There are three things I will say to convince you that John Proctor is the Villain is worth seeing while it’s at the Huntington. One: everybody in the audience under 30 seemed to love it. Two: every guy in the audience whose wife clearly dragged him there (especially the old guys) seemed very grumpy as they were leaving. Three: it made me forget I had a headache.
I saw the show on the matinee after its opening night performance. Coincidentally, this was the night after the Advocate’s very own Berlin/Berlin party, as well as my own 21st birthday celebration. Could I have planned this better? Yes. But I follow through on my promises, especially ones that result in a very kind comped ticket, so I shelled out for a Lyft (thanks, MBTA), threw back a Caffè Nero double espresso, and waded through hordes of elderlies to get to my exceedingly well-placed seat in the Calderwood Pavilion.
John Proctor is the Villain follows a high school honors lit class as it reads The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Meanwhile, in the high school’s small Appalachian Georgia “one-stoplight town,” Crucible-esque “witch-hunt” things are happening. This is all explicitly related to the #MeToo movement, which was gathering steam in 2018, when the show takes place and when it was written. This synopsis may seem liable to cringe—I thought Kimberly Belflower’s script managed to pull it off much better than expected.
The near-perfectly paced and thriftily peopled one-act held my attention from pretty much start to finish. (Side note: I think nearly all plays should be one-acts, unless you’re Shakespeare. Don’t give me an excuse to catch my breath.) Belflower’s script was the balance of funny and tragic that literally everybody seems to be trying to get right these days. But she actually mostly managed to pull it off. Some of that is probably her continued experience as a high school teacher, because high schools themselves are the mix of funny and tragic in question. I don’t want to spoil too many of the one-liners, but I’ll give you the Harvard-est one: “When colleges look at my application, they’ll either feel sorry for me or think I’m, like, a horse.”
The seven “teenagers” in the cast of nine almost flawlessly represent what it was like to be in high school in 2018. I did the math, actually, and assuming these actors just graduated from their various BFAs, they actually were juniors in high school in the spring of 2018, just like their characters. (I was a freshman.) They looked as much like high schoolers as 23-year-olds can look like high schoolers. I found Victoria Omoregie’s performance as Nell the most continually believable, but the clear stars were Isabel Van Natta as Shelby and Haley Wong as Raelynn. I can’t tell whether I cringed a bit at Jules Talbot’s performance as Beth because I was a Beth in high school, but since I can’t tell, I won’t hold it against her. The guys—Benjamin Izaak as Lee and Maanav Aryan Goyal as Mason—over-acted a bit, especially in the beginning, but what high school guy isn’t constantly chewing the scenery, when you think about it? And Japhet Balaban as Mr. Smith was exactly right.
Margot Bordelon’s direction was wonderfully unobtrusive and uncontrived, with the exception of which classroom chairs people chose to sit in—in all of high school, I only sat in the one same seat in each classroom, and I don’t know anyone who didn’t do the same. I understand the staging vision, but it irked me a bit. The worst part of the whole production to me was the Appalachian accents and their extreme variability within a class that supposedly has been together since kindergarten. Some actors were drawling it up and some were talking like every New England would-be frat-bro at my high school.
The most likely political criticism for this play would be that it’s a teenager’s idea of what feminism is. But its greatest strength, in my opinion, is that it’s a teenager’s idea of what feminism is. The teenage girl characters are all on the internet, but they’re still trying to be a “Christian feminist club,” only sort of flirting with sex positivity. When push comes to shove, they can’t necessarily reconcile their hypothetical feminism with actual men they know. They want to be respected, and they want to be feminists, and they want to get into college. They criticize some men for doing the bare minimum, but praise others for less. They let men tear them apart, then reconcile with each other, but they never interrogate why men could have had that effect on them in the first place.
But increasingly, I’m starting to think that art doesn’t necessarily need to save the world to represent it for what it is. And though I grew up in a more “liberal” area than the one in which the play takes place (we had several feminist clubs that the guidance counselor never tried to discourage, instead just pushing us towards a blue-no-matter-who philosophy), we had exactly the same problems. The feminists dated the most problematic guys. The smartest people had the biggest blind spots. Charisma reigned. I think this play puts Kimberly Belflower up there with Sarah DeLappe in understanding how hypocritical one can be when one is 17. That doesn’t mean that person will be a bad person forever, although that fate is a possibility that should be taken seriously.
I experienced real actual catharsis while watching this play, especially in the last scene that I don’t dare spoil. Like, maybe I finally let go of hating my 17-year-old self for no good reason. I felt like I saw life represented without feeling extremely depressed, which is rare. Please go see this play. It’s $25 for students.
2025