John Proctor is the Villain
Opening Night: April 14, 2025
Theater: Booth Theatre
Website: johnproctoristhevillain.com
At a high school in a rural town in Georgia, an English class is studying The Crucible, but the students are more preoccupied with navigating young love, sex ed, and a few school scandals. As they delve into the American classic, the students begin to question the play’s perspective and the validity of naming John Proctor the show’s hero. With deep wells of passion and biting humor, John Proctor is the Villain is a new comedy from a major new American voice, capturing a generation in mid-transformation, running on pop music, optimism, and fury, and discovering that their future is not bound by the past.
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April 14, 2025
Taymor’s production is entirely sympathetic — to the characters and to the text. Though thrilling in its refusal to tamp down the show’s sometimes anarchic spirit, it does not ignore the dangers of abandon. Sink’s Shelby is beautifully positioned just at the spot where you can’t tell the difference between impulse and illness. The other girls stratify at in-between altitudes, from Scott’s firmly grounded Nell to Strazza’s high-pitched Beth.
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April 15, 2025
“John Proctor” executes sleight of hand very well — it begs us to reconsider the stories, events and people we’re told to trust. And Belflower gives this ensemble of actors wells of nuance to draw from, demonstrating a clear reverence for girlhood and its contradictions. The result is a “John Proctor” that handles the deadly serious and the deliriously silly with equal skill.
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April 14, 2025
There’s a moment in the play featuring a song by Lorde that elicited in me a dizzy gasp, then an eye-roll, then gave way to a moment of catharsis. In one gesture, it brilliantly tied up the play’s themes, aesthetics and narratives in a genuinely thrilling way, while getting me to consider a long-beloved favorite in a new light. John Proctor Is the Villain is much like that: a heady rush of glee, shock and understanding that takes you by surprise, and leaves you happy you came.
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April 14, 2025
Sink shines in using her physicality here. With more room for her and the other actors to play and relax, there’s potential for this production to be even better. But despite its shortcomings, it’s a stunner.
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April 14, 2025
“John Proctor Is the Villain” is the best play of the season, but even more significantly, it is a feminist masterpiece sure to become one of the defining works of art from and about the #MeToo era.
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April 14, 2025
Forget the villain — Belflower’s play hits as hard as it does because at its heart, fighting their way through one hell of a junior year, are the kind of heroes we actually need.
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April 14, 2025
But although themes and incidents from The Crucible reverberate throughout this work, you don’t need to be an expert on Miller’s drama to appreciate this one. Belflower’s first Broadway play is a galvanizing accomplishment all on its own. Remember her name.
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April 14, 2025
And as events unfold that could break a small town apart and almost certainly make national news, the characters stick to a sit-com style. That’s the play that Belflower wanted to write, and there’s something to be said about humor and lightness keeping the audience invested. I enjoyed myself. But while “John Proctor” is a good time, it is not a powerful one.
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April 14, 2025
It’s a testament to the subtle brilliance of Kimberly Belflower’s writing and Danya Tamor’s direction that you can hardly feel the 105-minute, no-intermission runtime of John Proctor Is the Villain.
READ THE REVIEWApril 14, 2025
Combined, John Proctor Is the Villain not only serves as a modern day recontextualization of the original play, but also a laugh-out-loud funny and deeply affecting examination of girlhood, feminism, the #MeToo movement, and the unstoppable power of female friendship. It is pure, heartbreaking perfection.
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April 14, 2025
“John Proctor” is written in short snippets of scenes, often the crutch of a novice playwright. Danya Taymor’s direction looks to punch up all these scene changes with flashy interludes that offer blinding shots of lightning (by Natasha Katz), ominous “Carmina Burana”-esque music (by Palmer Hefferan) and a black-lit classroom set (by Amp and Teresa L. Williams) that jiggles. It’s all about as subtle as Taymor’s direction of her cast, Ebert excluded.
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I cannot overpraise the talented cast and the snappy production, which moves like a bullet train and ends with a rebellious “Presentation Day” dance that sends shivers down your spine and tears down your cheeks.
READ THE REVIEWApril 14, 2025
I could be jaded about John Proctor is the Villain and nitpick how some major developments get revealed abruptly for plot’s sake, how the male characters are broadly drawn archetypes known all too well in both fiction and reality: the charming predator, the obvious creep, the well-meaning dolt. But John Proctor seems to know that. It also knows it’s a reclamation of age-old stories by intelligent, thoughtful young women whose views of themselves and others are nonetheless a work in progress.
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Sink does a wonderful job as the blunt-speaking Shelby, who has become an outcast among her friends, because she slept with the boyfriend of her best friend. She is reportedly the reason why this play wound up on Broadway – her star power – but it would be unfair to single her out without mentioning that best friend, Raelynn, portrayed by Amalia Yoo, the daughter of a preacher, who yearns to break out, and gets several delectable moments to do so. Fina Strazza is also fine as Beth Powell, a hilariously over-prepared student, as are Morgan Scott as newcomer Nell Shaw and Maggie Kuntz as Ivy Watkins.
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Lorde’s bouncy breakup song “Green Light” plays a major part in Raelynn and Shelby’s final literature project, an imagined conversation between two Crucible characters that morphs into their own version of a dance in the woods. It’s as kooky, joyful, and unsettling as you might think, and more ecstatic, cleansing, and liberating than you could ever imagine. That’s the scene that will live rent-free in your head.
READ THE REVIEWApril 14, 2025
This frenetic effort undercuts its provocative thesis with too-obvious situations and characters, telegraphing its messages with all the subtlety of a dance-heavy pop song. The play is geared to younger audiences, who, based on the wildly enthusiastic reactions at a recent preview performance, are clearly eating it up. It’s not surprising that it was extensively workshopped at college theater departments; on Broadway, it just seems juvenile.
READ THE REVIEWApril 14, 2025
In the end, John Proctor Is the Villain doesn’t feel like a show designed to goose youth-audience ticket sales; it feels like one that will engage and electrify a teenage audience, and plenty of adults too.
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April 14, 2025
The classroom has its own John Proctor, and believe me when I say his comeuppance – provided merely through the survival and unity of several underage girls – is among the most deeply satisfying scenes on Broadway this season.
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April 14, 2025
A new reading of The Crucible becomes both scary and liberating. Just as John Proctor is shown to be not the hero of Miller’s play (but rather, for Shelby, the much be-knighted Abigail Williams), so Mr. Smith is shown to be far from the supportive teacher we and the girls may have thought. From Lee’s menace and temper to shoulder-rubbing memories of Ivy’s “gross” dad, the evidence of patriarchal abuses in the everyday fabric of their lives become apparent to the young women.
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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.
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April 14, 2025
In a cultural climate where diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are under attack—and where critical engagement with race, gender, and power is being labeled “divisive”—this play feels not just timely but necessary.
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April 14, 2025
There are plenty more grown-up dramas on Broadway this spring, for those who fancy them. But there will always be a strong argument for shows that draw young people through the door — and that urge you to remember the first time injustice made you want to scream.
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