The Crucible The 1953 premiere of The Crucible confirmed Arthur Miller’s reputation as one of America’s most important and serious playwrights. The drama is a historical play of 17th century colonial America and a parable about the communist witch hunts in the United States of the 1950s. The events which surround Miller’s timely novel are separated by some two hundred and sixty years, but are joined by circumstances where societies seek only evidence of guilt and ignore or suppress all evidence to suggest otherwise. The Crucible is still being produced worldwide nearly fifty years later with universal themes that transcend time and place. The major theme of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is guilt by