For much of her high school career, Sadie Sink took her lessons inside an old lifeguard shack that had been converted into a schoolhouse for the child actors on the set of “Stranger Things.” When the cast wasn’t battling Demogorgons in a parallel dimension, “everyone was studying different things at the same time,” Sink told me recently of her experience in the shack. “It was chaos.”
With that hit Netflix series nearing its end, and as Sink plotted her next move, she read the script for Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a play about teenagers reading “The Crucible,” together, in a more typical school setting — though one that hides troubles of its own.
On a February afternoon, Sink sat at a desk in a rehearsal space in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, in a simulated classroom that had a timeless quality. There were pencil grooves atop the melamine desks, tennis balls at the bottom of the chair legs. On a blackboard in the back, cryptic remnants of a lesson: “SEX IS POWER” was scrawled in chalk in uppercase letters, and below that, in lowercase, the words “changes nothing.”
Just as “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic, used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, “John Proctor Is the Villain” uses “The Crucible” to interrogate the complexity of growing up in the #MeToo era. In an English class in Appalachia in 2018, the students are studying Miller’s play just as that movement against sexual violence tears through their one-stoplight town, breaches the doors of their school and collides with their reading of the play itself.
The result is a prismatic revelation: “John Proctor Is the Villain” is, at turns, a literary critique, a tender bildungsroman, a loopy comedy, a study of rural America and a Taylor Swift appreciation post. This month, it becomes a Broadway show, directed by the Tony Award-winning Danya Taymor.
Inside the rehearsal space, Taymor lit a stick of incense. Cast members — playing five high school girls and two boys — worked through a scene in which a meeting of the fledgling feminist club explodes into accusations against the men in their lives: a teacher, a student, the mayor. In each case, the students’ personal entanglements test their commitment to their ideals.
Mid-scene, Sink burst through the classroom door, the pages of her script rippling in her hand. Her character has returned to school after a conspicuous absence only to find that, despite all these revelations of male bad behavior, it is she who has been made the scapegoat. Sink’s eyes poked around the class, widening at her friends’ hypocrisy. Then she pinned one of the male students, Mason (Nihar Duvvuri), in her sights and sliced into his sweet exterior: “Thank you for being an ally,” she said.
They took the scene three times, with the actors testing out different kinetic impulses. Taymor paused after each iteration to ask: “Thoughts?” She wanted to know if they preferred to sit or lie on the couch, whether the doors to the classroom ought to stay open or closed. And how their understanding of the text was shifting in the room.
“This is the first scene in the play where the word ‘rape’ is used,” Duvvuri realized.
These characters can confidently discuss, as one puts it, how “white feminism is monopolizing the mainstream body positivity movement,” but they remain somewhat naïve to how power operates in their own lives. Now the glow of childhood has been rudely extinguished, and they must fumble through the dark toward a collective social consciousness.
Taymor advised her actors to resist the urge to make all of the lightbulbs appear to go off right away. “I know there’s discomfort because you care for your characters so much, but sometimes they don’t know yet,” she said. “They’re on the longest journey of discovery.”
A coven is a gathering of three or more witches, and it took the combined powers of Sink, 22, Taymor, 36, and Belflower, 37, to bring the play to the Booth Theater, where it will begin previews on March 20. (Sink also appears this month in “O’Dessa,” a musical movie coming to Hulu.) Over breakfast before that day’s rehearsal, they convened to tell the story.
The spark was lit in October 2017, when Woody Allen compared the mounting sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein to a “witch hunt.” Belflower decided to reread “The Crucible.” She was struck by how John Proctor — long venerated as the tragic hero in this paradigmatic tale of American persecution — was also a menace who conducts an “affair” with Abigail Williams, a teenager working in his home.
“I was like, this is a teenage girl and a grown-ass man,” Belflower said. She began to envision a play of her own, one titled after her central revelation: John Proctor is the villain.
She wrote the script in 2018, with the help of a grant that commissions plays featuring younger characters and produces them at college drama departments. It has since been licensed for dozens of nonprofessional high school and college productions. “So, I kind of thought that was all this play was going to do,” Belflower said.
Instead, “John Proctor Is the Villain” went on to well-received runs in Washington and Boston, and eventually made its way into Sink’s hands. She was drawn to the role of Shelby Holcomb, a traumatized girl accused of smearing a good man’s name, not unlike Miller’s Abigail.
“When she comes in, it’s like a tornado,” Sink said of Shelby. “There’s a heaviness to her, masked by a lot of energy and a really fast mouth.” With Belflower and Taymor, Sink put together a workshop in Manhattan. “Every character felt like a real teenager,” she said, neither dumbed down nor overly mature. “And that is so rare to find.”
SINK WAS 10 when she made her Broadway debut, portraying various orphans in a 2012 revival of “Annie” before being promoted to play the title character. At 14, she joined the second season of the fantasy series and ’80s pastiche “Stranger Things,” which began streaming in October 2017 — just as the abuse and misogyny of the entertainment industry was erupting into public view. “It was a scary feeling,” Sink said. “It was an intense time, being so young and not really able to wrap my head around it.”
In the years since, she has emerged as somewhat of an avatar for her generation’s pop-feminist imagination, one that delights in remixing the cultural relics of the past. In “Stranger Things,” as the skeptical and scrappy Max, she gave Kate Bush’s 1985 weirdo feminist anthem “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” a new life on TikTok and the U.S. singles chart.
In 2021, Taylor Swift picked her to star in “All Too Well: The Short Film,” a music video set to a devastating expanded version of Swift’s 2012 power ballad about the end of a Hollywood love affair. As Swift ripped up her song’s foundation to show the grief and betrayal beneath its floorboards, Sink embodied the expanding feminist consciousness of the world’s biggest pop star, crystallizing the moment she reclaimed her music for herself.
Now, in “John Proctor,” that spirit of cultural revision and renewal comes to Broadway. “The play is so much about cycles, and about how systems of power perpetuate themselves,” Belflower said.
Though she wrote the play as #MeToo was developing, it’s now a period piece. But it also illuminates a generation contending with accumulated decades — centuries — of American cultural messaging. The characters make references to John Mayer and “Twilight,” Joan Didion and Daniel Day-Lewis, Walt Whitman and SparkNotes.
Alongside “The Crucible,” Belflower read the historian Stacy Schiff’s 2015 book, “The Witches,” which documents how Salem’s young women suffered PTSD from rampant violence. She quotes Schiff in the play’s epigraph, writing on how the Salem woman, though “officially voiceless,” made herself heard: “In legal records she hectors, shrieks, quarrels, scolds, rants, rails, tattles, and spits.”
Belflower’s text gives that insight a modern spin, transforming stigmatized feminine vocal tics into the raw creative materials of girls who must fight to be heard. On the page, her style takes on the cadence of a text message, its urgent lines freed from punctuation. As her characters challenge adult interpretations — whether of “The Crucible,” or of Lorde’s “Green Light” — they stage a proxy battle for the right to be the narrators of their own lives.
There is something enduring about this play, and about the teenage experience itself. Taymor claimed her Tony last year for directing the musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” another period piece about the trials of youth. “Being a teenager — there’s something about it that never changes,” Taymor said. “For anyone who has been alive in America, this place will feel like home.”
Belflower wrote the play during the first Trump administration, and “John Proctor” will now have its biggest stage at its second coming. Callback auditions for the Broadway production fell on Election Day 2024. Actors vying for the role of Raelynn, Shelby’s on-again, off-again best friend, had to read a monologue in which she says: “one day / maybe / the new world we were promised / will actually be new / one day / maybe / the men in charge won’t be in charge anymore.”
“To hear that text,” said Taymor, “over and over that day — it was so, so intense.”
The #MeToo movement may not have destroyed gendered power structures in the entertainment industry, but “it shifted some things inside, internally,” Taymor said. It opened a lane of expression for discussing experiences that were previously suppressed, and allowed her and other women storytellers to recast their own lives from a new perspective.
Back in the rehearsal room, Sink, as Shelby, entered the classroom just after the remaining members of the feminist club emitted a spontaneous collective scream — as if Shelby had been drawn to the room by the howl of her wolf pack. In one iteration of the scene, Fina Strazza, playing the studious Beth, tested out wailing into the cushion of the classroom couch. Afterward, Belflower had a note: “Don’t you dare stifle that scream.”
