The Witches of Salem

The people of Salem envy each other for power, possessions, life success, love. The people of Salem are eavesdropping, peeping, reporting, and throwing false accusations. The people of Salem, confused and terrified, search for the guilty, prepare evidence, destroy each other, and finally kill the innocent. The people of Salem...

Salem was supposed to be a special place. The Puritan community was to create a better order in the New World — a world based on faith, morality, and responsibility for others, free from vice and violence. Its guarantors were to be vigilance, discipline and strict adherence to the rules. However, when something appears in this ordered reality that cannot be explained, accumulated fears, resentments, jealousy and guilt begin to demand an outlet. The community, which wanted to be free from evil, begins to look for it in the other man. Suspicion becomes accusation, accusation becomes evidence, and concern for common values becomes an excuse for violence.

The Witches of Salem, directed by Tomasz Frizl, looks at the community at a time of mounting fear, pressure and gradual disintegration. Salem becomes a laboratory where private emotions, desires, and conflicts begin to reinforce each other until they transform into a collective mechanism of violence. The historical costume does not serve to reconstruct the past, but allows us to look from a distance at those who, although belonging to a distant world, turn out to be contemporary in their fears, desires and choices. The play asks about the line between individual and collective responsibility, what happens to values when we begin to use them to judge others, and the moment when the other person ceases to be a neighbor and becomes a potential threat.

***

Arthur Miller's copyright is represented by the ADiT Drama and Theatre Agency under an agreement with the United Talent Agency.