Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo in John Proctor Is the Villain. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The title signposts the destination–John Proctor Is the Villain. Stripped of the bitter sarcasm of last season’s The Good John Proctor (which, full disclosure, I found more compelling dramaturgically, though I can’t deny the energy here), Kimberly Belflower’s title puts it all up front. That famous hero of The Crucible, a man willing to die for his rectitude, was a boss taking sexual advantage of a young woman who worked for him. (A very young woman; Belflower doesn’t get into the fact that the actual age gap between Abigail Williams and John Proctor was not twenty years, as Arthur Miller depicts it, but closer to fifty.) It’s Peak #MeToo, which fits, as the play’s set in spring 2018. But even knowing our destination, it takes a while to get there—and to figure out what the play is actually saying about sexual agency, identity, and power. Triumphant scenes staking feminist ground in #WeBelieveWomen and empowerment through pop sit uneasily alongside more tentative forays into the unsettling murkiness of consent, of the complexity of navigating feelings about loved ones or beloved leaders who might also be abusers. Director Danya Taymor’s work tends to atomize the characters to focus on each individually and let them have moments of triumph, but the play is more interesting when it’s less definitive, when it acknowledges how equivocal that triumph is, and what the tradeoff is in comfort and complacency to get even that far.

It’s northeast Georgia, the kind of rural community where all the teachers grew up in the same one-stoplight town, went away to college, and came back; where the town ten minutes away counts as “outside.” The honors English teacher, Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert), has been forced by budget cuts to devote part of his classroom time to the most mind-numbing species of sex ed. (Educational budget cuts, like so many things in this play—not its fault!—feel both accurate to Trump 1.0 and barely adequate to hint at Trump 2.0.) Smith is a recognizable trope–the “teacher in an inspirational movie,” as one of the characters acknowledges–and Ebert walks an effective line between the earnest educator who really just wants to get through to the kids of today and the charming, smug BMOC he was as a student in this very school almost 20 years ago. As he leads his class through the painful sex ed material and then through a speech that catches both them and the audience up on The Crucible (spoiler alert: Smith is definitely not the one to come up with the idea that John Proctor is the villain), we get to know the students a bit, especially the girls: Beth Powell (Fina Strazza), the devout rule-follower and book-lover, genuinely devoted to their teacher but also to furthering her own ambitions to take her brains and her talents way the hell out of rural Georgia. Nell Shaw (Morgan Scott), the recent transfer from Atlanta, using the cachet she gets from cosmopolitanism to claim her place in this new social circle. Ivy Watkins (Maggie Kuntz), Beth’s best friend, well-intentioned but not quite sure how to break out of her assigned role as the rich, pretty girl. Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo), a preacher’s daughter, whose worldview was recently shattered when her boyfriend cheated on her with her best friend, Shelby Holcomb (Sadie Sink); Raelynn doesn’t quite know who she is without Shelby and the boyfriend, Lee Turner (Hagan Oliveras), to bookend her. Shelby hasn’t been back to school since; Lee’s inchoate-rage-filled attempts to make up tend to imply Raelynn is better off without him. 

Mr. Smith is quick to outline the familiar parallels to the McCarthy era once they start talking about Arthur Miller, but the girls, consciousness raised by recent events both global and local, start to push in another direction. Beth, spurred on by “new girl” Nell, starts a feminist club; when their guidance counselor, Bailey Gallagher (Molly Griggs) balks at the optics of feminism, Mr. Smith volunteers to sponsor, then throws Mason Adams (Nihar Duvvuri)–who is generically well-meaning but has more puppyish enthusiasm than social savvy–into the club as an ally. Raelynn starts to recognize, and fight back against, Lee’s controlling rage. Then Ivy’s father, whom she adores, is accused of sexually assaulting a young employee. So when Shelby returns, an unruly tangle of oppositional defiance and self-lacerating shame, her barely contained emotions act like a match dropped into a well-laid bed of kindling.

As we learn what’s at the root of Shelby’s behavior–a sexual relationship with their teacher destructive enough that her best friend became collateral damage–the obvious parallel between Shelby and The Crucible’s Abigail becomes, well, a little too obvious. As with Abigail, Shelby is portrayed as the villain here, trying to ruin the reputation of a good man, and warping the minds of the other girls around her. “One lie can poison the entire well of truth,” Mr. Smith says, but whose lie is he talking about? The girls see through to the utter powerlessness of Abigail and the other young women in The Crucible; Mr. Smith still sees them as liars–just as he’ll paint Shelby as a liar, just as, we learn, he may have painted many other women in other ambiguous situations as liars. But the dangerous ambiguity in John Proctor Is the Villain isn’t the one of who’s telling the truth, of whether Ivy’s father or the town’s mayor is guilty of sexual harassment or of whether Mr. Smith is grooming Beth as he groomed Shelby. 

The ambiguity that the play feints toward but doesn’t quite look at is that all of these things are true at once. Ivy’s father can be her favorite person and guilty of sexual assault. Mr. Smith can be a good teacher and a sexual predator. Mason can be a good kid who likes Nell and call Shelby a slut without even thinking twice. I wanted Belflower and Taymor to sit with the discomfort of that contradiction—that John Proctor is a hero to his community, dismissive to his wife, and abusive of Abigail all at the same time; that Abigail, a victim herself, still helped to cause immense damage to others; that Arthur Miller wrote an important play carrying a vital message that a also encodes terrible messages about gender and power; that Mr. Smith is a teacher who makes his students love learning but also a man with a long history of abuse that no one was willing to even discuss till now–and who will in all likelihood come out of this accusation unscathed. But Taymor’s way of transitioning between scenes with a flash of light on a single character’s face tends to chop up the play, focus us on what that one character is thinking or feeling at the moment rather than the way the students are constantly seeking one another’s, and their teachers’, reactions and approval while also trying to negotiate what they actually think and feel instead of what they’ve been told to. 

All but one scene of the play takes place at school, on a classroom set (by AMP and Teresa L. Williams) that’s trying to be upbeat and positive but can’t escape its institutional feel and its mildly patronizing educational signage. But that one outside scene, where the normally well-behaved Raelynn cuts school to find Shelby, has the truest emotional connection in the piece: their heartbreak at each other’s loss, their joy in being reunited, the tentative way in which they grope back toward their former intimacy and figure out how to talk about all the things they’d kept hidden. That combination of pain and joy, that acknowledgment of the complexity of even people who do terrible things: that’s where all the play’s currents come together. In bigger scenes, Sadie Sink can take Shelby over the top–Shelby’s “a lot”; she’s “intense”–but there’s also a rawness to her, a conscious attempt to be angry rather than awkward that works sometimes better than others. With Raelynn, she can be more introspective, more vulnerable, matching Amalia Yoo’s quieter journey of self-definition. Without a more intimate scene like this, the other characters have less nuance.

Reunited, Shelby and Raelynn present a joint interpretive project that neatly encapsulates their take on The Crucible and ends the play in an upbeat jolt of righteous energy, but that high note feels a little sour when you realize there aren’t really any wins for the feminist cause. Mr Smith has been reinstated; the guidance counselor may finally realize the truth (to which her middle school crush long blinded her) but hasn’t yet done anything about it; Shelby has to go to summer school; we see the danger Beth is in even if she does not. And look at where we are, seven years later; again, not the play’s fault, but the glimmer of hope spawned by #MeToo feels a world away.