More Weight for Connecticut's Witches

Reading this week's stories about the Connecticut legislature's considering a resolution that would acknowledge the horrible nature of this state's 18th century witch trials, my mind rolled back to Dublin, Ireland, in the mid-1990s when I watched a performance of Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible at the Abbey Theatre.

Set during the Salem Witch Trials of the 17th century, the play explores the brutal effects of mob hysteria and government by and about fear. The damning word of unreliable witnesses, the conniving ways of jealous girls, and the hunger for pleasure and joy that rips through these colonists like an invisible, silent earthquake turn the rule of law, common sense, and fair play on their head with deadly results. The Crucible has been called a play about McCarthyism. It can be that, but it is in fact about any situation in which reason and compassion surrender to blind power.

I knew the story line as I watched the drama unfold in Dublin so many years ago, but the folks around me did not. For them, every word and every twist in the plot were brand new.

It was a thrill, then, when the play had arrived at the point where Giles Corey is literally being pressed into a confession. His torturers place more and more mill stones weight on them to elicit a confession. Though Corey is a tad eccentric, he is far and away not in league with the devil. To his death, Corey maintains his innocence. When his captors pause in their torture to ask him if he has anything to say, Corey responds, "More weight!"

At this point in the drama, the Abbey erupted. People rose to their feet and clapped and held hands and wept and I don't know what. I never saw anything like that highly charged moment in the playhouse. It made perfect sense in the Ireland of that time. In that time and place, this was an Irish play.

"More weight." No fear. No defeat. No honor lost at the say-so of dishonorable people. No truth but the one truth.

So what about those men and women killed in Connecticut for what many say now was nothing at all? Their names will stay on the record as witches until the next legislative session. Time ran out before honor could be restored. More wait.

More about Connecticut's witch trials
More about the pending resolution