‘John Proctor Is the Villain’

In John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s angry, funny, and excellent new play, both the surprise and the real potency of the title lie in how quickly its moment zips by — the speed with which the phrase bubbles up as an idea and, perhaps even more crucially, with which it’s dismissed. In an 11th-grade-English classroom in rural Georgia, seven students are reading The Crucible with their very cool teacher, Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert, demonstrating his genius for subtly terrifying characters who seem like such sweet, fun, sensitive guys). Mr. Smith is the type who charms kids no matter where they are on the sexual-awakening continuum: The willowy, would-be-worldly Ivy (Maggie Kuntz) and smart, straight-shooting transfer student Nell (Morgan Scott) titter about his sweatpants when he’s out of the room while the anxious, straight-A addict Beth (Fina Strazza) wriggles in protest: “You guys, stop! He’s, like, my friend.” A student named Shelby Holcomb (Sadie Sink, taking a hiatus from Hawkins and giving a body blow of a performance) isn’t here for this conversation. She has been mysteriously away from school for months, and the girls’ rambunctious banter slows when her name is mentioned — after all, she was lifelong best friends with Raelynn (Amalia Yoo) until she hooked up with Raelynn’s boyfriend, Lee (Hagan Oliveras). “She’s a Lot,” says Raelynn guardedly after Shelby crashes back through the classroom doors. “Yeah …,” says Beth. “She kind of always has been.”

Shelby’s a-Lot-ness blazes into full focus a few scenes later as Mr. Smith tries to wrangle a conversation about Arthur Miller. “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!,” the slightly derpy but increasingly curious Mason (Nihar Duvvuri) reads aloud at his teacher’s request, and the students thrill at John Proctor’s celebrated words. All except Shelby. “I don’t get it … Your name is literally just a word that someone else gave to you,” she insists. “ … That’s what names are: They’re fiction. But my body is a fact. I live inside of it … Abigail was a human being … but John Proctor is just obsessed with this made-up thing … He’s just pretending, like, I dunno, like, his fiction is more important than her fact? I mean, that sucks. Like, John Proctor is clearly the villain, right?”

Bless the director, Danya Taymor, for paying close heed to Belflower’s note on pacing. “The page count might be high,” writes the playwright, “but this play moves very, very quickly. If it’s over 1:45-1:50ish, you’re going too slow.” Taymor keeps things crackling (it comes in at one hour and 40 minutes), and so does Sink’s energy, visibly rattling around inside her like so many hydrogen atoms ready to combust. Shelby, upon her return, has brought something perilous and explosive back into her old classroom, her old group of friends, her old life — something they’re not ready for and that she herself is still struggling to articulate. It starts to find voice in her critique of The Crucible, but Mr. Smith leaps to shut it down. “John Proctor is one of the great heroes of the American theater,” he declares — defensively, decisively. In that moment, I wondered how many audience members were sharing a flashback: My own 11th-grade teacher used practically the same words. We loved that play. We loved Proctor’s speech. He had flaws, yes, but he was an honorable man, a good man. We were taught the same thing about Robert E. Lee.

Along with a dexterity for shaping character out of the casual contours of contemporary speech, Belflower also has a keen sense of balance: She hangs just enough of her play on The Crucible but not too much. This isn’t a riff or a rewrite. Miller’s text functions as a kind of flint — a surface on which Belflower’s characters, especially Shelby, can create sparks, but the fire that grows belongs to them. They are the living, wrestling souls, contending with more than any teenager should have to and just as much as many do. They are the bodies to Proctor’s name — and they’ve got plenty to puzzle and menace them even before he and his fiction enter the picture. “Oh no …,” gasps Beth, checking her phone over lunch. “Oh my God. You guys. Oh my God.” One of the sharp, sad jokes of John Proctor is that Beth and her friends have been attempting to start a “feminism club” (to “spread awareness, foster dialogue, and ignite change,” its founder recites with college-application zeal), but life’s everyday misogynies keep getting in the way. On this particular day, the girls’ phones all buzz with a panicked text from Ivy: Her rich, successful father has been accused by a former employee. “She’s saying that, like, stuff happened between them. I mean, not good stuff — in, like, a not-good way,” quavers Beth, drained of her usual fervor.

With the sharpest of needles, Belflower starts to stitch real catastrophes, real moral and emotional tangles, into the fabric of the students’ days, throwing the play they’re reading into uneasy new relief. “I don’t know if I feel good about doing this anymore …,” Ivy tells her friends, close to tears, as she tries to back out of feminism club in the wake of her father’s disgrace. “I mean, these are people’s dads, you know?” It’s true, though not in the way poor Ivy means it. They’re also people’s boyfriends and people’s teachers. As Lee, surly and entitled, tries to force his way back into Raelynn’s graces, and as, most shattering of all, more accusations emerge, this time concerning Mr. Smith, Belflower’s characters find themselves in their own crucible, boiling, thrashing, trying to keep their heads above the molten surface. “I know I’m supposed to believe women, like, no matter what,” says Beth, shaken and adrift after their teacher has been implicated. “But I just … I know him, you know? He’s, like, the best person I know. He’s the best person …”

In a way, John Proctor Is the Villain forms a powerful companion piece for Bess Wohl’s trenchant Liberation. One closes as the other opens; one bears witness to a group of women 50 years ago, using every tool they had to try to carve out a better world for themselves and their daughters, literal and otherwise. The other turns its sights on the daughters of their daughters — a half-century of “progress” behind them, intersectionality in their vocabularies and Taylor Swift and Lorde on their iPhones — who are still confronting, even internalizing, base-level daily assumptions of their own less-ness, their own fundamental inferiority in the ranks of humanity. Belflower’s play is full of zing and zest, but there’s also heartbreak in every moment of watching the wonderful Yoo’s Raelynn — at once wary, thoughtful, and seized with doubt — attempt to construct some sense of self-worth after seven years of dating a boy like Lee and a lifetime of living with a mother who “taught me how to do my face before she taught me about my period.” Every moment in which Beth checks herself; or Ivy retreats; or the well-meaning, impeccably southern school counselor, Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs), encourages the girls to “choose [their] words with care” because “feminism is just — people are sensitive right now,” it’s a familiar and horrible wrench. As NASA is ordered to remove references to women in leadership roles from its websites, and as — wildly, dystopically — even the word women appears on a list of terms the current administration is attempting to wipe from federal materials, how can we not quake and seethe along with Shelby? “Maybe she didn’t ‘go’ crazy because she’s always been crazy,” quips Raelynn. Or maybe crazy is the way any awakening soul looks and feels in such a mad and brutal world. Forget the villain — Belflower’s play hits as hard as it does because at its heart, fighting their way through one hell of a junior year, are the kind of heroes we actually need.

John Proctor Is the Villain is at the Booth Theatre.