Becky Nurse of Salem tickets

By: Sarah Ruhl
Producer: Lincoln Center Theater
Director: Rebecca Taichman
Lighting: Barbara Samuels
Sound: Palmer Hefferan
Design: Riccardo Hernandez
Costume: Emily Rebholz
Cast list: Tina Benko, Candy Buckley, Alicia Crowder, Deirdre O’Connell, Thomas Jay Ryan, Julian Sanchez, Bernard White
Other info: Projections by Tal Yarden

Something witchy this way comes to Lincoln Center Theater: the New York premiere of Pulitzer finalist Sarah Ruhl's Becky Nurse of Salem, starring Tony Award winner Deirdre O'Connell. Get Becky Nurse of Salem tickets on TodayTix.

The title character of the Becky Nurse of Salem play is a modern-day employee at a Salem Witch Trials museum. She's been hit by a stroke of bad luck, so she turns to pills, a man, and witchcraft to try and reverse it. Is she really a witch? She could be — she is descended from Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged during the actual Salem Witch Trials. Becky Nurse of Salem is about the ongoing link between witchcraft and misogyny, and how they shape the lives of two women centuries apart.

Becky Nurse of Salem premiered in California in 2019 at Berkeley Rep. The Becky Nurse of Salem Off-Broadway premiere stars Deirdre O'Connell, a 2022 Tony Award winner for starring in Dana H. on Broadway. She's been an Off-Broadway fixture for years, though; her recent credits include Dana H.'s 2019 Off-Broadway premiere and Corsicana, which went up at Playwrights Horizons earlier this year.

There's a formidable team of women behind the scenes of Becky Nurse of Salem in New York, too. Playwright Ruhl is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and The Clean House, and director Rebecca Taichman is the Tony-winning director and co-creator (with Paula Vogel) of Indecent on Broadway.

Get Becky Nurse of Salem tickets on TodayTix now.

What to Watch For

• Ruhl's newest play, Letters From Max, will have its world premiere off Broadway shortly after Becky Nurse of Salem wraps. How many writers can say they're doubly represented off Broadway in one season?
• Taichman also has another directing credit on the horizon: She directed the Broadway-bound Sing Street musical off Broadway and in Boston.
• Ruhl took inspiration for Becky Nurse of Salem from Judith Miller's research on her father Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. A review of Becky Nurse of Salem directly states, "A wildly ambitious denunciation of 'The Crucible,' with its sexualization of women and girls, 'Becky Nurse of Salem' calls out the way women are taken to task for the ills of the world."
• More than 200 people, mainly women, were accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93. Fourteen women and five men among them were hanged.
• In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and Becky Nurse of Salem have similar themes; in both, Ruhl explores how people have historically sought to control powerful women by declaring them "witches" or "hysterical."