Church and Community

Exercise 1

Visit: The Girls . Read the interviews and background material on the actors who play Abigail, Mercy, Betty and Mary: ‘Abigail’s Journey’; ‘Role of Mercy Lewis’; ‘Mercy Lewis’s journey’; ‘Mary Warren’s journey’; ‘Role of Betty Parris’.

Visit: Rehearsals especially: ‘Preparing for her role’; ‘Mercy Lewis’ objectives in Act 1’; ‘Challenges in the play’; ‘Playing sleeping Betty’; ‘Can Betty fly?’; ‘Character development in rehearsal’; ‘Waking up Betty’; ‘Mary Warren enters the bedroom’; and ‘Betty tries to fly’.

Visit also: Performance . Watch the sequence of video clips under the headings: ‘In the bedroom of Betty Parris’; ‘Motivation of Mercy Lewis’; ‘Mary Warren’s Perspective’.

These Stagework assets will help you understand the girls in their community setting but also how the actors prepared to recreate their situations. The girls’ actions have set themselves – from their dancing in the woods onwards –outside the community and the Church.

Would you describe the girls as religious? Discuss ways have they been influenced by malice or by their religious upbringing?

Leah Muller, the actor who plays Abigail, believes that her character’s behaviour throughout the play is a result of the repressed society she lives in. Discuss ways in which you think the Christian community at Salem is repressive.

Can you think of anything positive to say about the strict rules of behaviour set by the church there? Do you think Christianity today is too strict or too easy in terms of its moral guidance to young people, or to any age group?

Exercise 2

Review: The Girls . Read again the interviews and background material on the actors who play Abigail, Mercy, Betty and Mary, especially what the actors say about character development.

Imagine you are a reporter for a newspaper at the turn of the seventeenth century, the beginning of the 1700s. Your newspaper is producing a special edition of the most notable events in Massachusetts over the 1600s. Your editor has given you the task of writing about the Church in Salem in the late 1680s and early 1690s. But the editor wants some original material and has asked you to track down the central characters in the story to find out about their religious beliefs – then and now.

Either: improvise and possibly record an imaginary interview with one or more of the girls (Abigail, Mercy, Betty and Mary) and Tituba. Play back and discuss.

Or: write up an imaginary interview with one or more of the girls (Abigail, Mercy, Betty and Mary) and Tituba. Read out and discuss.

In either case, make sure you focus upon the religious beliefs of the girls and how they reflect on the trials in Salem (regret, remorse, bitterness, satisfaction) and whether it has affected their religious beliefs ten years or so later, as a New Year brings in 1700.

Exercise 3

Religious groups are frequently intolerant. Religious and cultural groups are also and often severely persecuted themselves.

We should not forget that the New England Puritans were settlers on lands that were once the sole domain of indigenous peoples, the Native American Indian populations, who were themselves demonised as ‘pagans’ and ‘savages’ by the Puritans. [Listen to the words spoken by Abigail, in Performance , ‘In the bedroom of Betty Parris’.]

Find out more about issues of religious freedom in the world by investigating the contents of some of these United Nations declarations (See Appendix I):

Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination based on Religion or Belief (25 November 1981)

Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (18 December 1992)

Oslo Declaration on Freedom of Religion and Belief (1998)

World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Discrimination (September, 2001)

For full texts, follow links at www.ohchr.org , or visit the website of Freedom House: www.freedomhouse.org

In what ways, especially post-11 September 2001, have issues of religious freedom and persecution become important today?

Arrange a discussion around this theme, (but use material from one of the websites listed in order that your discussion is well-informed and not itself prejudicial).