Review: ‘John Proctor is the Villain' on Broadway reinvents ‘The Crucible' for today

Chicago Tribune

15-04-2025

NEW YORK — Every high-school kid knows Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible,' the allegorical play seemingly about the Salem witch trials but really fighting the chill of McCarthyism. In that play sits John Proctor, a righteous American farmer who finds his earlier affair with a dangerous girl named Abigail makes him vulnerable to her lies, as used in service of those who will take him down.
Miller intended Proctor as a flawed hero, maybe a man not unlike himself. But the lively, moralistic new show starring Sadie Sink ('Stranger Things') on Broadway undermines Miller's 1953 view of the world by applying contemporary, anti-patriarchal thinking. The point of the mostly melodramatic play, set in a contemporary high school classroom in a small Georgia town, is right there in the title: 'John Proctor is the Villain.'
Part of the problem, of course, is that once you understand that Sink's complicated Georgia high school girl, Shelby Holcomb, is a version of Abigail and her seemingly super-cool English teacher, Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert) has similarities with Proctor, you know where the play is going. Miller was interested in complexity and ambiguity; playwright Kimberly Belflower is on more of a single-minded quest: to recalibrate the dominant view of a play so seeded in the U.S. education curriculum and maybe even get a place alongside it in the future.
This isn't the first play to go after Miller's work. Eleanor Burgess' 'Wife of a Salesman' attempted something similar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I confess some resistance to this trend, because it feels unfair to take the work of a great American writer from a previous generation, strip it of moral ambiguity and judge it by the values of today while also taking advantage of Miller's intellectual property to bring in an audience. I find myself thinking, 'Then write your own play.' But it's a free country, of course. Thanks in part to Miller.
Still, there's no denying the vivacity of director Dana Taymor's highly entertaining production, a textbook example of how high-quality direction can ignite a mostly predictable script. It's a very deftly cast show and Taymor keeps the classroom stakes consistently elevated. I can't imagine this play ever getting a better production.
Thus the smart, vulnerable girls in Mr. Smith's classroom, variously played by Maggie Kuntz, Morgan Scott, Amalia Yoo, and especially the superb Fina Strazza are filled with adolescent life and energy. Bellflower adds a second adult in school counselor Bailey Gallagher (Molly Griggs), a character the audience can enjoy seeing slowly awake to the villain hiding in their midst.
Much effort here has been made to make all of the classroom dialogue feel real and successfully so. Sink is strikingly dynamic and aptly disruptive, which is the whole point of her Shelby.
As in most such shows, the actors are considerably older than their characters, and you can tell. But within that constraint, you get a real sense of what can happen in a classroom when teenage students become fully engaged with a work of literature. As soon as you get one look at the bro-ish face of Hagan Oliveras, who plays a clueless boyfriend, you know he is going to be a problem for his girlfriend and you will not be wrong, especially since the only other young guy is a more sympathetic kid of color, played by Nihar Duvvuri. But this is a show about empowering girls, fundamentally, and it does its job for what surely is going to be its most appreciative audience.
Belflower grew up in a small Georgia town herself and she knows how to put such a community truthfully on stage, even if she no longer reflects its dominant politics or social mores. She makes extraordinary efforts here to reflect how high school kids think and talk outside Hollywood backlots, something that deserves appreciation.
I wish 'John Proctor' made its very fair point about girls forging their own narratives with more ambivalence and less certitude, especially in its less-than-credible last few minutes, which you could subtitle 'Abigail's revenge,' or even that it gave Miller some consideration of how things have changed over time, not just from the witch trials to the 1950s but from then to now. But then when you're all about making sure folks now see an old hero as a new villain, that does not serve your purpose.