Why Women Are Leaving This Broadway Show in Tears

Opinion|Why Women Are Leaving This Broadway Show in Tears

I cried the first time I saw the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the MeToo movement, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears. This past weekend, I went a second time with a friend. As the houselights went up, she was crying, as was the woman in the row in front of us. They spontaneously hugged, which is something I’ve never seen before at a Broadway show. Outside the theater, two women were sobbing.

At least since the time of Aristotle, catharsis has been understood as one of the chief purposes of theater, but it’s been a while since I’ve experienced it so viscerally, and I kept wondering why this play is having such an intense effect on so many. (No other play has received more Tony nominations this year.)

One reason for its power, I suspect, is that it transports the viewer back to a time when MeToo still felt alive with possibility, the moment before the backlash when it seemed we might be on the cusp of a more just and equal world. It’s not an uplifting play — an innocent girl is punished, and a guilty man is not — but it is still shot through with a kind of hope that’s now in short supply.

“John Proctor Is the Villain” takes place in 2018 and revolves around an honors English class studying Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” The girls in the class are smart and ambitious; they’re also, like many teenagers everywhere, swoony and bursting with contradictory emotions. They’re so excited about the MeToo movement that they want to start a feminism club at their school, which school officials do not, at first, want to allow. Tensions in the community, their guidance counselor tells them, are too high.

Those tensions soon creep in to the high school and start to shake the girls’ solidarity. The father of one of the girls is accused of sexual harassment by two women, which leads her to question MeToo. “We can punish the men if they’re proven guilty, but if we find out the girls are making it up they should get punished just as bad,” she says. Another girl, Shelby — played by the “Stranger Things” star Sadie Sink — returns from a mysterious absence with her own destabilizing accusation. Their drama is refracted through their engagement with “The Crucible.” In “John Proctor Is the Villain” the increasingly common idea that MeToo was a witch hunt is turned inside out.

The playwright, Kimberly Belflower, had been captivated by the MeToo movement when it revved up in 2017. “It just felt like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re doing this. We’re naming these things,’” she told me recently. It gave her a new lens on her own adolescence in rural Georgia. “I didn’t have the vocabulary for this then, but I do now,” she said.