Tampa Rep, ThinkTank come together for ‘The Crucible’
Actress Brianna Larson hasn’t been onstage for seven years, but she’s got a good excuse.
Larson is the founder and artistic director of Largo-based Theatre Exceptional, which produces plays for, about, and including artists with disabilities. “My company has been my focus for the last eight years,” Larson says.
These days, however, she says she has a “really good team” at Theatre Exceptional, “so I’ve been able to kind of step back and let them take the reins – which allowed me the time to do a passion project and be onstage again.”
Passion is a key component of the play marking Larson’s return. It’s Arthur Miller’s iconic drama The Crucible, produced by the Tampa Repertory Theatre in conjunction with ThinkTank.
A fictionalized take on the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century, The Crucible is a parable about what can happen when unfounded accusations infect a community.
Larson plays Elizabeth Proctor, accused of witchcraft along with her husband John, who’s played by Robert Teasdale.
“It’s a play I’ve been in three times, as three different characters,” Larson says. “It’s one of my favorites. I did it in college, and again professionally. It was one of the last things I did, actually.”
So when auditions were announced, Larson thought “Well, why not?”
Director Georgia Mallory Guy points out the parallels between the Salem witch trials, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “communist probe” in the early 1950s, which is when Miller wrote The Crucible, and the intolerance of today.
“History is doomed to repeat itself, right?” Guy asks. “So we’re still dealing with the issues, in a different way, that people were dealing with in 1692.
“We’ve see it resurface time and time again, this concept of people feeling that they’re being accused before they’re able to speak out. Before they’re able to defend themselves. Many times as an American, you are guilty until proven innocent. As a community, I think, we need to be wary of being too quick to accuse.”
The repressive society portrayed in The Crucible might seem eerily familiar. “What’s beautiful about The Crucible is that it’s full of people that we can all in some way identify with,” Guy explains. “We’ve all been heartbroken; we’ve all been a zealot in some cases; we’ve all been cold towards someone; while it may not have been adultery, we have wronged someone in our lives.
“Miller does such a beautiful job of bringing all the characters’ flaws to the surface, in a very dramatic way. But understanding that human flaws are just that, and they can be overcome.”
The show is being performed in the Stageworks theater space, in the Channelside District of Tampa.
Fittingly, it’s not presented as a “period piece.” The production uses minimalist sets. “It’s set in an ambiguous space that could be anything,” says Guy. “There is a harkening to what the dress of the time might have still felt like, lots of aprons and bonnets, but it’s not Puritanical. We’ve taken it to a place where it could still feel like something that looks recognizable to you – not too in the distant past.”
Find tickets and more information here.
