\n<\/p>\n
For much of her high school career, Sadie Sink took her lessons inside an old lifeguard shack that had been converted into a schoolhouse for the child actors on the set of \u201cStranger Things.\u201d When the cast wasn\u2019t battling Demogorgons in a parallel dimension, \u201ceveryone was studying different things at the same time,\u201d Sink told me recently of her experience in the shack. \u201cIt was chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that hit Netflix series nearing its end, and as Sink plotted her next move, she read the script for Kimberly Belflower\u2019s \u201cJohn Proctor Is the Villain,\u201d a play about teenagers reading \u201cThe Crucible,\u201d together, in a more typical school setting \u2014 though one that hides troubles of its own.<\/p>\n
On a February afternoon, Sink sat at a desk in a rehearsal space in Manhattan\u2019s Flatiron district, in a simulated classroom that had a timeless quality. There were pencil grooves atop the melamine desks, tennis balls at the bottom of the chair legs. On a blackboard in the back, cryptic remnants of a lesson: \u201cSEX IS POWER\u201d was scrawled in chalk in uppercase letters, and below that, in lowercase, the words \u201cchanges nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Just as \u201cThe Crucible,\u201d Arthur Miller\u2019s 1953 classic, used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, \u201cJohn Proctor Is the Villain\u201d uses \u201cThe Crucible\u201d to interrogate the complexity of growing up in the #MeToo era. In an English class in Appalachia in 2018, the students are studying Miller\u2019s play just as that movement against sexual violence tears through their one-stoplight town, breaches the doors of their school and collides with their reading of the play itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The result is a prismatic revelation: \u201cJohn Proctor Is the Villain\u201d is, at turns, a literary critique, a tender bildungsroman, a loopy comedy, a study of rural America and a Taylor Swift appreciation post. This month, it becomes a Broadway show, directed by the Tony Award-winning Danya Taymor.<\/p>\n
Inside the rehearsal space, Taymor lit a stick of incense. Cast members \u2014 playing five high school girls and two boys \u2014 worked through a scene in which a meeting of the fledgling feminist club explodes into accusations against the men in their lives: a teacher, a student, the mayor. In each case, the students\u2019 personal entanglements test their commitment to their ideals.<\/p>\n
Mid-scene, Sink burst through the classroom door, the pages of her script rippling in her hand. Her character has returned to school after a conspicuous absence only to find that, despite all these revelations of male bad behavior, it is she who has been made the scapegoat. Sink\u2019s eyes poked around the class, widening at her friends\u2019 hypocrisy. Then she pinned one of the male students, Mason (Nihar Duvvuri), in her sights and sliced into his sweet exterior: \u201cThank you for being an ally<\/em>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n They took the scene three times, with the actors testing out different kinetic impulses. Taymor paused after each iteration to ask: \u201cThoughts?\u201d She wanted to know if they preferred to sit or lie on the couch, whether the doors to the classroom ought to stay open or closed. And how their understanding of the text was shifting in the room.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first scene in the play where the word \u2018rape\u2019 is used,\u201d Duvvuri realized.<\/p>\n These characters can confidently discuss, as one puts it, how \u201cwhite feminism is monopolizing the mainstream body positivity movement,\u201d but they remain somewhat na\u00efve to how power operates in their own lives. Now the glow of childhood has been rudely extinguished, and they must fumble through the dark toward a collective social consciousness.<\/p>\n Taymor advised her actors to resist the urge to make all of the lightbulbs appear to go off right away. \u201cI know there\u2019s discomfort because you care for your characters so much, but sometimes they don\u2019t know yet,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re on the longest journey of discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n A coven is a gathering of three or more witches, and it took the combined powers of Sink, 22, Taymor, 36, and Belflower, 37, to bring the play to the Booth Theater, where it will begin previews on March 20. (Sink also appears this month in \u201cO\u2019Dessa,\u201d<\/a> a musical movie coming to Hulu.) Over breakfast before that day\u2019s rehearsal, they convened to tell the story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The spark was lit in October 2017, when Woody Allen compared<\/a> the mounting sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein to a \u201cwitch hunt.\u201d Belflower decided to reread \u201cThe Crucible.\u201d She was struck by how John Proctor \u2014 long venerated as the tragic hero in this paradigmatic tale of American persecution \u2014 was also a menace who conducts an \u201caffair\u201d with Abigail Williams, a teenager working in his home.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, this is a teenage girl and a grown-ass man,<\/em>\u201d Belflower said. She began to envision a play of her own, one titled after her central revelation: John Proctor is the villain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She wrote the script in 2018, with the help of a grant that commissions plays featuring younger characters and produces them at college drama departments. It has since been licensed<\/a> for dozens of nonprofessional high school and college productions. \u201cSo, I kind of thought that was all this play was going to do,\u201d Belflower said.<\/p>\n Instead, \u201cJohn Proctor Is the Villain\u201d went on to well-received runs in Washington and Boston, and eventually made its way into Sink\u2019s hands. She was drawn to the role of Shelby Holcomb, a traumatized girl accused of smearing a good man\u2019s name, not unlike Miller\u2019s Abigail.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen she comes in, it\u2019s like a tornado,\u201d Sink said of Shelby. \u201cThere\u2019s a heaviness to her, masked by a lot of energy and a really fast mouth.\u201d With Belflower and Taymor, Sink put together a workshop in Manhattan. \u201cEvery character felt like a real teenager,\u201d she said, neither dumbed down nor overly mature. \u201cAnd that is so rare to find.\u201d<\/p>\n SINK WAS 10<\/strong> when she made her Broadway debut<\/a>, portraying various orphans in a 2012 revival of \u201cAnnie\u201d before being promoted to play the title character. At 14, she joined the second season of the fantasy series and \u201980s pastiche \u201cStranger Things,\u201d which began streaming in October 2017 \u2014 just as the abuse and misogyny of the entertainment industry was erupting into public view. \u201cIt was a scary feeling,\u201d Sink said. \u201cIt was an intense time, being so young and not really able to wrap my head around it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the years since, she has emerged as somewhat of an avatar for her generation\u2019s pop-feminist imagination, one that delights in remixing the cultural relics of the past. In \u201cStranger Things,\u201d as the skeptical and scrappy Max, she gave Kate Bush\u2019s 1985 weirdo feminist anthem \u201cRunning Up That Hill (A Deal With God)\u201d a new life<\/a> on TikTok and the U.S. singles chart.<\/p>\n In 2021, Taylor Swift picked her to star in \u201cAll Too Well: The Short Film,\u201d<\/a> a music video set to a devastating expanded version of Swift\u2019s 2012 power ballad about the end of a Hollywood love affair. As Swift ripped up her song\u2019s foundation to show the grief and betrayal beneath its floorboards, Sink embodied the expanding feminist consciousness of the world\u2019s biggest pop star, crystallizing the moment she reclaimed her music for herself<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now, in \u201cJohn Proctor,\u201d that spirit of cultural revision and renewal comes to Broadway. \u201cThe play is so much about cycles, and about how systems of power perpetuate themselves,\u201d Belflower said.<\/p>\n Though she wrote the play as #MeToo was developing, it\u2019s now a period piece. But it also illuminates a generation contending with accumulated decades \u2014 centuries \u2014 of American cultural messaging. The characters make references to John Mayer and \u201cTwilight,\u201d Joan Didion and Daniel Day-Lewis, Walt Whitman and SparkNotes. <\/p>\n Alongside \u201cThe Crucible,\u201d Belflower read the historian Stacy Schiff\u2019s 2015 book, \u201cThe Witches,\u201d which documents how Salem\u2019s young women suffered PTSD from rampant violence. She quotes Schiff in the play\u2019s epigraph, writing on how the Salem woman, though \u201cofficially voiceless,\u201d made herself heard: \u201cIn legal records she hectors, shrieks, quarrels, scolds, rants, rails, tattles, and spits.\u201d<\/p>\n Belflower\u2019s text gives that insight a modern spin, transforming stigmatized feminine vocal tics into the raw creative materials of girls who must fight to be heard. On the page, her style takes on the cadence of a text message, its urgent lines freed from punctuation. As her characters challenge adult interpretations \u2014 whether of \u201cThe Crucible,\u201d or of Lorde\u2019s \u201cGreen Light\u201d \u2014 they stage a proxy battle for the right to be the narrators of their own lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is something enduring about this play, and about the teenage experience itself. Taymor claimed her Tony last year for directing the musical adaptation of \u201cThe Outsiders,\u201d another period piece about the trials of youth. \u201cBeing a teenager \u2014 there\u2019s something about it that never changes,\u201d Taymor said. \u201cFor anyone who has been alive in America, this place will feel like home.\u201d<\/p>\n Belflower wrote the play during the first Trump administration, and \u201cJohn Proctor\u201d will now have its biggest stage at its second coming. Callback auditions for the Broadway production fell on Election Day 2024. Actors vying for the role of Raelynn, Shelby\u2019s on-again, off-again best friend, had to read a monologue in which she says: \u201cone day \/ maybe \/ the new world we were promised \/ will actually be new \/ one day \/ maybe \/ the men in charge won\u2019t be in charge anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo hear that text,\u201d said Taymor, \u201cover and over that day \u2014 it was so, so intense.\u201d<\/p>\n The #MeToo movement may not have destroyed gendered power structures in the entertainment industry, but \u201cit shifted some things inside, internally,\u201d Taymor said. It opened a lane of expression for discussing experiences that were previously suppressed, and allowed her and other women storytellers to recast their own lives from a new perspective.<\/p>\n Back in the rehearsal room, Sink, as Shelby, entered the classroom just after the remaining members of the feminist club emitted a spontaneous collective scream \u2014 as if Shelby had been drawn to the room by the howl of her wolf pack. In one iteration of the scene, Fina Strazza, playing the studious Beth, tested out wailing into the cushion of the classroom couch. Afterward, Belflower had a note: \u201cDon\u2019t you dare stifle that scream.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n