Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will be our fourth production this season and will be produced on the PAC Main Stage. Based on true events in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, the play’s action highlights human greed, malice, deception, judgement, and mania. Thrown into the mix are alarmist preachers using scare tactics to further their personal causes, selfish townspeople trying to take over their neighbors’ coveted lands and a manipulative young woman’s infatuation with a local married man. The events and the subsequent trials of those who demanded their innocence were executed, those who would not name names were incarcerated and tortured, and those who admitted their guilt were immediately freed as a parable of the Congressional Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joe McCarthy in 1950’s America. Nicole Hess Diestler will direct the Crucible. Buy Tickets!

We conclude our 2011-12 season with a stylized comedy, staged in our intimate Arena space. Molière’s play Tartuffe, (The Imposter) is a masterwork by France’s most celebrated comic playwright. Tartuffe is set in the realm of seventeenth-century Parisian high society during the reign of King Louis XIV. The comedic genius of Molière soars in this delightful parable, which embroils instinct, passion, deceit, confusion, hypocrisy, and virtue into a messy ball of humorous situations and character-driven antics. The character of Tartuffe represents those members of society who preach religious piety but do not themselves live by the morals they try to force upon others. Because the play focuses on the issue of religious hypocrisy, it was highly controversial at the time it was written and was banned from public performance for five years. Beth McBrien, whose recent DVC directing credits include, The Comedy of Errors, Rumors, and The Imaginary Invalid, will direct Tartuffe. Buy Tickets!