PEPONI TEENS REVIVE ARTHUR MILLERS' WITCHHUNT

 

                                        Miranda Kansiime plays the one African in Salim Tinuba in The Crucible

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (March 2022)

Originally, when Sabina Okech settled on directing Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, she’ planned to cast senior students.

“But then they got too busy preparing for exams, I intended to drop the idea,” Sabina told Weekender right after the final performance at Peponi School on Friday evening, March 18^th.

“It was my first-year students who said they’d like to do it themselves, so we did,” she added with a touch of pride at her students’ performance.

And although Peponi is a co-educational institution, it seems more girls were keen to perform than guys. This meant the make-up artists had a challenge of transforming 14-year- old girls into 40-year-old men, but it worked. They were assisted by the costuming coordinated by Lilian Ayatta and her team.

The only technical flaw to the show was the sound. Voice projection wasn’t a problem for Amara Pannu who played Abigail Williams or Katy Anderson who played Mary Warren, especially in the final scene when the two were at odds, each knowing that their lives as well as the truth was on the line. But it seemed the sound system wasn’t powerful enough to pick up voices in so voluminous a space as Peponi’s theatre hall.

The play itself is timely if one is looking at the national and global political scene where attitudes are hardening, much as they did during the days when Miller wrote about the Salem witch hunt trials of 1692. The intolerance of that time correlated with Miller’s own experience in America of the 1950s when the anti-Communist hysteria was just as rife, irrational, and life-threatening as it was back then.

What was remarkable about Peponi’s play was seeing how easily the cast picked up on the emotional nuances associated with the false accusations and mesmeric suggestions that had profound implications for people’s lives. It was most apparent in the final ‘court’ scene when the life and death stakes were so high.

Being deemed a witch meant being burned at the stake, and Abigail had no compunction identifying the wife of her ex-lover John Proctor (John Barigo) with witchery. John tried to tell the court his wife was innocent. He even confessed to lechery, attempting to explain that Abigail was seeking revenge for his choosing his wife over her. She was prepared to polish off her former love out of vengeance when she couldn’t make him bow to her will. If her behavior wasn’t fueled by dark, sinister, and what would have termed demonic or satanic thoughts in her time, then I must have read her wrong.

In fact, Abigail had led a band of ladies from the village into the forest where we never quite know what was the significance of their dancing in the dark. She is clearly a charismatic character and Pannu played her remarkably well.

                                              Amara Pannu plays Abigail, the right leader of girls in The Crucible

Abigail’s character and will are so apparent in the courtroom that she is not only able to lie consistently and stick to her lie straight through to the end. She is also able fabricate illusions out loud in the court which her team of ladies pick up instantly, without coaching or verbal exchange. They act as if they are possessed, but was Mary correct in when she pleaded with Abigail to please stop cheating and tell the truth. Were all of Abby’s minions so mesmerized by their friend that it wasn’t far from the truth to suggest they all were possessed.

Peponi’s headmaster, Mark Durston, spoke briefly about the play before the show began, sharing several thoughts about themes in the play. One was religion, another was intolerance, and third was irony. Part the irony of the Crucible is that the Puritans who escaped religious intolerance in Europe by coming to America had become as intolerant as those they had fled.

Another tragic irony that was well revealed in the play was that those who were claiming to do God’s work were doing nothing of the kind. For in believing they had the right to judge who was and wasn’t a witch, who deserved to be forgiven and who were not, they forgot the very word of their leader who advised them to ‘Judge not that ye be judged.’

One point that I find curious about Miller’s play is why he had to make Tinuba (Miranda Kansiime), the one African in the town, be the first one to name townspeople a witch. Ironically, in the Peponi version of the play, it seemed that Abigail bore more responsibility for blaming others and setting off a tsunami of hysteria that would lead to the death of not only her ex-lover, but to many of her neighbors in the town.

Perhaps, Sabina Okech was correct when she thought Miller’s play might be too ‘mature’ or too psychologically nuanced for 14-year-olds to understand, but the cast resoundingly proved that assumption wrong. They did an excellent job.