It is 2018, spring semester, junior year, at Helen County High, the only high school “in a one-stoplight town”—that may soon acquire a second stoplight, we learn—in northeast Georgia.
In the opening scene of Kimberly Belflower’s play, John Proctor Is the Villain (Booth Theatre, to July 6), Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who at first seems to be the ideal teacher of young minds—comically ideal almost, so right-on and empathetic, bouncy, and fun—is taking his class through the definition of sex.
The entire class recites: “The biologic character or quality that distinguishes male and female from one another as expressed by analysis of the person’s gonadal, morphologic, chromosomal, and hormonal characteristics.”
Or: “The physiologic and psychological processes within a person that prompt behavior related to procreation or erotic pleasure.”
As this #MeToo-era play unfolds, both definitions prove hopelessly inadequate in defining what happened when it comes to the sexual relationships and abuses that may or may not have occurred between characters we both meet and never see.
Those real-life relationships and secrets come to be filtered and mirrored in the class’ reading of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. The title of Belflower’s play refers to the persuasive re-reading, and putting on moral trial, of the play’s protagonist by teenage lead character Shelby Holcomb (Sadie Sink). Just as in Miller’s play—and its source material of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692—soon in the Georgia of 2018 we are in a territory of rumors, accusations, whispering, and judgement.
To get the most from the play brush up on The Crucible and the music of Taylor Swift and Lorde, both of which play key roles in the show (there’s a very funny bit about Swift’s relationship with John Mayer).
The cast and director Danya Taymor craft a simmering stage of very teenage drama, humor, friendships, alliances, gossip, resentments, and ultimately collective power. The group is keen—despite official discouragement—to form a feminism club to discuss issues that mean something to them. Various hometown mysteries complicate that group’s formation and meeting. Shelby has been absent for a long time, but no one knows why; her sleeping with classmate Lee Turner (Hagan Oliveras) has torpedoed her friendship with onetime bestie Raelynn (Amalia Yoo). Lee himself seems to be a menacing misogynist in (eager) training.
Nell Shaw (an excellent Morgan Scott), a Black teenager from Atlanta, is new to town, and a spiky voice of reason and certainty whose fledgling romance with the dorky Mason (equally excellent Nihar Duvvuri) provides a standout moment in the play, until Mason—in his efforts to be an ally—shows himself to not be.
The unseen father of Ivy (Maggie Kuntz) is accused of sexual harassment, while Beth (a nuanced performance by Fina Strazza) slowly comes to terms with undealt-with-hurt in her own life, as she tries to get the feminism club up and running. Bailey Gallagher (Molly Griggs) is a guidance counselor only a few years older than the girls, and at first resistant to their mission for change—and the truth.
Shelby’s re-analysis of The Crucible and John Proctor make for not simply a skillful and convincing piece of literary analysis, but also reveals to the group how shaky their view of the world is—particularly one that places such harsh judgments on women, while setting them up in opposition to each other. Watching them make tentative, truer friendships with each other and seeing the world anew is moving.
A new reading of The Crucible becomes both scary and liberating. Just as John Proctor is shown to be not the hero of Miller’s play (but rather, for Shelby, the much be-knighted Abigail Williams), so Mr. Smith is shown to be far from the supportive teacher we and the girls may have thought. From Lee’s menace and temper to shoulder-rubbing memories of Ivy’s “gross” dad, the evidence of patriarchal abuses in the everyday fabric of their lives become apparent to the young women.
What can they do? What should they do? How about, the play suggests, actively challenging the repressive established order.
“John Proctor is one of the great heroes of the American theatre,” Mr. Smith says.
“I don’t think he is. I think he sucks,” says Shelby.
Her mission to speak a new truth to old power doesn’t end there, and the play ends in a stunning mash-up of music (Lorde’s “Green Light”) and movement that unites the women on stage. It is a pulsating, fierce statement in Georgia in 2018 and also one across time and reality and fiction—a female-created dance of both defiance and an insistence upon true freedom. Or, at least in the meaningfully frozen final image of one character, hopefully it is.
