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- Christopher Innvar and Kim Stauffer in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Photo Kevin Sprague.
In The Crucible,
the Proctors sit at their plain table with John's brief failing between them. He is a good man. He makes every situation better, more reasonable. He is a natural man. The land is his, and he is the land's. Everything is in the quietness. She is the quietness. Christopher Innvar with a voice which lurches sadly, breaks the silence. Kim Stauffer, with a face barren and wide, makes cautious answer, and holds the distance between them in her hands. These marvelous actors do not push the scene or frighten the quietness. They wait upon it. It becomes their whole union. Maybe the best art is the stillest. One thinks of the necessary silence in Rembrandt's great "Prodigal Son" where the hands, the fingers of the aged father are the only speaking agents, his old head only cocked in a certain way that seems to speak. Or the earned sense of settled quiet I heard in Peter Pears' singing at the end of his time on the stage, most of it at least a half-tone flat. What is this? As I saw at Barrington Stage, this is a listening. Listen first, sing later. After the miners rose encapsuled through dark tunnels in the earth, after the silence, there was singing.