How to describe what I heard from the orchestra? It happened one night at the Booth Theater during a preview performance of John Proctor Is the Villain. Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo), the preacher’s daughter, was delivering the final part of her monologue: “One day, maybe, the new world we were promised will actually be new. One day, maybe the men in charge won’t be in charge anymore.” The scene is wrenching; the audience held its breath. I wiped at my cheeks and caught a string of snot with my sleeve. And then––Hahah!
I am not the hall monitor of human feeling. But I know this much: That wasn’t a punchline, even if the play, for all its grief and fury, is often very funny. John Proctor Is the Villain treads heavy terrain. It’s about high school girls in small-town Georgia who start a feminism club at the height of the MeToo movement. They do it partly to pad their transcripts, partly to fill the gaps in their abstinence-only education, but mostly to make sense of the world around them as stories of sexual violence saturate the news cycle. Early on, one girl’s father is accused of assaulting his secretary. Her classmate Shelby (Sadie Sink), newly returned after a mysterious four-month absence, isn’t surprised.
That dry, skeletal laugh. From somewhere on my left, or maybe the rear. Or the balcony. Or my own throat. Who could say? The dark conscripted us all. Men? Not in charge? it said. Please. More than anything, it seemed to reflect the national mood: weary, doomed. Laughter as the mildest outburst, born of the sense that any outburst is futile.
“I can say that I have seen the state of the world and that I am not optimistic any population can return from some of the lines people have collectively crossed,” Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in his essay on living with despair. “I do not think that there’s a newer and better world that can be built with the knowledge of a genocidal campaign being carried out on a live stream for a year and a half and counting. The world at large is seemingly fine with what we are witnessing, and I think that suggests the irreversible unwellness of a people, of a society.”
The backlash against feminism has intensified in recent years. During Donald Trump’s first term, MeToo went mainstream, forcing a national reckoning with sexual violence. It was then, in 2017, that Kimberly Belflower, a playwright and educator from Appalachian Georgia, began writing John Proctor. By 2022, the momentum had stalled. Amber Heard’s near-total loss in a defamation suit against Johnny Depp marked a broader conservative pushback, cemented by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Now, with Trump back in office, that pushback has only grown more brazen. The new administration is staffed with men accused of sexual misconduct, including the president. The arts have followed suit: Kevin Spacey, among the first high-profile men called out by MeToo, received a “special lifetime achievement award” in Cannes this year. What can you do but laugh?
Which makes John Proctor’s success all the more remarkable. The play led this year’s Tony nominations—including Best Play, Best Direction for Danya Taymor, and Best Performance nominations for Sink, Gabriel Ebert, and Fina Strazza—even as it breaks from the bleak, reactionary mood of the moment. Tina Fey has signed on to produce a film adaptation. Unlike much recent art, it isn’t about Hollywood’s flop era or the ultra-rich behaving badly. Instead, Belflower takes us back to 2018, when MeToo’s momentum made speaking out against powerful men feel newly possible. When Raelynn’s “new world” still felt within reach. John Proctor rages against the reality it lays bare, but insists on imagining something better: a future conjured by its teen heroines, whose ideals—and whose language—Belflower honors with rare sincerity. Her characters shriek, giggle, and gossip. They speak in memes, pop songs, and celebrity lore—a “girly” internet vernacular often dismissed as frivolous and anti-intellectual, but that Belflower recognizes as a way of processing the world. Mine, certainly. Maybe yours, too.
For Belflower, pop culture is a transformative force, shaping how her characters see themselves and their circumstances, expanding their sense of what’s possible. In the girls’ feminism club, music, film, and literature become prisms for thornier questions: Can you obsess over a boy like Bella Swan and still call yourself a feminist? Is Taylor Swift really a figure of female empowerment? These debates spill into the classroom, where the characters are reading The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the Salem Witch Trials and allegory for McCarthyism. In Miller’s telling, John Proctor is a tragic hero—a flawed but principled man, undone by his “affair” with his teenage servant and later redeemed in death. Even their beloved English teacher Mr. Smith (Ebert), who calls his class a “safe space,” defends Proctor’s integrity.
But as the girls grapple with questions of power and consent, Miller’s narrative begins to feel suspect. Maybe Proctor isn’t a “beacon of integrity” at all, but a selfish, abusive man. Maybe The Crucible’s female characters aren’t hysterical or manipulative, but traumatized—a reading informed by Stacy Schiff’s The Witches, whose account of the Salem Witch Trials inspired Belflower. As the play unfolds, the girls’ feminism club evolves into a kind of consciousness-raising circle; they learn to recognize their lived experience as political, and that recognition sparks an emotional release. Soon they interrupt, scream, break decorum. In one of the play’s most affecting scenes, Shelby and Raelynn collapse into a manic fit of laughter. “They laugh for way, way longer than you think they should,” Belflower writes in her stage directions. She continues:
they might hold hands, or lean heads against shoulders
the audience should absolutely get a little uncomfortable
from how long they laugh
if you think they're laughing long enough, they almost definitely probably aren't
the laughter might turn a little manic in an edge-of-tears way
but still
they laugh
Did Belflower imagine her play opening in a different cultural moment? Perhaps she pictured John Proctor staged after MeToo had achieved real, lasting change. The irony is unmistakable: a work conceived in a season of hope, now performed in the backlash that very hope provoked. Haha. Is it funny, or tragic, or absurd that we once believed in a better, braver world? That some still do? “Are we even allowed to be laughing?” Shelby asks. “I mean,” Raelynn says, “I think that’s up to you.”
And yet. By dramatizing what it feels like to encounter art and be changed by it, John Proctor becomes the kind of play that does exactly that: It moves its audience, unsettles them, and sends them back into the world different than they were before. Even knowing what the years ahead would hold for the girls onstage, and the real ones in the audience, I believed they could still imagine something new. Something better.
I saw the play twice. Each time, I cried all the way home.