Time has played some odd tunes upon Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, just revived as the first offering of the National Actors Theatre, Tony Randall’s grandiosely styled group. The new production begins attractively. We are lost in a forest: great beetling green treetrunks tower weirdly over a barely suggested bedroom. Set designer David Jenkins suggests a darkness lurking both outside and inside the Calvinist interior. (It is an expressionist vocabulary used also in the Dancing at Lughnasaset.) For a second, we await a rich, complex drama. Then, alas, the play starts; actors take the stage in wigs and in colonially monochromatic cotton and gingham, and they commence to utter the pseudo-colonial cotton-and-gingham prose of Miller: “On Sunday let you come with me, and we’ll walk the farm together; I never see such a load of flowers on the earth,” etc. This purports to be the speech of an upright yeoman farmer; similar slight deformations of idiom mark all the characters. The story, of course, tells of the heroic resistance offered by this farmer to the witch-hunters of Salem in 1692. But Miller’s dramaturgy is amazingly inept, blurring the contour of even the melodrama he wishes to create. The hero is guilty of adultery and must squirm with shame before his righteous, chilly wife; his partner in sin is the young woman who is leading the chorus of confessing and accusing witches and is apparently intending to have the hero’s wife hanged for a witch. But she