An earlier version of this story misquoted playwright Kimberly Belflower. Recounting a conversation she had with her father about “The Crucible,” Belflower recalled that it was she, not he, who said that “John Proctor is the villain.” The article has been corrected.
This particular high school is in rural Georgia, where budget cuts, curtailed sex education, and nervousness about race and gender have students, faculty and parents on edge. When Carter Smith, the school’s popular English teacher, tries to teach Miller’s drama about the 1692 Salem witch trials, controversy seems sure to spark. And it does, but not in the way one might expect.
The character of Smith presents Miller’s character John Proctor as a courageous dissenter who stands firm against the hysteria and false accusations of the trials. But some of the female students in the class see Proctor very differently after they learn that this 30-something farmer had an affair with his wife’s teenage maid, Abigail Williams. One student even declares, “John Proctor is clearly the villain.”
In 2017, Belflower says, “I’d finished my MFA in theater at the University of Texas, and I’d moved back to my family in rural North Carolina to consider my next move. That fall was when the first wave of #MeToo accusations came out, and I obsessively read every article about them. For the first time, I had a vocabulary for things that had happened to me and my friends when we were younger. Those things sucked, but we felt like nothing could be done about it, so we weren’t going to talk about it. And now we could talk about it.
“When people started calling the #MeToo movement a witch hunt, that made me think of Miller’s play. My father is a farmer who raises grass-fed beef, but when I told him the story of ‘The Crucible,’ I said, ‘John Proctor is the villain,’ and that phrase stuck with me.”
Belflower insists that she has a profound respect for Miller, that she would never have spent so much time adapting his play if she didn’t value it. When she reread “The Crucible,” she marveled at the beauty of the language and the structural engineering that created the “pressure-cooker situations” that every dramatist desires. What Belflower objected to was the way Miller’s play is usually taught and staged — as if John Proctor were admirable and Abigail Williams unforgivable.
“When people teach ‘The Crucible’ or present it onstage,” Belflower says, “Abigail is often dehumanized and given far more power than teenage girls ever had at that time. It’s true that she falsely accuses innocent people, and it’s true that John Proctor stands up against a corrupt court. Yet he never acknowledges the damage he’s done to Abigail. I don’t know if there’s really a villain in ‘The Crucible.’ Everyone is too complicated. My title is more of an intentional provocation.”
As the students in the modern high school discuss Miller's play, they build a bridge from their own time period to Miller’s 1950s and Proctor’s 1690s by quoting feminist lines from songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Lorde.
“I love pop music,” says Belflower, “and I know how those songs can get into your bones and shape who you are. Our culture has a tendency to [dismiss] what teenage girls love. I wanted to have a play where Taylor Swift was as legitimate a voice as Arthur Miller.”
If you go
John Proctor Is the Villain
Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. 202-332-3300. studiotheatre.org.
Dates: Through June 12.
Prices: $50-$95.