Brave New World Rep Presents THE CRUCIBLE At The Old Stone House

The Salem witch-hunts and trials-one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history, will come alive in Park Slope when Brooklyn's Brave New World Repertory Theatre presents a two-week run of Arthur Miller's classic play The Crucible, March 4-14. The site-specific production will take place in The Old Stone House, originally constructed in 1699, seven years after the Salem hangings.

The production will be lit entirely using candlelight lanterns (no electric lights) to deepen the dramatic impact of the play and its subject matter. Rather than change scenery, Brave New World (BNW) will invite the audience to move after intermission-from the setting (the Parris and Proctor homes) on the ground floor for Acts One and Two, to a larger room upstairs (the courthouse and jail) for Acts Three and Four. The evening will commence with a prologue in the front yard seen through the parlor windows. 

Of her reasons for presenting the play entirely without electric light, director Claire Beckman (Producing Artistic Director of Brave New World), says, "I think it will help people to understand what fuels the fire of fear and panic in 17th century Salem Massachusetts. It was a cold and dark time. I want the actors to explore that darkness and see how it informs their performances and I want the audience to feel the danger lurking in the shadows."

Thanks in great part to sponsorship from The Old Stone House of Brooklyn, BNW will enjoy its first two-week indoor run, having garnered much attention over the past five years for its site-specific productions around the borough, including To Kill a Mockingbird on the front porches of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street, On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay, and The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island. This production of The Crucible got its start as a highly popular reading during Brave New World's 2009 Salon Series of Play Readings, also at the Old Stone House. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The cast includes the following Actors Equity members: Ezra Barnes, William Brenner, David Frutkoff, Kevin Hogan, Joe LoGrippo, John Edmond Morgan, Eleanor Ruth, Caroline Ryburn, Sandra Mills Scott, Christine Siracusa and Baz Snider.

http://www.theoldstonehouse.org
336 3rd Street (between Fourth & Fifth Avenues)
Brooklyn, NY