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.
If the boys feel less fully-drawn than the girls in this play, well—welcome to the club, guys.
I felt the spirit of the play as soon as I entered the Booth Theater and took my seat to the accompaniment of a playlist of female empowerment anthems. My friends and family know I can identify Bach more readily than Beyoncé, so I pulled out my phone and asked Shazam what I was listening to. Beyoncé, of course. Lizzo, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Janelle Monáe, Florence and the Machine. No Lorde yet, though her “Green Light” turns out to be pivotal in helping the girls withstand this particular crucible.
The crucible these girls inhabit—a high school in rural Georgia at the beginning of #MeToo—may be less terrifying than a 17th century Puritan village on the American frontier, where the stakes are life and death, both literal and spiritual.
But is it really less terrifying? These girls face their own forms of social death: slut-shaming, silencing, the destruction of friendships and reputations. What I called empowerment anthems just now? I could just as well have called them expressions of women’s rage.
These girls aren’t living in Salem, but they are navigating their own trial by fire, and Belflower draws us into their inner lives, which erupt, like those of Miller’s girls, into fits of laughter and screaming, into wild dancing. The very sound of the play—how these girls speak, laugh, scream—captures just how adolescent girls are working their way through their love, their fear, and their anger.
At one point, former friends Shelby and Raelynn meet to talk about the sexual betrayal that has torn them apart. When Raelynn asks her friend if the sex was good enough to be worth wearing the Town Slut badge, they begin to laugh. This awkward laughter slowly builds into a long explosion of something unhinged, a release of unbearable feelings under the surface.
As I read the published script later, I saw that Belflower had written in the stage directions that we should feel uncomfortable witnessing this hysterical laughter: “they laugh for way longer than you think they should … if you think they’re laughing long enough, they almost definitely probably aren’t.” Belflower’s own language here—”almost definitely probably”—with its stacked up adverbs, is precisely the play’s voice: nominally tentative, but in reality insistent and purposeful.
This apparently tentative adolescent voice becomes a tool of discovery and resistance in class discussions of The Crucible when Shelby questions the heroism of John Proctor. Miller’s hero speaks in the language of moral abstractions, where a word can carry a kind of sacred weight (“Because it is my name!”).
Shelby and her classmates see this as posturing: what happens to the women in the story—Proctor’s pregnant and now abandoned wife, and his accuser, who only turned on him after he sexually used and dropped her? Is a man’s name more significant than a woman’s body?
Mr. Smith, the girls’ charismatic English teacher, is perhaps a little too defensive when Proctor’s heroism is questioned. The girls are learning to navigate a morally complex world where the men they trust—teachers, fathers, boyfriends—may not be all they seem to be. The people they live with and care about can do terrible things, sometimes to them. Their growing awareness of this moral ambiguity complicates their lives even while helping them learn how to navigate an imperfect world.
By the end of the play, these girls can no longer be contained by their English teacher or by an administration threatened by their feminism club. As Lorde sings in “Green Light,” the play’s true anthem: “I hear sounds in my mind, brand new sounds in my mind …”
The final scene does not give us The Crucible‘s noble sacrifice. Rather, these girls will go on living, enraged and uncontained, as they dance their way into an unknown future—not as victims or martyrs, but as young women who have claimed their voices and won’t give them back.
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