New York — “John Proctor Is the Villain,” the title of Kimberly Belflower’s Tony-nominated play, has a robust polemical ring. Earlier than seeing the work, I assumed that the writer was choosing a battle with Arthur Miller, whose play “The Crucible” immortalized the historic determine of John Proctor as a conscience-stricken hero.

Belflower started the play because the #MeToo motion was gaining momentum, however she has an excessive amount of humor and sympathy to jot down a programmatic screed. Her drama isn’t solely far more refined; it’s also an excellent deal extra shocking. The manufacturing on the Sales space Theatre, directed by Danya Taymor and starring Sadie Sink from Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” casts a mysterious spell that I’m nonetheless processing a month later.

Set in a cheery highschool classroom in small city Georgia, the play tracks college students as they deal with Miller’s “The Crucible” with their charismatic trainer, Mr. Smith (performed to perfection by Gabriel Ebert), through the spring semester of their junior yr. Because the 5 younger ladies within the class mirror on Miller’s play concerning the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Mass., an allegory for the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy period, they start to depart from the usual interpretation that minimizes the experiences of the feminine characters.

Don’t be fooled by the varsity setting: There’s nothing tutorial about “John Proctor Is the Villain.” The scholars, who embrace two teenage boys, are too spirited to fall according to the obtained knowledge of their trainer, whose personal character comes beneath vital scrutiny together with that of Miller’s Proctor as the scholars start sharing personal experiences that make clear the hypocrisies of the grownup world. (A faculty counselor, nonetheless discovering her ft, has her arms full.)

Sadie Sink in “John Proctor Is the Villain.”

(Julieta Cervantes)

Sink performs Shelby, the novel within the class with a repute for hassle. She’s been mysteriously absent, however when she returns in a blaze of purple hair and rebellious fury, she challenges the opposite women to rethink not solely what they find out about literature but in addition about what they perceive about themselves.

The play reaches a climax that, echoing feverish occasions in “The Crucible,” explodes in a burst of interpretive dancing to Lorde’s “Green Light.” Belief me, regardless of what number of occasions you’ve heard this hit single, you’ve by no means skilled it fairly like this. The impact, which spoke to a distinct a part of my mind than is often accessed within the theater, communicated one thing profound about gender politics — and never in mental abstractions however within the liberated motion of defiant our bodies and souls.

The concept for the play got here to Belflower shortly after she obtained her MFA from the College of Texas at Austin in 2017. That summer time she learn Stacy Schiff’s e-book “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” which expanded the historic context that Miller’s play selectively attracts on.

“I’m always interested in things that broaden the lens that we’re already given,” Belflower stated throughout an interview in Midtown Manhattan, not removed from the theater. “A lot of Shelby’s arguments about the girls in Miller’s play having PTSD from the assaults that were so rampant in the town were things that I learned from that book. I was just blown away by the way [Schiff] reframed a moment that I thought I understood.”

However one thing much more momentous was about to shift the playwright’s body of reference. “That fall, the tidal wave of #MeToo broke,” Belflower stated, pointing to the allegations of sexual misconduct towards Harvey Weinstein that have been printed within the New York Instances and the New Yorker in October 2017. “Like a lot of people I know, especially women, I was really consumed by every new allegation. I started looking back at my own adolescence and young adulthood with a new vocabulary. And I was like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t just like a weird moment. That was this. That guy wasn’t just creepy.’ ”

Sadie Sink, left, and Amalia Yoo in “John Proctor Is the Villain.”

(Julieta Cervantes)

A BBC interview with Woody Allen, during which he referred to as the #MeToo motion a witch hunt, was a eureka second for Belflower. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always tried to make sense of the world around me through the books I read and the culture I consume,” she stated. “And so I reread ‘The Crucible,’ which is like the most famous work of art about witch hunts.”

Returning to Miller’s traditional at this cultural turning level left her with a starkly completely different impression of John Proctor. The imperfect protagonist of “The Crucible” takes a heroic stand towards the mass hysteria that’s turning his Salem neighbors viciously towards each other. However his personal adulterous misdeeds and patriarchal presumptions make him weak to critiques that reach past the scope of Miller’s drama.

“We talked a lot in our rehearsal process that multiple things can be true,” Belflower stated. “I think John Proctor is a good man and does all of these incredible moral things. But this other thing is also true. He was awful to every woman in the play.”

Belflower, a Georgia native who teaches at Emory College, has a fast thoughts and a gracious Southern method. There was no hint of the ideologue as she harked again to the origins of “John Proctor Is the Villain.”

“Because I had been looking back on my own formative years through the lens of #MeToo and because I first read ‘The Crucible’ in high school, I was like, ‘Wow, I am 30 and I don’t recognize my life and the world around me through this movement. What would it be like to be coming of age at this moment? What would it be like to be a 16-year-old?’ So that’s kind of how it all swirled around.”

“John Proctor,” which has obtained quite a few faculty productions, is the uncommon case of a campus hit turning into a New York sensation. As Belflower was commenting on her play’s uncommon path to Broadway, Taymor arrived to hitch the dialog. It was simply after 9 a.m., and the in-demand director was on a good schedule. A day of auditions for the tour of “The Outsiders,” the Tony-winning musical that earned her a Tony Award for her path, awaited her.

Though she was catapulted into the highlight for a musical, Taymor, who occurs to be the niece of Tony-winning director Julie Taymor, has a formidable observe report of collaborating with boldly revolutionary playwrights, amongst them Will Arbery, Jeremy O. Harris, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu and Martyna Majok.

“The majority of my career has been working on new plays by new writers,” she stated. The one lifeless playwright I’ve ever directed is Beckett, however I attempted to deal with ‘Endgame’ like a brand new play too. I even handled ‘The Outsiders’ like a brand new play. A part of the rationale the musical made sense for me is that I’m a rhythm-focused director. I take into consideration the cadence of a specific author’s type, and the best way a play ought to really feel within the mouths and within the our bodies of the performers.”

This heightened acoustical sense drew Taymor to Belflower’s play. “Kimberly’s rhythm on the page is so clear,” she stated. “The line breaks, the beats, the pauses — to me, that is like music. I do tell the cast of ‘John Proctor’ that they’re a nine-piece orchestra and that there are all these different variations on how they play together.”

Commissioned by Farm Theater’s School Collaboration Undertaking and developed with Centre School, Rollins School and Furman College, “John Proctor” was a part of the 2019 Ojai Playwrights Convention’s New Works Pageant. Instances tradition critic Mary McNamara wrote a column about how this play about John Proctor and #MeToo cured her of her aversion to theatrical works-in-progress.

Director Danya Taymor, left, and playwright Kimberly Belflower.

(Michaelah Reynolds)

Earlier than the pandemic, Belflower and Taymor had mentioned working collectively on the play’s first manufacturing. Schedules didn’t align, after which the COVID-19 shutdown occurred. “John Proctor” had its world premiere at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2022. Taymor assumed that she had missed her likelihood. However then Sink, who was trying to do one thing on stage, learn the play and alternative knocked once more.

“Sadie, her people and the producers were like, ‘We think Danya Taymor would be great for this,’ ” Belflower recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, yeah, me too!’ So it was like witchcraft.”

It might be exhausting to think about a extra well-tuned solid than the one Taymor assembled. Sink, Ebert and Fina Strazza, who performs Beth, the eager-beaver of the category, all obtained Tony nominations. Sink is up for lead actress in a play, in a efficiency of fiery vulnerability. Nevertheless it’s a real ensemble manufacturing.

“Sadie read this play and activated this moment of its life,” Taymor stated. “She wanted to lend her power to something new on Broadway. Sadie is incredible as an actor and a company leader and someone who is just so humble and grounded in the group.”

Though posing a revisionist problem to “The Crucible,” “John Proctor” obtained the blessing of the Arthur Miller property. It’s a testomony to the playwright’s lengthy historical past of defending free speech and inventive freedom.

“The agent who represents the estate read the play and really got what I was going for,” Belflower stated. “My play is not going to knock ‘The Crucible’ off its pedestal. It’s a great play. I love ‘The Crucible.’ I love Arthur Miller, and my play is not going to do anything to his legacy. If you’re in the canon and the work is strong and belongs there, then it should be able to withstand questioning and prodding and widening. So I think that the estate has really smart people.”

“The Crucible” is especially resonant at a time when self-censorship is on the rise in America and dissent might be grounds for deportation. I’ll admit that I felt barely protecting of the play till I noticed “John Proctor.” Belflower isn’t out to cancel “The Crucible.” She making an attempt to deepen the dialog with an undisputed American traditional.

“I’ve been asked if this is my Arthur Miller hit piece,” Belflower stated. “Why would I want to spend years of my life trying to make something in conversation with something that I hate? That sounds miserable.”

The anti-woke brigade naturally assumes that that is simply one other play about poisonous white masculinity. However to that reductive objection, Belflower has a well mannered retort: “OK, but look at the history.”

Lorde performs on the Glastonbury Pageant in Somerset, England, in 2022.

(Scott Garfitt / Related Press)

“Some of the characters who do the worst things in the play are the characters with these redeeming qualities that you fall in love with,” Taymor stated. “What do we do when it’s not a ‘monster’? Some people want to reject the question. Some are willing to wrestle with it.”

“John Proctor” might sound like a relentlessly disputatious drama, nevertheless it’s a deeply emotional work. I discovered myself overcome with tears on the finish, not realizing how the play had such a devastating impact on me. The concepts which can be debated signify just one degree of the theatrical expertise. On one other airplane is the lived actuality of the younger ladies who’re studying painful truths about sexual politics as they arrive of age in a world that’s nonetheless liable to low cost them.

Their maturing our bodies are conserving the rating. And right here is the place New Zealand pop star Lorde is available in. “Green Light” fuels the play’s climax. Sink’s Shelby and one other scholar (performed by Amalia Yoo) current their class mission deconstructing the oppressive social forces driving Abigail and the opposite ladies of “The Crucible” to carry out forbidden rituals within the woods. The dance sequence that caps off the report, giving expression to centuries of feminine trauma and insurrection, takes us right into a realm past phrases that doubtless would have terrorized the anxious males of 1692 Salem.

How did they acquire Lorde’s permission? “Oh my God, it was cosmic,” Taymor stated. “Kimberly really wrote the most amazing letter to her.”

“My publisher was approaching her publisher, and I was sure my letter won’t even make it to her but I wrote it just in case,” Belflower stated. “It was never like they dance to a song. It was always that song. And so I was like, ‘This is what your song means to me. This is what your song means to these characters. This is the moment in the play that it happens. This is what they’re doing. This is what I feel you’re doing. This is why it has to be. And this is what this play is. And I’m legit, I promise.’ ”

In a case of recreation recognizing recreation, Lorde stated sure. And the consequence is without doubt one of the most shocking and transferring Broadway dramas in current reminiscence.