Broadway Review: JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN (Booth)

JOHN PROCTOR GETS CANCELLED

In an honors English classroom at a county high school in northeast Georgia, seven juniors are cracking open Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), a charismatic and respected teacher, leads the discussion. He poses a deceptively simple question: “Why are the girls dancing in the woods in the first scene of the play?” Possible answers emerge — boredom, hysteria, witchcraft — but by the end of Kimberly Belflower’s timely bold new play, John Proctor Is the Villain, now at the Booth, the answer becomes chillingly clear.

Gabriel Ebert, Molly Griggs

The cast

Long a staple of high school syllabi, Miller’s parable parallels the hysteria of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s to the McCarthy-era paranoia of the 1950s. The protagonist, John Proctor, is presented as a good, reputable tragic hero who, despite past sins, finds a sense of redemption and freedom as he is marched to the gallows, dying with his good name and reputation intact. But Belflower’s play detonates that interpretation. Set in the pre-#MeToo era, her script reexamines Proctor’s legacy and, in doing so, reclaims the narrative from the girls who were once dismissed as hysterical. When Shelby (Sadie Sink), one of Mr. Smith’s students, denounces John Proctor as a villain — “He’s a middle-aged man who has an affair with a teenager and later publicly calls her a whore” — much of the audience broke into applause. It was a moment of generational clarity and surprisingly unapologetic truth-telling.

Sadie Sink, Amalia Yoo

Morgan Scott, Nihar Divvuri

But Belflower doesn’t stop with literary critique. Her 100-minute play shocks by implicating the present, revealing uncomfortable parallels between Miller’s plot and contemporary classroom dynamics. Here too, inappropriate power imbalances emerge — more than one, in fact — and the fallout ripples across this one-stoplight town. With Taylor Swift lyrics echoing as a kind of generational anthem, the girls’ cries can no longer be dismissed as mere “teenage angst and hysteria.”

Nihar Divvuri, Hagan Oliveras

With several short scenes, Danya Taymor’s direction is as solid and visionary as her other Broadway production, The Outsiders. Her staging captures the claustrophobic realism of a high school with striking precision, thanks to the detailed set design by AMP and Teresa L. Williams. The classroom sits between a schoolyard and a locker-lined hallway, a liminal space where innocence erodes. Taymor ends each scene with a potent visual punctuation, bolstered by Natasha Katz and Hannah Wasileski’s evocative lighting. In the final moments, light and sound dissolve the walls of the school, thrusting us inside the characters’ minds as they burst free of old systems. Palmer Hefferan’s exhilarating sound design transforms the climax into something akin to a dance floor revolution — an invitation to liberation.

The cast

The cast

The cast delivers extraordinary performances across the board. Gabriel Ebert gives a flawless performance as the beloved teacher. His fall from grace is distressing, yet inevitable. Nihar Duvvuri is tender and sincere as Mason, the eager student slowly learning how to become a better man. His awkwardness is endearing and spot on. Hagan Oliveras brings surprising nuance to Lee, a would-be toxic male whose future feels uncertain but hopeful thanks to present lessons learned. Fina Strazza’s Beth is a revelation—her heartbreak, confusion, and resolve are palpable, particularly in her raw emotional eruptions that demand a reconsideration of what we label as hysteria. Molly Griggs shines as the conflicted school counselor, Ms. Gallagher, whose final moment of moral clarity drew cheers from the audience. Amalia Yoo (Raelynn) and Morgan Scott (Nell) offer grounded, moving portrayals of young women navigating the treacherous terrain of adolescence and authority. Maggie Kuntz brings depth to Ivy, who struggles to reconcile her loyalty with truth. And then there’s Sadie Sink’s Shelby—volatile, wounded, fiercely seeking a resolution. Sink plays her with such complexity that her cry of freedom feels like a collective release, a cathartic scream for every silenced voice before her.

Sadie Sink

The cast

At the end of the play, the audience jumped to their feet with jubilance. Yet, I could hardly move. I felt heartbroken. Disturbed that, in 2025, Belflower’s play reminds us that we are still reckoning with abuses of power, still redefining who gets to be believed, still judging characters without listening. John Proctor Is the Villain isn’t just a play—it’s an eye-opening confrontation. Like it or not, it’s one we can no longer put off.

Hagan Oliveras, Amalia Yoo

Sadie Sink, Amalia Yoo

photos by Julieta Cervantes

John Proctor Is the Villain
Booth Theatre, 222 W 45th St
ends on July 6, 2025 EXTENDED to August 31, 2025
for tickets, visit John Proctor

Gregory Fletcher is an author, a theater professor, a playwright, director, and stage manager. His craft book on playwriting is entitled Shorts and Briefs, and publishing credits include two YA novels (Other People’s Crazy, and Other People’s Drama), 2 novellas in the series Inclusive Bedtime Stories, 2 short stories in The Night Bazaar series, and several essays. Website, Facebook, Instagram.