Sadie Sink stars in 'John Proctor is the Villain' on Broadway

 

The description of John Proctor is the Villain, a new play by Kimberly Belflower at the Booth Theatre, sounded promising.  Five teenage girls in 2018 during the spring semester of their junior year in what the program describes as “a one stoplight town, northeast Georgia” are planning a feminist club before school and studying The Crucible in class.  They have a crush on their charismatic teacher, Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), who tells them the play’s main character, John Proctor, is one of the great heroes of American theatre.  But these girls, coming of age in the early stages of the #MeToo movement, see him differently.  He’s a villain for cheating on his wife with a teenage girl in their small Salem town in 1692.

The play, under Danya Taymor’s misguided direction, is being promoted as shining “a blazing spotlight on the eternal fight to claim your own narrative in a world that’s still stuck in the past.”  Sounds good, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not.  After a somewhat slow start to the 100-minute, intermission-less play any speck of subtly is abandoned.  And that was just fine with the audience, which was made up mostly of teenagers.  How did they afford orchestra seats on Broadway?

The show should have a warning like the one on a section of the Sunday Times that says For Kids Only.  This production should say For Teens Only.  They loved it, laughing heartily throughout at references that went right over my head.

They also went wild when Sadie Sink (in photo) made her dramatic entrance as Shelby.  It was clear Mr. Smith would turn out to be a parallel to Proctor but I had been wondering which of the four girls at the start of the play was going to turn out to be Abigail, the 17-year-old servant girl Proctor had an affair with and who then set in motion what became the infamous Salem witch trials.  Beth (Fina Strazza), Ivy (Maggie Kuntz), Nell (Morgan Scott) and Raelynn (Amalia Yoo) were too meek.  

I saw in the Playbill that Sink is a star of “Stranger Things,” a hit Netflix series I had never heard of until I received a press invite to the Broadway incarnation of the show, which I’m seeing next week.  

Any director of The Crucible must be extremely careful in staging the trial scene in which the girls accusing their fellow town folks of witchcraft become hysterical, screaming and pointing out birds flying around the courtroom that no one else can see.  Under Taymor’s directing the girls throw themselves wildly around the stage, laughing and screaming in a scene that is torturous to sit through. 

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 when Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was conducting a brutal witch hunt of his own aimed at exposing people he suspected of being communists infiltrating the government and elements of society such as the movie industry.  Now would be an excellent time to revive the play.  I hope the teenagers will show up for that to see the power of good theatre.