Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials works every time. No matter how well you know it, it can still make you writhe with discomfort and lean forward with suspense. It's a long play with a huge cast, an enormous undertaking for a small theater company and high-risk in a tiny theater, but Vagabond meets the challenge.

The plot involves the righteous and self-righteous town of Salem, Mass., during the 17th century when a woman, then many women, then many men are accused of doing the devil's work. In a litigious community where people are constantly suing each other over land and timber and cows, where records are kept about how often a person appears in church and whether a man plows his fields on Sundays and where defending yourself against a holy accuser is a capital crime, there is more danger from one's fellow man than from the devil. Puritans indeed.

The plot involves John Proctor (Jeremy Chacon), an upstanding farmer, who has had an affair with the household servant, Abigail (Kate Griesemer), and whose wife, Elizabeth (Corinna Burns), finds out about this "lechery," throws the girl out, and is, months later, accused by her of witchcraft. This begins a series of heinous lies as hysterical teenage girls catch the fever and, led by Abigail, have many of the men and women in Salem hanged.

Miller's play is usually talked about as a thinly veiled indictment of the HUAC investigations in the 1950s that hounded communists and anyone accused of being a communist (they didn't call them witch hunts for nothing). Saving yourself through implicating others was the methodology; it worked then, it worked centuries before in Salem, and it works still. Since the McCarthy hearings are no longer foremost in our national conscience, various other political horrors flit through your mind as you watch the play.

Much of the credit of the success of this production is due to Charlie DelMarcelle's imaginative direction, with the entire cast of 20 sitting onstage in solemn judgment throughout the drama, occasionally singing hymns and clanking chains. Joe Koroly's austere set -- wood planking, sawdust floor, ropes -- is wonderfully atmospheric, and Aileen McCulloch's costumes evoke both time and character.

Although Chacon's central performance as Proctor seems passionless rather than noble, there are several fine performances. Most notable are Griesemer as the manipulative, erotic Abigail, Eric Singel as the vicious prig of a minister, Tina Brock as the radiantly good neighbor and Burns as Proctor's dour wife who realizes how cold a house she kept.