'Witches?! In Salem?!' : A Test In Making An Absurdist Comedy Out Of Injustice

Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff

In a shocking (shocking I tell you!) development, OnStage Blog founder Chris Peterson wrote a theatre take that many disagreed with!

Chris wrote in January that the then-upcoming comedy ‘Salem: The Musical’ was in poor taste, satirizing one of the darker moments in pre-America times when 25 innocent people were falsely accused of witchcraft and hung in a (to put it mildly) miscarriage of justice.

I disagreed with this take, as did Rachel Wagner, a disagreement we aired on The OnStage Blog Podcast (which you can see below at the 10:46 mark).

Ultimately, we landed on two things:

1) The play had to take care to satirize the villains (or the villainous environment) and not the victims

2) We need to see the play before making a final judgment because it all comes down to the execution.

Well, the producers of another show about the Salem Witch Trials invited us to see their take on the subject matter, and I volunteered to put up and see whether they could land the airplane on a comedy about this.

First, I'm happy to report that the comedy, ‘Witches?! In Salem?!’, written by Matt Cox(‘Puffs’), passed our initial test. While this is an absurd comedy about 1692 Salem, they always lampooned the environment leading to the witch trials and the perpetrators themselves while generally not making light of the killing of innocent people at the hands of supposed justice.

Beyond passing that test, the comedy was, for me, hit-and-miss.

‘Witches?! In Salem?!’ is a fast-paced farce of the culture of 1692 Salem that reminded me of several British sketch comedy shows, where nearly every character is outrageous and doing weird things in almost every second they are on stage. Quirks are invented for nearly every character, and every quirk is played up to the hilt like the actors were told to dial it up to 15 on a scale of 1-10.

I don't tend to like this type of comedy, but most of the audience was digging it (with some exceptions, which I will get to), so I'm not about to declare this play wasn't funny. Based on the audience I saw this with, some will find this funny, some will chuckle, and some won't laugh. It depends on whether this type of humor appeals to you.

What I can fairly criticize is the overuse of running gags. For example, Reverend Parris (played by the playwright Matt Cox, who was filling in for the actor who could not perform) is obsessed with ensuring he is paid firewood for his Reverend duties. One of the gags is that he always brings firewood around and, at one point, plays up the gag by fondling it on stage, showing how much he loves it (see picture).

The overall gag was funny the first couple of times, but the audience's laughs fell off with each iteration, and there were several more iterations throughout the play. Reverend Parris was also similarly obsessed with letting people know he went to Harvard (this gag didn't work after the first instance; again, it was purely subjective opinion!).

There was also a running gag around a character, Sarah Goode, constantly popping in and saying "Yes??" when her last name was mentioned, which, again, got laughs the first few times but lost a lot of steam after several more repeats (although one unexpected repeat got me to laugh out loud).

I counted at least five running gags, all of which lost steam as they were repeated during the production, based on my reading of the audience's reaction.

However, the comedy of this production wasn’t why I came to review it because, again, comedy is so subjective. No, I made the trek to Hudson Square on a Tuesday night to see how they handled the dramatic aspects, if any. I found this production was genuinely notable because they tried to thread the needle between a comedy, a drama, and a lecture of sorts, with mixed results.

While the first act was almost exclusively a comical farce, the production turns more serious in the 2nd act regarding the hangings. I found their serious moments quite effective. The production looks like this was done on a shoestring budget (something the show pokes fun at itself for), but how they pulled off the hangings with a simple set design and good timing with the lighting was highly effective. It successfully got the audience invested in the character's deaths.

There were also some surprisingly serious monologues from the female 1692 characters, throwing in modern-day thoughts on how this could have been all avoided and the values their society (and ours) should hold true. Nothing is shocking in the content itself; it's non-partisan and speaks of universal values that should have a 99% approval rating, but the monologues remain effective nonetheless.

This production strayed a bit in managing the shifts in tone. In addition to the production emphasizing the miscarriage of justice that transpired during this era, it also tries to set the record straight on what actually happened during the Salem Witch Trials, even calling out Arthur Miller by name (and picture) as a chief perpetrator of fake news commonly believed by Americans.

They achieve this primarily by using a teen character who acts as a narrator in the present day, reading from a history book and speaking to the audience about events that transpired differently than the history we know through "The Crucible" and other sources. Also, at other times, the characters set in 1692 spoke onstage about their historically inaccurate depictions.

It was such a jarring shift in tone and structure that it (for me) rendered the overall message less effective. Most comedies attempting to do this try to find a way to make the same point within the structure of the dialogue within the 1692 setting. I think the play was so concerned with ensuring the audience understood all of the falsehoods perpetrated by the historical influencers that it didn't step back and think, "Does this make sense within the play?". After all, within its narrator device of reading about Salem through a history book, there's no way any history book would depict the Salem figures as absurdly as portrayed on stage.

This shift in tone was most stark in the final five minutes, where the production goes from a dark comedy-drama to a lecture to the screwiest of screwball comedy endings. I looked around at the audience during this time. Some loved it, most looked amused, and others, like me, were cringing at how awkward the transition was, especially the very, very, very big prop reveal at the end.

My head was spinning at what was happening, and not in a good way. I was mouthing "WTF" throughout the final events on stage.

This is not a criticism of the content conveyed through the lecturing; by all means, the should set the record straight on whether Tituba was responsible at all for the girls accusing everyone of witchcraft (she wasn't).

However, the shifts in tone over a subject matter, such as the Salem Witch Trials, were all just a bit too distracting for this audience member. The production would have been better off if it had not been so ambitious with its goals, trying to pointedly teaching a few things about the era while being an absurd comedy.

Putting aside my thoughts on whether I found this comedy funny (I didn't, outside of two-line deliveries, but everyone's mileage will vary on the comedy aspects), I enjoyed all the actors and their performances. They gave it their all with memorable performances for a production like this, and I look forward to seeing all of them in a sketch comedy environment based on what I saw here. I particularly enjoyed Jessica Mosher, who played Abigail and portrayed her characters seriously and comedically with excellence.

Back to the original question of the tests, a comedy like this should pass when depicting an atrocity.

1) Treat the victims and the atrocity with gravitas, which this production did.

2) Don't be overzealous in ensuring the audience knows what happened in this real-life event.

Weirdly, though, as much as I think the comedy's ambition was a detriment to what I saw on stage, I appreciate that "Witches?! In Salem?!" had ambition. It was unafraid in its vision and execution on stage, and theatre needs more of that, especially with comedies, even about dark times in world history.

You can buy tickets for "Witches?! In Salem?!" here. Performances run through March 30th.