Set at the Peak of the #MeToo Movement, ‘John Proctor is the Villain’ Touches on Territory Laid Out in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’

At first blush, Carter Smith, the oldest character in Kimberly Belflower’s new play, “John Proctor is the Villain,” is the kind of high school English teacher you only wish you’d had. Played by Gabriel Ebert, a Tony Award-winning actor who has often downplayed his lanky good looks, Mr. Smith engages the students in his junior-year honors class with both contagious enthusiasm and empathy, encouraging self-expression and mutual respect while easily enforcing discipline.He is, in other words, a little too good to be true. Elaborating on this point would require revealing a key twist in this cleverly constructed, thoroughly engrossing one-act piece, which marks Ms. Belflower’s Broadway debut. The play’s title refers to the most prominent male character in “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s classic retelling of the Salem witch trials, inspired by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt when he was a senator in the 1940s and early ’50s.In Miller’s work, you may remember, Proctor, who’s based on a real-life figure, bravely defies accusations first posed by a gaggle of teenage girls led by his former mistress, Abigail Williams — described in the stage directions as “a strikingly beautiful girl … with an endless capacity for dissembling” — and pays the ultimate price for his courage. Mr. Smith concedes, as Miller’s portrait did, that Proctor is a “flawed man,” but declares him “one of the great heroes of the American theater.”One of Mr. Smith’s pupils, a girl named Shelby Holcomb, begs to differ. Portrayed here by Sadie Sink — a former child actress on Broadway, now famous for playing another high schooler on a popular TV series, “Stranger Things” — Shelby doesn’t turn up until a few scenes into the play; it’s explained that she has missed several months due to unspecified but, it’s suggested, trauma-inducing circumstances.Sadie Sink in ‘John Proctor is the Villain.’ Julieta CervantesShelby’s insistence that Proctor is the real heavy in “Crucible” jibes with a pattern of developments that have been established in “Villain,” set in 2018, at the peak of the #MeToo movement, in small-town Georgia, where Ms. Belflower herself grew up. By the time Shelby arrives, the father of one of her friends has been accused of sexual assault, and we’ve seen a boy in Mr. Smith’s class become aggressive with another girl, someone he had dated for years and then betrayed.It could be argued that we need another account of toxic masculinity right now like a fish needs a bicycle. I’ll admit the play’s title and plot summary made me suspect I was in store for yet another supposedly feminist study in which women were presented as victims, with boys and men behaving badly; the men in this case would include a beloved character and, by extension, the beloved playwright who adapted him. Yet the relationship in Miller’s play between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, a married man and an orphaned teenager he hires as a servant, has long been ripe for re-exploration, and has surely received it in real-life classrooms in recent decades. Ms. Belflower emphasizes this contemporary context repeatedly, making canny references, for instance, to pop stars — among them Taylor Swift, who showcased Ms. Sink in “All Too Well: The Short Film,” adapted from Ms. Swift’s song. The playwright also stops short of demonizing the boys, at least, in “Villain”: Of the two male students we meet, Lee Turner, that aforementioned aggressor, certainly acts like a jerk, while Mason Adams, something of a slacker, can talk like one. But both are also clearly struggling, as guys their age do, to juggle raging hormones with rising pressures.There’s also a sense, especially with Mason, that they’re trying, in their fashion, to do the right thing. Under Danya Taymor’s sensitive direction, Nihar Duvvuri underlines this, giving the character a sweetly awkward quality, while Hagan Oliveras encourages at least some compassion for Lee by emphasizing his character’s emotional immaturity. Not surprisingly, though, Shelby and her female classmates are drawn more fully and empathically, giving Ms. Taymor and the immensely appealing young actresses more opportunity to win our hearts — and to have fun in the process. In addition to Ms. Sink’s precocious, powerfully nuanced Shelby, there’s Beth Powell, an earnest bookworm who loves F. Scott Fitzgerald and the singers Lorde and Harry Styles, played with touching authenticity by an adorable Fina Strazza.Morgan Scott gets some of the funniest lines as Nell Shaw, the new kid in town, whose feisty precocity belies some insecurity. Nell, who has moved from Atlanta, confides at one point that she has overheard her mother speaking with her aunt on the phone: “She’s like, ‘Nell’s just a lot.’ ‘Nell is so dramatic these days.’ ‘Nell is too much for me right now.’ … What they really mean is just, ‘Nell’s a girl.’”More than any play or film I’ve seen in a while, in fact, “Villain” captures that mix of exuberance and angst particular to adolescent girls. In one memorable scene, several of these characters begin screaming together; it’s an obvious reference to their 17th-century counterparts in “Crucible,” yet what Ms. Belflower is charting isn’t feigned or mob-induced hysteria but rather a genuine, almost primal release of anxiety, frustration, and yearning.The final passage in “John Proctor is the Villain,” which incorporates a single by one of the previously referenced pop artists, is similarly intense and exhilarating. Whatever your take on “The Crucible,” #MeToo, or any of the ongoing debates concerning women’s roles and responsibilities, to themselves and others, you’ll likely leave the theater feeling more bewitched than bothered.

Set at the Peak of the #MeToo Movement, ‘John Proctor is the Villain’ Touches on Territory Laid Out in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’

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