Logelin said.“We had to work around 20 different class schedules, but in the last week we pulled it together really well.”
“The Crucible” also proved to be bigger in scope than the club’s first production. There were often 12 to 14 on stage at once — a drastic difference from the eight-person one-act “Entropy or Something.”
Since the discontinuation of the theater department and theater major in 2008-09 as well as the destruction of the Foley Theater in place of what is now the Anderson Athletics and Recreational Facility, theater has begun to rebuild its presence at St. Thomas.
“I ended up applying for the executive board of Theater Club as president, and they brought me on and said, ‘We don’t really think you should be president because in Theater Club, all we do is go to shows,’” Elfner said.
Instead, the executive board offered her a unique position to allow her the freedom and creativity to accomplish what she wanted. She created her role as Performance Director out of that freedom and started making an outline of what she wanted to do.
“To do an Arthur Miller classic on a St. Thomas stage just 11 months later (from “Entropy of Something”) has meant more than I can say,” Elfner said. “And to all of the people that made this possible, I am forever grateful to them.”
Kayla Osiecki can be reached at osie4769@stthomas.edu.
