The first word spoken in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.”
Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.
The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift.
It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since #MeToo acquired its hashtag, that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action. But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.”
“Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks.
Others have experienced worse.
But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr. Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ.
Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert) is more accustomed to being fan-girled over than having his assumptions tested. Beth the grind (Fina Strazza) blossoms whenever he compliments her intelligence. Nell the new girl from Atlanta (Morgan Scott) compares him to “the teacher in an inspirational movie,” and Ivy the rich girl (Maggie Kuntz) becomes breathless recalling how he looked in sweatpants at last year’s Relay for Life. Too prim to admit that, Raelynn (Amalia Yoo) nevertheless thinks it’s cool that Smith’s wife “doesn’t even do most of the cooking” when the honors lit classes dine at his house at the end of each school year.
Belflower paints these girls, and the director Danya Taymor presents them, as supersmart, sensitive and a little feral. They sometimes flip out, surprising the dim boy dragooned into their club (Nihar Duvvuri) and even themselves. Beth, who soft-pedals her every incisive thought, snaps at the new school counselor (Molly Griggs) for expressing her concerns about the club. “It is literally your job to facilitate situations like this!” Beth shouts. “Just do your job!” And then apologizes profusely.
But the most likely to flip out is Shelby Holcomb, played by Sadie Sink of “Stranger Things.” Indeed, before the play’s action, she betrayed Raelynn with the kiss-raping boyfriend (Hagan Oliveras), even though the girls had been best friends forever. Now, with Shelby returning after a mysterious absence of several months, the ground beneath the club’s understanding of allyship and betrayal has shifted so much that an earthquake seems imminent.
It comes; I’m not going to say how. But Belflower smartly keeps the play from becoming a polemic by moving on several tracks at once. One track is pure high school comedy. Another explores the role of pop music as a vector for bonding and empowerment. Another takes it into the territory of dramatic works — like Julia May Jonas’s “A Woman Among Women” (a gloss on Miller’s “All My Sons”) and Paula Vogel’s “Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief” (overturning “Othello”) — that offer feminist revisions of cultural touchstones.
Certainly “The Crucible” is ripe for that. After Proctor, who is married, dismisses Abigail Williams, the 17-year-old servant he’d been sleeping with, she accuses him, and others, of witchcraft. The play seems to find the revenge of a powerless girl worse than the sins of the man who abused her. Indeed, Proctor’s great final act of supposed nobility is to choose death rather than renounce his good name by confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. But a name, Shelby argues, is a “made-up” thing. What’s real is the suffering he causes the women around him. It does not seem very noble that his wife, having done no wrong, will have to support their family alone.
“His fiction is more important than her fact?” Shelby asks rhetorically.
“John Proctor is one of the great heroes of the American Theater,” Mr. Smith responds, defending his ground perhaps too aggressively. Ebert’s beautifully judged performance gives you the feeling of something tarnished beneath the gold.
Yet “John Proctor” is not an anti-“Crucible” tract. (Substantial excerpts from “The Crucible” have been authorized by the Arthur Miller trust.) Though Belflower argues, straightforwardly and successfully, that the older play fails to take seriously the misogyny behind the witch hunts, she essentially admits its dramaturgical power, in part by imitation. Her own characters and situations take more than a page from Miller’s. She borrows but reframes the idea of a crucible as the kind of hothouse you might find in any high school. And in ways that feel perfectly natural, her girls fall into paroxysms of laughter, screaming and wild dance that, if viewed unsympathetically, could well look like witchiness.
Taymor’s production is entirely sympathetic — to the characters and to the text. Though thrilling in its refusal to tamp down the show’s sometimes anarchic spirit, it does not ignore the dangers of abandon. Sink’s Shelby is beautifully positioned just at the spot where you can’t tell the difference between impulse and illness. The other girls stratify at in-between altitudes, from Scott’s firmly grounded Nell to Strazza’s high-pitched Beth.
But the overall tone, expressed by Natasha Katz’s convulsive lighting of the classroom set by Teresa L. Williams (working with the AMP collective), embraces the extremes. The disturbing sound design and original music, by Palmer Hefferan, are especially vivid. At the play’s climax, when Shelby and Raelynn present their “junior honors lit interpretive project” — dressed in homemade versions of Salem garb (costumes by Sarah Laux) — all of Belflower’s touchstones, and Taymor’s skill at choreographing emotion, come together in a wild scene that restores to the girls the power taken from them.
You could argue, I suppose, that the tight twisting of themes — Lorde, in “Green Light” mode, turns out to be the point-for-point antidote to Proctor — is a bit overdetermined. The girls are universally wonderful; the male characters, except for the dim boy, who gets a small shot at redemption, not. The script sticks relentlessly to its topic, a common enough trait of early work. (This is Belflower’s New York debut.) One of the features of “The Crucible” it ignores is how Miller’s play succeeds as allegory because it is porous: It is about many things.
No matter. “John Proctor Is the Villain” is too urgently necessary about its one thing to make it worth wishing it were even a little different. That the urgency comes in an often hilarious, often ecstatic, highly accessible package is all the better. I hope a lot of high school girls — and boys — see it. Both need to understand that the case against John Proctor is just beginning.
John Proctor Is the Villain
Through July 6 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan; johnproctoristhevillain.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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