Ideas and images crackle in the University of Hawai'i-Manoa's Ernst Lab Theatre as it opens its new season with "Vinegar Tom" by Caryl Churchill.

Audiences familiar with Churchill's blending of women's issues with social politics, from Hawai'i productions of her "Cloud Nine," can expect a similar approach in this earlier play. "Vinegar Tom" takes its title from the pet name given by an accused witch to one of her "familiars." a devilish imp with the body of a greyhound and a grotesque head.

Set amid a 17th-century English witch hunt, the play links to the present day in the same way that Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" exposed the fear of communism underlying the McCarthy hearings in 1950's America. "Vinegar Tom" suggests that 17th-century fears and attitudes about women continue today, but that their scapegoating and demonizing take different forms.

Churchill uses the device of interspersing 17th-century themes with contemporary songs. Churchill has written the lyrics but leaves it to the play's director to come up with the music. Lurana Donnels O'Malley directs, with original music by Sean T.C. O'Malley.

Their musical choice is the 1950s, suggesting that era also rigidly stereotyped its image of the proper female.

So singers in bobby sox, crinolines and matching girl-group gowns punctuate the story line built around 17th-century women accused by their neighbors of dealing with the devil.

The central characters are Alice (Annie Lipscomb), an unmarried but sexually active young woman fiercely eager to escape her small village, and Joan, her widowed mother (Terri Madden), too free with her curses for a stingy neighbor. Without marriage, the women are free from its restraints, but also lack its male protection.

Alice is viewed as devilish temptress, both by a man who enjoys her favors and by another who desires them.

Joan is too free with her drink and her tongue, verbally lashing out with curses believed responsible for a sick calf and butter that will not churn.

The common 17th-century view was that women were particularly susceptible to devilish possession. By juxtaposing modern musical images, Churchill suggests those same desires and fears about women can be expressed in contemporary ways.

O'Malley's controlled direction lets the message unfold without forcing it. Lipscomb and Madden reflect their characters' response to a slowly constricting noose in differing ways. And Frank Episale is chilling and intensely effective in dual roles as a philandering nobleman and a clinically dedicated witch hunter.

The final musical number asks us subliminally whether we enjoy participating in the destruction of today's witches. It packs an effective dramatic uppercut to finish the play.