Once again, this is a play I came across first while I was at school. While I haven't looked at it in well over ten years, it's not strictly a first reading.
The first thing that really struck me on reading this (penguin modern classics version) was just how much Miller gives in the way of stage direction, historical anecdotes, even telling actors how they should be physically reacting and with what exact emotion. I've seen stage manager's cue copies with less annotation, and it doesn't leave much imagination up to the actors nor show any trust in a director. In context though, that does seem more relevant - every one of the characters is being "directed" (or misdirected), or play-acting, or at the very least hiding something significant. So perhaps the added sense of a somewhat over-directed script which might be natural responses to one actor but not to another could be used as a starting point for creating the atmosphere on stage. It doesn't strike me as an ideal way to work, but it might make an interesting experiment to try to follow the marks exactly as given in the script. There is also the note that a lot of the content of the play is taken or extrapolated from papers and records of the time, so in some scenes those directions might come out of transcripts (for example, of the courtroom).
The focus of the story changes so insidiously through the play that it's easy to forget by the end that the one person left alive after all the accusations was also the only person who actually had an act of "witchcraft" set against her at the beginning, Elizabeth Proctor. She is really the reason the whole situation spirals out of control in the first place, as the girls start accusing vast numbers of people (including her) to cover the fact that Abby wants her out of the picture. By the time Mary decides she wants to come clean it's far too late, both sides are in too deep to shift focus so quickly.
This play was meant to show a basic story at the heart of it which was recurring "out in the world" at the time - how damaging false accusations and misdirection can be, especially when it comes from the top. It's something which continues to be pertinent (and stretching back, shows up in Shakespeare just as often) and to an extent is part of being human. Even Elizabeth Proctor, the one who "cannot lie", tries to do so just a little bit to cover for her husband when put on the spot. Where the children in this play are all acting "big" (false as they may be, their emotions are writ large and directed to be played that way) the adults seem to all have fairly internalised directions - and there's always going to be worry about the younger generation having more will for freedoms (especially those they don't have a right to, for whatever reason) than the older... otherwise "in my day" wouldn't be cliché! Although in this case what they're trying to incite sort of backfires in the short-term, Miller notes in an afterword that parts of the town were left to ruin and the Theocracy in Salem was pretty much dead after the events of the play. So then, there's a different message to the younger audience members than there is to the old.
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