‘John Proctor Is the Villain' stars Sadie Sink and Fina Strazza, playwright Kimberly Belflower on reading ‘The Crucible' for the first time

Yahoo

22-05-2025

'I hadn't read it since college,' says playwright Kimberly Belflower of Arthur Miller's iconic play The Crucible. She drew inspiration for John Proctor Is the Villain from that 1953 drama and found herself compelled to reread the work — an allegory of the McCarthy era in American politics told through the lens of the Salem Witch Trials — in 2017 at the height of the #MeToo movement. A comment by Woody Allen comparing the movement to a 'witch hunt' sparked the idea to revisit Miller's play because she says her 'brain just thinks in fiction.' Belflower recently sat down with Gold Derby and other journalists at the 2025 Tony Awards Meet the Nominees press event.
Set in 2018 in a small town in Georgia, John Proctor Is the Villain centers on a group of high school juniors reading The Crucible in English class when accusations of sexual misconduct begin rippling through their community and hit extraordinary close to home. 'I don't know if I would have come to the same conclusions if I wasn't re-reading it in that exact moment in time,' Belflower observes of her reaction to The Crucible, adding, 'I love to revisit things over time because they have different resonances in our larger culture, but also in your own personal time.' She believes the play has been striking a chord with young theatergoers, especially young women, because 'it's a play that takes young girls seriously and recognizes them as the smart, multidimensional people that they are, and gives them the space to be vulnerable and messy and ugly and weird.'
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Belflower leaves the door open to reworking more Arthur Miller plays, too. 'There have been so many women playwrights who have been re-examining Miller. There's Eleanor Burgess' Wife of a Salesman. Most recently I saw the Bushwick Starr production of Julia May Jonas' A Woman Among Women, which is re-examining All My Sons," says Belflower. "Both of those, it legit makes me want to go back and reread a lot of Arthur Miller.'
Unlike Belflower, John Proctor featured actress Fina Strazza had never read Miller's play as a student. While she first dove into the text to prepare to star in Belflower's work, the new play didn't influence her take on the original material. The actress, who made her Broadway debut in Matilda at eight years old, told Gold Derby, 'Even though our show has a very assertive, direct title proclaiming that John Proctor is the villain, it's really just encouraging people to re-examine historical texts and allow different perspectives, and maybe open yourself up to the possibility that the people you think are heroes might have some flaws as well.' Strazza, who plays the unflinchingly thorough, star pupil Beth in the production, adds, 'I've re-read it a few times and found different heroes and different villains. I like to think that Elizabeth Proctor is the hero of that story.'
SEE Sadie Sink on her character's 'emotional rage' in 'John Proctor Is the Villain' and her reaction to 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow'
When Gold Derby interviewed Sadie Sink last month, the Stranger Things and The Whale actress recalled reading The Crucible in high school but admits, 'I was just trying to make it through the year honestly. It was mostly about getting it done.' The stage veteran of Annie and The Audience knew she wanted to return to the stage after her recent film and television work and said, "When John Proctor came along, it just felt like it was something that spoke to me but also could really matter and felt like really important work that needed to be shared on the biggest scale possible, and I didn't know that meant Broadway at the time.'
John Proctor Is the Villain is the most Tony-nominated Broadway play of the season with seven citations. In Gold Derby's latest odds, the drama ranks second in Best Play and could be a challenger to the frontrunner Oh, Mary! The play also ranks second in the all-important Best Director category for Danya Taymor, who pulled off an unexpected victory last year in the musical director category for her work on The Outsiders. Elsewhere, the play ranks third in Featured Actress for Strazza, Featured Actor for Gabriel Ebert, and Sound Design, and fourth for lead actress Sink and in Lighting Design.
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