The #MeToo movement that burst into wide public currency in 2017 gave a name, and a hashtag, to the old and pervasive crimes of sexual assault and harassment, particularly of women and girls by men in positions of social power. “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a gripping new play by Kimberly Belflower currently on Broadway, may not be the first stage drama inspired by the movement; Suzie Miller’s legal drama “Prima Facie,” which played on Broadway in 2023, is just one other example. And it’s not entirely fair to fit Belflower’s meaty drama too neatly into a #MeToo box, any more than it’s fair to label Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”—the high-school reading list classic that “John Proctor” explicitly puts in its crosshairs—as merely an anti-McCarthyism screed, though the Red Scare of the 1950s was clearly Miller’s main inspiration.
Still, the palpable buzz of anger and terror, leavened by invigorating flashes of humor and tenderness, that courses through Belflower’s play feels bracingly new on the Broadway stage, and long overdue.
In dramatizing the events that unfold in a single classroom in a small-town Georgia high school, “John Proctor Is the Villain” depicts a quintet of teenage girls with remarkable acuity and clear-eyed sympathy. Most crucially, Belflower has an exquisite sensitivity not only to what these girls have in common but to what they don’t; her play is finely attuned to gradations of class, race, temperament and maturity among them, which give rise to eddies of drama around the main plotline.
The story follows two tracks, as a group of students are assigned to read and discuss Miller’s play by their charismatic teacher, Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert); meanwhile, they also try to form a young feminists’ club, with the nervous half-encouragement of a guidance counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs). Hovering around these parallel efforts are bits of offstage drama that eventually make their way to centerstage: One girl, Shelby (Sadie Sink), has been mysteriously absent for months, and the father of another girl, Ivy (Maggie Kuntz), has been accused of sexually harassing his secretary. Shelby’s eventual entrance brings these disparate threads together; she is also the one who makes the connections between a climate of predatory patriarchy and the events of “The Crucible.”
The case against Miller and his moral drama is that by holding up John Proctor as a flawed but noble hero speaking truth to power—that is, refusing to go along with the Salem witch trials of the 17th century—Miller blithely brushes past Proctor’s extramarital affair with young Abigail Williams, whose false accusations of witchcraft arise from her feeling spurned by him. Viewed from her own perspective as a 21st-century sexual assault survivor, Shelby is having none of that excuse. She zeroes in on the notion that John Proctor’s “good name” is the most sacred eternal value, acidly noting:
your name was made up
your ancestors were like
“ooh there are a bunch of blacksmiths in our family, better call ourselves Smith”
like that’s what names are
they’re fiction
but my body is a fact
I live inside of it
The insistence on grounding morality in the experience of real bodies is more than just the subject of speeches in Belflower’s play. In director Danya Taymor’s vivid production, it is literally embodied, as theater is uniquely qualified to do, in performances as uniformly excellent as any I’ve seen on Broadway. (Only “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s rangy family drama, running a block away from “John Proctor,” has a comparably stacked ensemble.)
Sink, famous for her role on “Stranger Things,” comes on so strong and sardonic in the recognizable role of “bad girl” that it would be easy to overlook the finer shadings she brings to the part, especially in her bonding with Amalia Yoo’s conflicted Raelynn. Morgan Scott and Nihar Duvvuri have a sweet rapport in a scene of relatively uncomplicated flirting. And as the adults in the room, Ebert and Griggs both have a youthfulness that makes them seem not so far from their own high school days, though this closeness is ultimately more queasy-making than innocent.
Upon reflection, it is Fina Strazza, as a meek hummingbird of a girl named Beth, who feels like the show’s quiet moral center. She doesn’t have the most lines, nor does she drive the plot, though the “feminism club” does seem to be chiefly her idea. As we watch Beth watching the play’s events unfold, and its battle lines drawn, we see a conscience in flux, and finally—no spoilers—heading toward decisive action.
Our own consciences can’t help but feel implicated. While many in the audience of “John Proctor Is the Villain” will have had direct experience of assault and harassment, the majority of us, like Beth, are witnesses, bystanders, confidants, would-be allies. It is an urgent question of the moment—and not just of the #MeToo movement—whether we will stand up against injustice wherever, and upon whomever, it lands.
