urban excavations

John Proctor Is the Villain
Featuring Nihar Duvvuri, Gabriel Ebert, Molly Griggs, Maggie Kuntz, Hagan Oliveras, Morgan Scott, Sadie Sink, Fina Strazza, and Amalia Yoo
Booth Theatre
March 20, 2025 – July 6, 2025 [extended]
production site

Arthur Miller made a run at using the Salem Witch Trials as social metaphor in 1953’s The Crucible, dramatizing the excitable teenage girls historical involved in the repressive Salem fever dream of gender oppression, resonating within the era of McCarthy communist witch hunts in U.S. government, industry, film, theater.

Other works have returned to the literal world of the characters of Miller’s play and in history to reflect upon social possibilities and limitations of the group of girls. Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem presents a descent of one of the persecuted women in Salem and the legacy of the history and Arthur Miller’s lens; The Good John Proctor by Talene Monahon looks at the Salem Witch Trials both as American history and Miller’s view using the trials to reflect on the McCarthy hearings of his own era, providing very specific details and dangers of girlhood and womanhood in Puritan America, never allowing us to forget that Becky is 12 years old.

Belflower joins this legacy of theatrical works that engage with history and with one another, at least reflecting back on Miller’s play and refracting it. In John Proctor Is the Villain, she uses the play a group of high school students are reading (as all American high school students read it) to examine gender politics and just existing as a girl, as a woman in the 2018 of the play.

In a sex education unit taught by Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert) in a high school in a small town Georgia, for a few minutes a day, a set of high school girls explore saying no and staying safe, despite the fact that most of these facts are not news to them. In this class, Smith thinks reading The Crucible makes sense as “a great play about a great hero” and the political allegory theme we all learn in high school, but he is not conscious at all of the other dynamics of oppression and sexual violence infusing the work. The girls of the sex education unit became interested in feminism and their desire to start a club, seek out a faculty sponsor, and raise these issues spark the initial action of the play.

Raelynn (Amalia Yoo) is a preacher’s daughter with an ex-boyfriend who wants to make up. The serious student Nell (Morgan Scott) thinks Smith is inspiring; Ivy (Maggie Kuntz) loves to think about Smith in sweatpants; a few boys including Mason (Nihar Duvvuri) find their way to the club to flesh out their college prep resume or meet girls. A new school counselor Bailey (Molly Griggs) we learn is a graduate of the school herself and hears the girls’ frustrations when Smith pushes back against forming the club. We seem him chafe at receiving any resistance at all from the girls — he is fine with adoration, it appears, but a genuine difference of opinion flummoxes even angers him. The adult women watching this man in action and this nuanced performance by Ebert all shuddered in recognition.

The girls talk about a missing member of their group Shelby (Sadie Sink) who somehow betrayed Raelynn, which causes a rift in their life long friendship. Shelby, we learn has been absent from school for a few months, and in the intervening time Raelynn connected more deeply to other girls, and new connections were made. The circle, it feels for a time, has closed to exclude Shelby. Until she reveals what kept her away from school and a few other secrets are exposed.

Playwright Belflower and directory Danya Taymor craft a world in which these adolescents have sharply varying politics (you can see the right wing folks emerging) in the form of similarly hormonal adolescent girls. Dance breaks, group yells, joint sighs. The work incorporated The Crucible, comments on it, unpacks the interpretive legacy (those girls are crazy, the men are heroes), but doesn’t denigrate the work entirely. The play and the characters’ lives illustrate that The Crucible doesn’t focus on or seriously analyze the witch hunt attacks on women and yet uses the structures of the play in her own, with final scene reveals of the criminal actor.

The tone of the work — the glow of the stage as illuminated by Natasha Katz’s gorgeous and chaotic lighting (reflecting the gorgeous and chaotic actions and emotions of the girls at the center of the action of this work), set in a classroom at once functional and a little decrepit by Teresa L. Williams, and sound and original music by Palmer Hefferan — keep us on edge, poised for the next revelation, prepared to jump at the next dance break.

© Martha Wade Steketee (April 14, 2025)

Playwright | Kimberly Belflower
Director | Danya Taymor
Set Design | Amp Ft. + Teresa L. Willams
Costume Design | Sarah Laux
Lighting Design | Natasha Katz
Sound Design| Palmer Hefferan