The scream begins as a ripple, starting with the most unlikely character first, and then crescendos from one teenage girl to the next, propelling them across the stage through sheer force of lung. Four voices rising and bodies contorting: aaaahAAAAAAHHHHH!
It’s a standout scene in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” the hit Broadway dramedy that revisits “The Crucible” through the eyes of burgeoning feminist high school students. At some point, these girls have had enough: of social pressures, family dramas and especially of questionable male authority figures. The only thing left to do is vent at top volume.
“They scream so loud and for so long,” the stage directions read, “it’s a lifetime of screams. It’s awesome.”
Audience members laugh and applaud that moment — and they also start to cry, said Kimberly Belflower, who wrote the play. She gets it.
“Teenage girls are so monitored and observed and objectified and are expected to be a certain thing,” Belflower, 38, said. “It’s a lose-lose in a lot of ways. So just having the opportunity to let go of that, and be, like, ugly and loud — it opens something up.”
The “John Proctor” shriekathon is the latest in a wave of young women and girls letting their pipes loose, on stages and in rock clubs, across arenas and on screens — and exhorting anyone to join in. “Right now, I want you to think about something or someone that just really pisses you off,” Olivia Rodrigo directed the cheering crowds during her Guts World Tour. “And when the lights go down, you’re gonna scream as loud as you can, and let it all out.”
Culturally, girlhood has long been synonymous with frenzy — think sleepovers, fan girls or horror victims (or the witchified clan in “The Crucible,” the 1953 Arthur Miller drama). But the screams now are an expression of something else: of exasperation and rage, ecstatic relief or pent-up awe, among other complicated emotions. That young women are being invited to sound off together, publicly — that it’s normalized, not secret or lunatic — feels like a new facet of what is allowed in girlhood.
Florence Welch, the ethereal frontwoman of Florence + the Machine, named her new album (due Oct. 31) “Everybody Scream.” She was thinking about the “more masculine connotations” of those words when they’re shouted at a show, she said, “and inverting that bravado into a scream of feminine fury and frustration.”
Screaming is elemental. “Before we have language, we all start knowing how to shriek. It’s almost like basic instinct,” said Fina Strazza, who earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Beth, the brainiac who first unleashes in “John Proctor.” “I always feel like a buzzing going through my body after I get to scream.” (The actors trained to do so without damaging their vocal cords.)
Strazza, 19, does a rock star-style slide on her knees toward the end of her eruption. Roaring in that position is especially powerful — it makes her feel like a lioness, she said, adding, “There’s something about being a woman that feels so primal.”
In the play, the screams feel necessary and inevitable, said Danya Taymor, the production’s director, even if it’s a release that may not last. “It reminds me of a really hot summer’s day,” she said, “when it just has to rain.”
“I think probably people should scream more than they do,” she added.
Here’s your chance to join in:
Rodrigo, 22, summarizes the endless, knotty conflicts of young womanhood in her sweet-punchy anthem “All-American Bitch” (“I scream inside to deal with it like ahhhhhhhh,” she sings with a forced smile. Live, that’s when she cues the audience to let it rip).
The singer and songwriter said that communal experience is especially resonant. “To be in a room full of strangers and be able to share an intimate moment of emotional release like a scream is so powerful,” she said. Those beats of connection are “what makes live music so important and moving,” she added. “It is emotional catharsis in the purest form.”
The Linda Lindas, the California teen punk band, has been primal screaming since its very first shows (when its youngest member was still in elementary school). Often led by the guitarist Bela Salazar, 20, it’s a mid-set flash of ferocity between band and audience.
The Lindas join a long line of punk women with a powerhouse screech, like Poly Styrene of the seminal ’70s British band X-Ray Spex; the riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna; and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ mesmerizing frontwoman Karen O. Now even pop superstars like Lady Gaga go earsplitting (an extended yell during “Killah” at her Mayhem Ball). And so does the North Carolina indie band Wednesday, led by Karly Hartzman, 28. On the group’s new album “Bleeds” (out Sept. 19), she delivers a wallop with the thrashing track “Wasp.”
“Sometimes a scream is more precise at communicating” than a lyric, she said. She doesn’t rehearse the vocal — it has to come out organically, and it’s therapeutic when it does: “I have to be in a very specific mind-set,” she said. “Screaming during our sets has become an extremely sacred part of my life.”
The TikTok star turned pop ingénue Addison Rae was in the studio with Charli XCX and A.G. Cook recording the “Von Dutch” remix, when Rae, 24, suddenly let it out. “One take. none of us knew it was coming,” Charli wrote on TikTok.
Welch’s initial release concept for her album was a video of her screaming into a hole. But because she is “trained in opera, not metal,” she said, she couldn’t safely do the vocals. They were dubbed by Arrow de Wilde, the lead singer of the band Starcrawler.
It resonated. “The main comment I got on a video of me screaming into the ground was ‘same,’” Welch, 39, said. “Anyone who is trying to get through their day whilst screaming internally, I hope they can come to my show and scream externally.”
Even onscreen, where the bloodcurdling wail is a cinematic staple, there are new dimensions. In the 2019 horror movie “Midsommar,” there was one sequence that its star, Florence Pugh, now 29, found “terrifying” to shoot, she later said: “The scene where we would all throw our guts out on the floor and war-cry and scream in each others’ faces.” But in that shared intensity, she felt supported, not alone and scared. “In this scene,” she said, “I found a true sisterhood.”
For Belflower, the “John Proctor” playwright, the cascading screams drew on many references: her own experience going to hardcore shows as an adult; the writings of Audre Lorde; a poem by Diane Seuss called “Cowpunk” that mentions performing in “The Crucible” — “giving me / license to go into fits / in front of the student body.”
Notably, Belflower’s play began its life on the college circuit, and that scene also brought the actresses and crowds a shiver of joy. When young women collectively spill their souls, she said, “You can tell how delicious it feels.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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