Soaring prices be damned, Broadway may nonetheless be experiencing some kind of youthquake. Following on the heels of a successful Rachel Zegler-led revival of Romeo and Juliet, which supposedly broke records for the greatest share of under-25 ticket buyers for a Broadway show, another non-musical from the theatrical canon has a gen Z update of sorts, also featuring a familiar yet youthful face. Sadie Sink, best known for Netflix’s Stranger Things, stars in John Proctor Is the Villain, which turns on the ubiquity of The Crucible in high school English classes.
But the show, from Broadway-debuting playwright Kimberly Belflower, is not a strict retelling of that Arthur Miller classic. Proctor takes place in a “one-stoplight town” in Georgia, where beloved teacher Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert) has just saved the high school’s nascent and endangered feminism club by agreeing to serve as its administration-handling sponsor. Overachieving and excitable Beth (Fina Strazza) is delighted, especially now that she’s befriended Nell (Morgan Scott), a recent transplant from Atlanta who’s even more up on intersectional-feminism discourse than she is. Two more founding members, Ivy (Maggie Kuntz) and Raelynn (Amalia Yoo), seem like they may be involved in the club more out of loyal friendship – which is just what Raelynn needs in the aftermath of a recent breakup.
The girls, along with boys Mason (Nihar Duvvuri) and Lee (Hagan Oliveras), also populate Mr Smith’s junior-year honors English course (for simplicity’s sake, and presumably to reflect the school’s smallness, the class has the unlikely low enrollment of just seven or eight students). In the midst of a unit on The Crucible, the class sees the return of their own quasi-harlot figure: Raelynn’s former bestie Shelby (Sink), who supposedly seduced Raelynn’s now-ex-boyfriend before disappearing from school for months on end. As the girls grapple with this awkwardness, it casts a new light on their interpretations of Miller’s allegory for red scare “witch-hunts” – a term that, as Mr Carter points out, has been used with increasing frequency lately.
Further developments are best left for discovery; even with plenty of portent roiling below the chipper banter of earnest teenagers, preview audiences still audibly gasped at certain shifts in relationship dynamics. The play is set in 2018, during a period of both reckoning and hot-potato caution over rising #MeToo accusations, but it’s not pitched as a Crucible for Our Times (not least because it may already count as a period piece). Instead, Belflower captures both the giddiness and devastation of girls starting to get a fuller picture of the world and their place in it, for better and worse.
Though some of the performers are still quite young – Sink has played characters older than Shelby, but not by much – their embodiment of adolescent nerves can nonetheless come across like Saturday Night Live cast members playing teenagers in sketches. That’s not a hello-fellow-kids attack on their authenticity, though. Quite the opposite: it’s an acknowledgment of how funny and endearing the cast is, even or especially in their more outsized mannerisms. Strazza is especially grabby as a 16-year-old whose combination of book smarts and small-town inexperience make her read, at times, like an awkward elementary-schooler, and Scott shows off ace comic timing. While the actors and Belflower don’t mock characters’ sincerity, the writing does poke some good-natured fun at the endless asterisking that comes with young people attempting to do right by their progressive attitudes. Eventually, genuine anger and frustration pop through.
Some theater buffs may blanch at a play with so little subtext; befitting the impulsiveness of youth, many characters eventually blurt out what they’re thinking. (Take a look at the play’s title for some hints on where those thoughts are going.) There ultimately isn’t much moral ambiguity in play, either. And even those more open to what could be described as a thornier and more intellectualized Degrassi marathon might resist some of the details – like how nearly every pop-music reference made by these high school juniors happens to sync up almost perfectly with the easily scannable tastes of countless decades-older thirtysomethings. (It’s not surprising or unbelievable that these girls love Taylor Swift and Lorde in 2018, of course, but isn’t it also a little easy?)
Yet as much as the play feels informed by pop music, teen movies and TV soaps (and a millennial’s attempt to see through gen Z eyes), it also carries an impressive theatrical charge. Belflower’s dialogue flows beautifully even when it tests the boundaries of realism, with well-placed laugh lines that relieve more and more tension as the show goes on; it’s a thrill to watch the characters find their voices. Some key later moments in this barreling 105-minute one-act, especially its extended climax, might have been eye-rolling in another medium. In a theatrical context, though, this material feels more thoughtful about the potentially cathartic nature of performance, and what it means for that performance to cross between the private and the public. In the end, John Proctor Is the Villain doesn’t feel like a show designed to goose youth-audience ticket sales; it feels like one that will engage and electrify a teenage audience, and plenty of adults too.
