The situation in which we find ourselves is brought out with dramatic force in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which deals with the Salem witch trials. As the play opens the audience is introduced to the community of Salem in Puritan America at the end of the eighteenth century. Aside from a quaint concern with witches and devils which provides the immediate problem in the opening scene, it is a quite normal community. The conversation of the characters creates an atmosphere suggesting the usual mixture of pleasures, foibles, irritations, and concerns which would characterize the common life of a normal village in any age. There is no occasion to feel uneasy or disturbed about these people. Instead, the audience can sit back at ease and, from the perspective of an enlightened time which no longer believes in such things, enjoy the dead seriousness with which the characters in the play take the witches and devils which are under discussion. A teenage girl, Abigail Williams, is being sharply questioned by her minister uncle, the Reverend Samuel Parris, about a wild night affair in the woods in which she and some other girls had seemed to have had contact with these evil beings. For all involved in this discussion the devil is a real entity who can really be confronted in the woods on a dark night, the demon world is populated with real creatures, and witches actually can be seen flying through the air.