BRUNSWICK — “Witch hunt” is a phrase on everyone’s lips these days at The Theater Project as its Young Company prepares to stage Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

The play dramatizes the Salem witch hunt and subsequent trials that seized the Province of Massachusetts in 1692.

Miller intended the play, written in 1953, to be a commentary on McCarthyism, with its desperate search to unearth Communists in America. However, the play’s themes of paranoia, intolerance and hysteria, and empowerment and the powerless have given it a lasting relevance.

The story focuses on John Proctor, a young farmer; his wife, Elizabeth; and Abigail, a young servant girl who maliciously causes Elizabeth’s arrest for witchcraft. Proctor brings the girl to court to admit the lie — and it is here that the monstrous course of bigotry and deceit is terrifyingly depicted.

Proctor, instead of saving his wife, finds himself also accused of witchcraft and ultimately condemned with a host of others.

Director Wendy Poole pointed out the lasting truth of Miller’s play. “They were after ‘the others’ — people on the fringes of society, and anyone who didn’t comply with social norms of the time,” she said.

“The research I’ve done with the kids makes it clear that as creative people, as different people, we would have been among the first to hang. Isn’t that scary? Yet, it’s still happening all over the world — people killing other people because they are different. It’s chilling to portray, knowing that the madness doesn’t stop with the end of the play,” Poole said.

“The Crucible” will be presented Oct. 29 through Nov. 7. Shows will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday at The Theater Project at 14 School St.

All tickets are pay what you want, with a suggested price of $12. For tickets, call 729-8584 or visit www.theaterproject.com.