Filippo Dini, one of Italy’s most intriguing actors and directors, tackles one of America’s most lucid and unsparing plays, a dramatic fresco in which Arthur Miller lays bare the stupidity and ferocious madness that can take hold of humans in certain circumstances.

Written in 1953 during the darkest days of McCarthyism, The Crucible is set during the Salem witch hunts in the XVII century and holds up that infamous event in American history as a mirror for all the gloomiest and most twisted aspects of contemporary society.
The Crucible is a marvelous fable, somber and at the same time grotesque, full of mystery and paradox; it describes early American society of 1692, terrorized by the dangers of a strange land and compromised by its own strict rules. But it is also a mysterious and fascinating tale of adolescence, that time of life when the passions well up and burst inside body and mind, kindling love and hate with the same fire, with the same incomprehensible drives.
Today, after two years of the pandemic and the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine the text resonates like a new and terrible piece of music: “We ourselves. writes Dini –are roiling in the crucible of horror and meanness.
Every scene, every line of the play takes on a burningly contemporary meaning, as if history were placing us at the edge of an abyss: unable to go back, unable to move forward”.