Sadie Sink heads back to school, this time on Broadway

Khaleej Times

13-03-2025

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 Stranger Things. When the cast wasn't battling Demogorgons in a parallel dimension, 'everyone was studying different things at the same time,' Sink said recently of her experience in the shack. 'It was chaos.'
With that hit Netflix series nearing its end, and as Sink plotted her next move, she read the script for Kimberly Belflower's John Proctor Is the Villain, a play about teenagers reading The Crucible, together, in a more typical school setting — though one that hides troubles of its own.
On a February afternoon, Sink sat at a desk in a rehearsal space in Manhattan's 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.
Just as The Crucible, Arthur Miller's 1953 classic, used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, John Proctor Is the Villain uses The Crucible to interrogate the complexity of growing up in the #MeToo era. In an English class in Appalachia in 2018, the students are studying Miller's 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.
The result is a prismatic revelation: John Proctor Is the Villain 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.
Inside the rehearsal space, Taymor lit a stick of palo santo. Cast members — playing five high school girls and two boys — 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' personal entanglements test their commitment to their ideals.
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's eyes poked around the class, widening at her friends' hypocrisy. Then she pinned one of the male students, Mason (Nihar Duvvuri), in her sights and sliced into his sweet exterior: 'Thank you for being an ally,' she said.
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 March 20. (Sink also appears this month in O'Dessa, a musical movie coming to Hulu.)
Belflower wrote the script for John Proctor Is the Villain in 2018, with the help of a grant from the Farm Theater's College Collaboration program, which commissions plays featuring younger characters and produces them at college drama departments. It has since been licensed for dozens of nonprofessional high school and college productions. 'So, I kind of thought that was all this play was going to do,' Belflower said.
Instead, it went on to well-received runs in Washington and Boston, and eventually made its way into Sink's hands. She was drawn to the role of Shelby Holcomb, a traumatised girl accused of smearing a good man's name, not unlike Miller's Abigail.
'When she comes in, it's like a tornado,' Sink said of Shelby. 'There's a heaviness to her, masked by a lot of energy and a really fast mouth.' With Belflower and Taymor, Sink put together a workshop in Manhattan. 'Every character felt like a real teenager,' she said, neither dumbed down nor overly mature. 'And that is so rare to find.'
Sink was 10 when she made her Broadway debut, portraying various orphans in a 2012 revival of Annie before being promoted to play the title character. At 14, she joined the second season of the fantasy series and '80s pastiche Stranger Things, which began streaming in October 2017 — just as the abuse and misogyny of the entertainment industry was erupting into public view. 'It was a scary feeling,' Sink said. 'It was an intense time, being so young and not really able to wrap my head around it.'
In the years since, she has emerged as somewhat of an avatar for her generation's pop-feminist imagination, one that delights in remixing the cultural relics of the past. In Stranger Things, as the skeptical and scrappy Max, she gave Kate Bush's 1985 weirdo feminist anthem Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) a new life on TikTok and the US singles chart.
In 2021, Taylor Swift picked her to star in All Too Well: The Short Film, a music video set to a devastating expanded version of Swift's 2012 power ballad about the end of a Hollywood love affair. As Swift ripped up her song's foundation to show the grief and betrayal beneath its floorboards, Sink embodied the expanding feminist consciousness of the world's biggest pop star, crystallising the moment she reclaimed her music for herself.
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 — 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: 'Don't you dare stifle that scream.'