Wolves are at the door in seductive Broadway revival of ‘The Crucible,’ starring Saoirse Ronan

A lone wolf prowls through Salem, Mass., in Ivo van Hove’s eye-popping and wholly unconventional revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” that great dramatic cautionary tale about the perennial dangers of a rampant theocracy fueled by ignorance and mass hysteria. This is not a metaphoric mammal, but a literal beast, actually a lupine-looking canine known as a Tamaskan, that prowls onstage in Act 2, stops center stage and exerts such a force over the proceedings that one fears he might decide to chow down on Row E the same way the dangerous seductress Abigail Williams, played in full-on seduction mode by the excellent young star Saoirse Ronan, eats up Ben Whishaw’s John Proctor, her married quarry. “I have a sense for heat, John,” she says, dressed provocatively in contemporary schoolgirl attire, “and you have drawn me to your window.” Proctor’s moral authority to stop the prosecution of the innocent thus is compromised as surely as a Southern governor submerged in a sex scandal, which was, of course, one of Miller’s central points in 1953, when this play about witch trials could be applied to a political witch hunt of a different kind, when writers and artists named names to save themselves.