Sarah Ruhl and Rebecca Taichman on Conjuring ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’

On a recent Tuesday morning, the playwright Sarah Ruhl and the director Rebecca Taichman were gazing at a window, diamond-paned and much-repaired, on the second floor of the New-York Historical Society. A showpiece of the Society’s exhibition “The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” the window had once stood in the home of Rebecca Nurse, a Salem woman who was hanged for witchcraft in 1692. At 71, she was the eldest woman among the trials’ two dozen victims.

“Rebecca Nurse looked through this,” Taichman marveled, snapping a picture with her phone. “It’s very powerful, like stepping into memory.”

Ruhl tried to see through the window, but the window didn’t make it easy. The panes were thick, the glass distorted in several places. This, she said, was like trying to see back into the past, trying to understand, as an artist, what had happened in Salem. “There’s this veil we’re trying to pierce,” she said. “We keep telling new stories.”

One new story is “Becky Nurse of Salem,” a Lincoln Center Theater production that is now in previews at Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Written by Ruhl and directed by Taichman, who last collaborated on the 2017 play “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage,” it conjures a dark comedy about power, inheritance and the opioid epidemic. In dialogue with both Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and contemporary conspiracy theories, “Becky Nurse of Salem” stars the Tony-winning actress Deirdre O’Connell as Becky, a many generations removed descendant of Rebecca Nurse. Fired from her job at Salem’s witch museum, Becky gives actual witchcraft a try.

After perusing the exhibit, which concluded with an Alexander McQueen dress and photos of contemporary practitioners, Ruhl (known for “In the Next Room”) and Taichman (“Indecent”) retired to a conference room to discuss the new play’s origins and implications and why the United States seems to be having what Ruhl described as “a very witchy moment.” Do these women believe in magic?