I wasn’t eager to see Kimberly Belflower’s new play John Proctor is the Villain. Though I understood and sympathized with the implied premise, it sounded a little too on the nose, perhaps a bit of feminist agitprop. (I dislike message plays, probably even more when I agree with their politics than when I don’t.)
But when the excellent reviews appeared a few days before I left for New York, I squeezed it into an already crowded schedule. (Three plays on Saturday? Why not?) And what a delightful surprise it turned out to be!
The title suggests this might be a reworking of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but it portrays a very different sort of crucible: a high school in rural Georgia in 2018, where a group of 11th grade girls are trying to form a feminism club in the wake of #MeToo.
