If you read The Crucible in high school, you might remember Rebecca Nurse. A minor character in the play, she goes to her death along with John Proctor, falsely swept up in the panic of the Salem witch trials.

Arthur Miller based Rebecca on a real person: a pious, 71-year-old woman whose deafness may have sealed her death warrant. (According to historical accounts, she couldn’t hear the court’s accusations during her trial.) The contemporary playwright Sarah Ruhl checks in with her descendants in Becky Nurse of Salem, now onstage at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse stage…

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