Single - Site Specific - Blog 6 - 27/04/17

Today we read through Scene One of The Crucible and made major decisions on how we'd perform our adaptation of the classic play.

We read through the first scene to remind ourselves of the story and highlighted important questions we asked ourselves afterwards:

• What characters are crucial?
• Are we performing The Crucible or only some scenes? 
• Or maybe only an adaptation?
• Or our own telling of the events during the Salem Witch Trials using scenes from The Crucible.

We wanted to stick to the script as much as possible but we wanted to do more than simply perform the play. For example, just performing the play would waste our opening movement piece as it would be scrapped. Ideally, we want to do something similar to what we did for 1984 which was perform the entire script along with a few movement pieces dotted inbetween scenes. However, The Crucible is a three hour play on its own so we'd need to cut scenes/characters out.

On the topic of characters, there was controversy on whether to cut/keep certain characters due to there being A LOT of characters in comparison to cast. We decided that the Putnam's needed to go as the plot of the play still made sense without the mentioning of their dead children and that already cuts out a chunk. Then there were discussions over Giles Corey; although he is an interesting character to have, he isn't really necessary to the plot either so the majority decision was to cut him. The Nurse's were also cut as they weren't in the story much at all either so below is our final list of characters:

John Proctor

Elizabeth Proctor

Judge Danforth

Reverend Parris

Mary Warren

Abigail Williams

Tituba

Betty

Hale

Cheever (With most of Hathorne's lines too as this still made sense and gave the character more of a role in the play.)

There was also a debate on whether we were going to keep the affair between Proctor and Abigail in our version of The Crucible or if were going to stay closer to the truth and scrap the affair. Although it would've been interesting to see the play without the affair, the majority of us felt that it would require a lot of effective cutting to be sure the script keeps continuity. Plus we felt that it removes a lot from the story and renders the courtroom scene nearly pointless as Proctor wouldn't be able to confession to lechery because it actually never would've happened.

After resolving all plot issues, we decided to begin cutting next lesson!