Many aspects of Ivo van Hove’s ruthless Broadway adaptation of The Crucible keep it from existing in the same universe as traditional productions of Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic, least of which is that it boasts a score by iconic composer Philip Glass. Possessed teenagers convulse and levitate, nature invades the stage in the form of wind and wolves, and suspicions uncontrollably snowball into tragedy.
Glass’ distinctly modern, minimalist score takes the play’s themes of supernaturalism and alienation and infuses them into the audience’s psyche. As cellos and violins pulse relentlessly beneath the entire three-hour production, audience members might start to understand the kind of mania that overtook the residents of Salem during the witch trials. The occasional drum or drone can be heard during particularly dramatic moments, but refuses to disrupt things up too much—Glass leaves that to Miller’s dialogue. The Crucible is hardly the avant-garde influencer’s first foray into scoring stage productions: He worked closely with Samuel Beckett, among others, beginning in the 1960s.
Van Hove offered Glass little instructions, instead leaving him to devise his own vision, which the composer did by attending every rehearsal of the show. Glass dove deep into 17th century hymnals, one of which is forebodingly sung by a group of schoolgirls as the curtain first rises. These rare lyrical moments punctuate the production, with Ben Whishaw’s John Proctor singing an original song at the play’s devastating conclusion.
As The Crucible heads into a big weekend at this year’s Tony Awards, where it’s nominated four times, we bring you a conversation we recently conducted with Glass, regarding his deeply psychological interpretation of the American theater staple. And just this week, Glass won the 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play.
Pitchfork: How did you become involved in The Crucible?
Philip Glass: I did the scores for two films Scott [Rudin] produced [Notes on a Scandal and The Hours], and I ended up getting an Oscar nomination for both of them so I had a very good history with Scott [who produces The Crucible]. Coincidentally, I had just actually seen A View from the Bridge [Hove’s other recent Arthur Miller adaptation for the stage] when Scott called, so I was up to speed on Ivo, I knew who he was and what he was doing. This is the first time I did an Arthur Miller work. I was not a big fan of Arthur Miller up to that moment. It isn’t a very nice thing to say, but just so you know it. I hadn’t done a piece of American theater that is as classic as The Crucible.
How familiar were you with The Crucible before this? Did you read it in school?
I don’t know where [I first read it]. But I have a 14-year-old son who read it in school last year, you know? It’s something that, at this point, kids are reading it pre-high school. It brings into the discussion issues of American civil discourse, which are pressing and urgent. Originally it was written about the Communist hunting that went on in the ‘50s with Joseph McCarthy—it was just a complete connection to witch-hunting. But moving it into the present, it turns out that there are many other issues that are reflected currently, which I don't know that I was aware of until I saw Ivo’s production. One of the arguments of the piece is—it’s very clear—that the only people who were witches were the poor people. No one with any money or status ever got accused of being a witch. The only ones that got murdered were the poor people. And sometimes it was done in order to deprive them of their property. So there was definitely an economic motivation that was going on and that was disguised partly by religious fervor. You might not have noticed it before, but Ivo has a way of bringing things out in his productions that you maybe missed. And that’s one of the reasons that he is the kind of person who has become important for our theater world these days.
I was told that you were at every rehearsal.
I began working in a collective company called the Mabou Mines [in 1970]. Whenever we did plays, I was a composer, and I went to all the rehearsals. I continued doing that later when we went to public theater. I did it when I worked on a Broadway show [in 2002], The Elephant Man. It’s the only way that I have as a composer of understanding how the music’s going to work. I have to see the process. And I watch everything. I watch the staging. Sometimes I even watch the costume crew. I watch the lighting rehearsals. When I worked with Bob Wilson on Einstein on the Beach, I was there every day. That’s not the way most people work in the theater. A lot of people just phone it in. I don’t phone it in. On the other hand, the rehearsals were happening a block away from my house. That made it very easy.
I’ve read it already, but if I can see it, it makes a big difference sometimes. Some of the things I really wouldn’t have done the way I did had I not seen… I wrote some actually while he was rehearsing. It’s a very good way of working.
Tell me about the song at the very beginning of the play, with the schoolgirls singing. Where did that come from?
I looked for some lyrics from the late 17th century and I found a hymnal that was published in New England in 1693, which is when the trials happened. These are the hymns that people sang in churches, and they’re not hard to find—this is public domain stuff. Just for fun, I picked one hymn for each of the four acts, and I wrote a piece that was based on it. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar to the music from the hymn, and the words were the same. That was the important part. The words that they sing aren’t written by Arthur Miller, they are just words from a hymn. But if you read the play carefully, there’s an author’s note saying that these were hymns from when they’d go to church. So this tells us that Miller expected that, as far as I was concerned, that it would be possible to find the hymn. Which I did. Of those four that I wrote, three of them ended up in the piece. They all were written before I’d even seen anything.
When you first approached the score, did you know you were going to use just violin and cello?
Yes, because Scott Rudin originally said I could have two live musicians. Now it had turned out we couldn’t really use live musicians, because there was actually no time to rehearse. However, I had decided on the violin and cello because that’s the most I can get out of the smallest group of people. Later, when we decided we weren’t using live players and I'd be able to back that up on the tapes, we added an organ in one place and a few other things that became very helpful to have for some of the ends of the acts, which are mostly the big harmonic moments.
String instruments also obviously have the inherent ability to create immense tension, which culminates at the end of The Crucible in this horrific way.
I mean, clearly. This is a man just roughly executed. I had just done a piece in an opera based on Kafka’s The Trial, where there’s also an execution. The trial ends with the execution of the main character. And then—yes, kind of a funny coincidence—six months later, I’m doing a play where the main character is executed. So it was like, “Well, I guess this is the theme for executions.” The funny thing is, I can tell you from my own personal experience that audiences really love these very dark endings. The operas that I’ve done that end with executions are always the most popular ones. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. I’ve done it a number of times. Fall of the House of Usher, there's an execution. The pieces that end with something terrible happening to the main character become the most popular pieces.
What’s moving about it is something else that’s going on here, though. What Ivo did is that, as a director, he made the relationship between the man [John Proctor] and his wife [Elizabeth] became very poignant at the end. He had them embracing while sitting on the ground, they’re hugging each other—all kinds of things that, if you look at the play, are not stage directions, this is a director’s vision. And what happens is that the audience gets sucked in. That last five minutes are amazing, the way everybody’s watching it, and two months later he goes off to be murdered and... that drumbeat starts, then singing, and there’s the curtain call.
The Crucible closes on Broadway come July 17th.