There’s something refreshing about seeing a Broadway theater packed with Gen Alpha patrons. Many of them flocked to the recent Romeo + Juliet with barely-twentysomething stars Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, and now they’re bringing a youthful energy to Kimberly Belflower’s new drama John Proctor Is the Villain, a modern-day, post-#MeToo gloss on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that pulses with the spirit of young women who are coming into their power and vulnerability at a tricky time.
The setting is 2018, in a high school in a rural Virginia town that’s on verge of installing its second stoplight. A tight-knit group of juniors is taking an honors lit class with a beloved teacher (Gabriel Ebert, putting a genial face on a man who emerges as a creep) who idolizes The Crucible‘s John Proctor as “one of the great heroes of the American Theatre.” But the whip-smart girls begin to question this standard interpretation of the 17th-century minister in Salem, Massachusetts, whose clandestine affair with teenager Abigail Williams sets off a witch hunt that he belatedly attempts to derail by belatedly confessing his transgression. Proctor is typically seen as a tragic hero for his final act in the play: After he himself is condemned to death as a witch, he considers but ultimately refuses to a sign a false confession of his witchery — or to “name names” of other potential transgressors in Miller’s 1953 parable of the McCarthyite Red Scare.
But as some of the show’s students point out, Proctor was a grown man who slept with a teenage girl who worked in his house — and then denounced her as a “whore.” And he barely acknowledges his own pregnant wife or the harm that his self-sacrifice will have on their lives and livelihoods. It’s a sharp reading of the text, fueled in part by the Feminist Club that brown-nosing striver Beth (Fina Strazza) has formed with her friends to burnish her college applications (initially encouraged by Ebert’s Carter Smith). Like a chatterbox version of Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick from Election, Beth preps worksheets for the group’s meetings, where she intends to explore everything from body positivity in the works of Lizzo to the origins of the #MeToo movement. Members include Ivy (Maggie Kunst), the local pastor’s daughter; Raelynn (Amalia Yoo), a perky cheerleader type who’s considering getting back together with her cheating ex, Lee (Hagan Oliveras); and Nell (Morgan Scott), a transfer student from Atlanta who’s taken a shine to the quietly earnest Mason (Nihar Duvvuri) — who himself joined the club mostly to earn some badly needed extra credit.
Beth, like her peers, is not merely a budding feminist. She’s also a daughter of the modern evangelical South — and the show opens with a mandated sex ed lesson that Beth finds a time-wasting distraction from the regular syllabus even though it emphasizes abstinence as “the only method 100% guaranteed to prevent pregnancy or disease.” (Outsider Nell notes that back it Atlanta, her school taught sex ed in fifth grade.) When Nell invokes “our bodies, our choices” during an early club meeting, Beth is quick to pivot: “Well yeah, but in my head it’s also kind of a Christian feminist club.”
Beth’s knee-jerk beliefs get a major challenge over the course of the play — first when Ivy’s dad admits to having had an affair with his church’s secretary and then with the sudden return of classmate Shelby (Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame), who left the school under mysterious circumstances several months before. Word is that she hooked up with Lee even though Raelynn had been her bestie forever. But this flame-haired deus ex machina is also a natural rebel eager to challenge authority — and she’s the one who leads the charge in re-examining John Proctor’s supposed heroism and to try to rally her peers to true feelings of sisterly solidarity (even if some of them, realistically, are reluctant to follow). She also has a secret of her own that threatens to topple the school’s carefully manicured equilibrium.
Sink is a dynamo in the role, a motormouth whose speech sometimes rushes ahead of her brain or at least any instinct to modify what she says to soften its impact. She speaks her mind, to a fault, but it’s an agile and quick-witted mind that rivals Beth’s in raw intelligence. Her expressive face has an openness that helps you understand how she’s able to patch things up so quickly with Raelynn and to fall back into a familiar rapport that includes a joint class presentation with a music-video element. “I mean I feel like we both know we’re gonna do a dance,” Shelby says, to which Raelynn replies automatically, “I mean, yeah, obviously.”
That dance, choreographed by Tilly Evans-Krueger to a strident, head-banging rager by Lorde, is a tour-de-force show-stopper — at once evoking the ritualistic and forbidden dance of Abigail Williams and her witchcraft-accused peers in The Crucible as well as any number of freeform, contemporary TikTok routines intended to celebrate a younger generation and draw a firm line of delineation from their elders. The primal cri-de-coeur encapsulates the plight of young women bucking up against patriarchal forces aligned against them. It’s also wonderfully staged by director Danya Taymor on a classroom set (designed by the collective Amp and Teresa L. Williams) that offers the perfect framework for a story that can drift from ripped-from-the-yearbook familiar to an almost otherworldly milieu (an effect that’s amped up by Hannah Wasileski’s projections and Natasha Katz’s sometimes disorienting lighting).
Belflower’s remarkable play is more than just a riff on Arthur Miller. She smartly resists the impulse to match Miller’s two-toned didacticism with the modern equivalent. Instead, we get a more nuanced and therefore realistic outcome. There are heroes and villains here (though I wish the villains had a little more depth). And there are others like Beth who are caught somewhere in the middle, not knowing quite which side they should choose — or even if they need to choose a side at all. Our bodies, our choices, right? John Proctor Is the Villain can be simplistic and also a bit messy, but messy in a way that’s unforgettably compelling. ★★★★☆
JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN
Booth Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 6 for $69 to $399
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