Director Rodger Henderson has pared "The Crucible" down to an intense personal tragedy, with potent results. As John and Elizabeth Proctor join in their final, lacerating drama of martyrdom and redemption, the audience hardly dares breathe.

Stephen Kancianic Daniel Krell as the Rev. John Hale prays over Chelsea Mervis' Betty Parris as David Cabot(Deputy Governor Danforth) looks on in "The Crucible," which Quantum Theatre is staging outdoors in Mellon Park. Click photo for larger image. 'The Crucible' Where: Quantum Theatre at Mellon Park Rose Garden, corner of Fifth and Shady avenues, Shadyside. When: Through Aug. 20; 8 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Tickets: $24-$27; 412-394-3353.

But the heart of Arthur Miller's famously political play beats with political passion. This is partly because "The Crucible" cannot escape its specific historical parallels, partly because it generates new parallels out of current news, but also because in human society the personal cannot help but be political, too.

"The Crucible" is Miller's potent parable of the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which a blinkered theocratic society spiraled into hysteria over events its theology could not understand. The resulting orgy of scapegoating was its rear-guard battle against the messy realities of the modern world -- apply this to whatever modern theocracy you choose.

Quantum Theatre has mounted it in the same Mellon Park Rose Garden space and on pretty much the same rough-hewn boards that Tony Ferrieri designed last year for its rural folk legend of witches, "Dark of the Moon." The atmosphere then was mysterious, but "The Crucible," with its faithful Puritan garb, starts out close to a historical pageant. The opening arguments about the minister's pay and the Colonists' land-grabbing shenanigans might be educational exhibits in a theme park.

Language is also a problem. Miller creates a speech with an antique, even biblical patina, and it takes a while to get used to it.

But the story moves quickly. Fearful of punishment, teenage girls who were caught dancing and conjuring in the woods with a black slave, Tituba, begin to charge witchcraft, which feeds the prejudices of the authorities. They are led by the sexually awakened Abigail, who has had sex with John Proctor and charges his wife, Elizabeth. Thus personal motives mingle with civic fears and religious hysteria.

Henderson has eliminated six of 21 roles. The overbearing Putnams are reduced to the wife, giving more weight to her lost babies than to his land-grabbing. The court loses its Judge Hawthorne, focusing the state's force in Deputy Governor Danforth. The Sarah Good scene is cut, as are references to revolts against authority in other towns.

These changes serve to personalize the story, as does Henderson's decision to use Miller's optional extra scene between Proctor and Abigail. Thus are the personal stakes intensified for the two confrontations of Danforth with Proctor and then his with his wife.

Hugo Armstrong and Robin Walsh are a Proctor and Elizabeth who reward this focus, he with a cranky, craggy rectitude, she with a passionate intensity, sometimes banked, more often quick of expression. Most Elizabeths are inhibited, even mousy, but Walsh is prone to confrontation, even in her first scene. It is difficult to see how Proctor could have been unfaithful to her, which may put a crimp in Miller's plot but provides the audience with compensatory emotional fireworks.

There are capable antagonists in the fretful, wishy-washy Rev. Parris of Cody Henderson (last year's Witch Boy) and the bullish assurance of David Cabot's judgmental Danforth. Daniel Krell's Rev. Hale occupies the middle ground, that of the ineffectual good man who sees the truth too late.

The other antagonist is, of course, Abigail, played by Ilana Niernberger with little flash but scary persistence. It may be hard to imagine Proctor falling for her, but it is easy to see how she would stick once engaged. Contrasting well is Gayle Pazerski's Mary Warren, the Proctors' bedraggled servant girl who swells with her new importance, then fails the ultimate test of integrity.

The large cast has robust comic support in Rick Kemp's Giles Corey. Ingrid Sonnichsen is no simple Puritan saint as Rebecca Nurse, but a pragmatic woman of conviction, and Linda Haston is a fearful Tituba, who knows where the power lies.

But the personal story these actors tell is not the sole reason "The Crucible" has become such an oft-produced American classic. We know the Proctors' fates are the result of religion and government, united, presuming to judge their souls.

When "The Crucible" appeared in 1953, its parable seemed to deal with the hunt for Communists in government. The familiar objection to this parallel is that in 1693 there were no witches, while in 1953 there really were Communists. But that's glib evasion. There may not have been real witches in Salem, but the devil was surely loose there -- in the overweening self-righteousness with which fallible humans turn terror, greed and self-conceit into aggressive strength.

In any case, "The Crucible" has long since lost its dependence on the McCarthy period. When Richard Eyre directed it on Broadway in 2002 with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, he was sure it was about how men face great issues of conscience and about the moral self-conceit of any leader who demonizes the unknown. And the audience would have sworn Miller had just written Danforth as a sketch of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

I'm sure the audience gathering these days in Mellon Park (sitting transfixed through occasional sprinkles) will find its own contemporary parallels. "The Crucible" is a classic because it remains contemporary, which is to say it is contemporary because it transcends the present.