Kimberly Belflower gives voice to small-town girlhood in 'John Proctor Is the Villain'

The Georgia-born playwright's Broadway-debut show deals with the impact of #MeToo, classic literature, and pop music on high schoolers in the rural South.

"The internet has both simultaneously erased and emphasized the isolation of small towns: You have access to everything, but it feels further away than ever," said playwright and professor Kimberly Belflower, who grew up in rural Georgia. But her Broadway-debut show John Proctor Is the Villain, now the most Tony Award-nominated play of the season with seven nods, reminds us that culture-changing work can come from anywhere, and small-town voices must be heard.

The same goes for the voices of young women. Belflower’s play is set in a tiny Georgia town, where five high school girls (played by Tony nominees Sadie Sink and Fina Strazza, alongside Maggie Kuntz, Morgan Scott, and Amalia Yoo) are reading The Crucible in class. This is in 2018, when the fast-rising #MeToo movement shifts the girls' relationships to Arthur Miller's play, their peers, their teacher Mr. Smith (Tony nominee Gabriel Ebert), and guidance counselor Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs) — or, in short, just about everything they've been told to believe.

"I was thinking a lot about my 16-year old-self," Belflower said. "And I read The Crucible for the first time in high school, so it just felt essential that it was set in the South."

Further strengthening those roots, Belflower workshopped the play with theatre students from three Southern schools via the College Collaboration Project before it went on to professional productions in D.C., Boston, and now New York.

Belflower spoke with New York Theatre Guide about the various geographical — and generational — perspectives that informed the play, her connections to the show's characters and themes, and her take on whether John Proctor really is the villain.

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How did the idea for the play come about?

I had the title before I had the play. I knew it was high school students exploring The Crucible in some way [and that] it's informed by #MeToo.

#MeToo prompted me to revisit my own teenage years and look back on adolescence and young adulthood with a new lens, a new vocabulary, to be like [...] "Oh, that guy wasn't just weird. He was a predator." Because of where and how I was raised, I wasn't equipped with the language to name certain experiences for what they were.

How did the College Collaboration Project shape the play?

I had Zoom interviews with all three schools and the theatre students. I visited each school during rehearsals once, and then to see the fully staged version of whatever draft I was on then.

In the beginning, I was asking specific questions like, "What do you remember about The Crucible?" "If you haven't read it, what is your cultural understanding of it?"

I asked a lot about sex ed — that's how my play opens, with a sex ed lesson. In a lot of ways, we're not super far from Puritan culture, especially in the Baptist South. Things like #MeToo don't happen in a vacuum. Things like Salem Witch Trials don't happen in a vacuum. What is the way we are teaching our young people how to think about sex and gender and power?

[I also asked] blurry questions like, "What do you do when you're angry?" "Where do you go when you're sad?", just trying to get a full, bodily understanding of a lot of different feelings I knew were going to go into the play.

What came of those conversations?

One of the most fruitful things that came up during one of the interviews is — this was early 2018, so Harvey Weinstein was very fresh. It was quite easy for the students to be like, "Harvey Weinstein's a monster. Of course I believe all these women, full stop."

As I was getting a fuller understanding of where the play was going, I was really interested in what happens when someone close to us, someone we love and respect, is accused of these terrible things. So I asked the students [...] "How would you feel if Harry Styles was accused of these same things tomorrow?" Immediately, they were like, "Well, that wouldn't happen." And I was like, "Yeah, but what if it did?" The knee-jerk "no" was so interesting.

How did the audience response inform the play along the way? (Vague spoilers follow.)

We had a reading in New York of the first draft of the play before it went to these colleges, [which] sent student and faculty representatives. One of the professors, who happened to be an older white man, raised his hand during a discussion and was like, "I'm sorry, it's totally unrealistic that he would come back at the end. No school would allow that." Almost every student's hand shot up, and they all had a story, either at their school or a neighboring school [...] where a teacher was accused of something similar and came back, as do I.

Then, at an early production, this woman approached me who was in her 70s and grew up in the county over from me in Georgia. She was like, "This could have been about my high school experience."

Obviously, everybody in every audience is going to have a different experience. But those two happened within the first year of the play's life and felt very indicative of a larger truth. Unfortunately, not a lot has changed in terms of structures and institutions and the people in power, but the way we talk about things among ourselves has changed.

Multiple Broadway cast members are also from the South. Did you have any shared experiences that informed this production?

I'm from a two-stoplight town an hour off the highway; it's quite different than [Morgan Scott] being from Greenville, South Carolina, which has an airport. But Morgan still grew up in and around the church. Molly knows people who were in Tri Delt, the sorority Miss Gallagher says she was in. Sadie's from Texas but moved to New Jersey when she was 10.

What a lot of us talked about is [...] this feeling that culture happens somewhere else. I had to drive 40 minutes to get to the nearest bookstore, but there were 12 Baptist churches in my tiny town. Then Morgan and Molly, even though they grew up in larger towns, have an understanding of the role of the church and the cultural norms [...] and the expectations that are put on you in terms of your gender.

We had a lot of conversations about the role church plays both in shaping the characters' beliefs, but also as a fabric of the town — and the fact that Mr. Smith goes to their church too. These characters aren't winking at religion. They're not looking down on it because the church is an ideology, but it's also a social place.

As an educator yourself, how did that experience inform your writing, particularly of Mr. Smith and Miss Gallagher? (Vague spoilers follow.)

In my role as an educator [...] I was fully taking care of children when I was 23, and I could barely take care of myself! And looking back on my high school years and being like, "Oh, this amazing English teacher I had was literally right out of school and was teaching us when she was like, 23. She seemed like such an adult."

[During] #MeToo, I was 30, and it felt like the ground underneath me was shifting, and my understanding of everything was totally changing. What would it be like to be like for a 24-year-old who is still coming into yourself while these students are totally challenging everything you knew to be true? That's what we see in Miss Gallagher.

With Mr. Smith, one of my core mission statements with this play, and something we talked a lot about in rehearsal, is that multiple things can be true. Mr. Smith is a great teacher and has positively impacted many lives. That is true, and this other thing is also true. Those truths don't erase each other, they just maybe complicate each other.

Why, then, was John Proctor Is the Villain the right title for this play?

It's intentionally provocative. I've had people hear the title and be like, "Oh, so you hate The Crucible." No, I don't, actually.

I think Arthur Miller didn't necessarily write the play to have a clear hero and villain. John Proctor does really, genuinely heroic things. He is a beacon for truth in this moment when lies are spreading through his town, and also, he was incredibly abusive to every woman in the play and is totally misogynist!

The title, in the play, is spoken out loud by [Sink's character] Shelby, and for her, John Proctor is the villain. That is a valid interpretation. In some moments of the play, John Proctor is the villain [...] in others, he does good things and is a good man. It was just a fun place to start from and does challenge the things audiences are expecting.

We must talk about Lorde's "Green Light," which is key to the play's final scene. What resonated with you when you first heard it?

At first, I didn't understand what it was doing to me; I just knew it was doing something incredibly powerful. I remember exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time: in my windowless basement office when I was in grad school, and I was preparing to go teach a class. Something immediately shifted inside my body. I put the song on repeat and listened to it until I had to go teach. I made my class listen.

When she says "But I hear sounds in my mind, brand-new sounds in my mind" — both sonically and lyrically, that feels like what it is to be an artist and to move through pain, to move through trauma, and get out on the other side and be like, "I'm going to use that pain to make something beautiful." I just don't think I ever heard a song that described that specific moment.

Has the song taken on a new significance for you now that audiences are having similarly visceral responses to it every night?

When I was first writing the play, it always ended in a dance to "Green Light." Even before I knew how I got there, I knew that's how it ended.

The reason it resonated to me as an artist, and moving through that pain and trauma, is why it resonates with Shelby and Raelynn. And also the ancient power of women dancing together!

The marriage of that song with the moment in the play that it is serving does unlock something in you whether or not you have a relationship with that song. I spoke with [one audience member] who put it so beautifully: "I was really engaging with the play intellectually, and then the ending happened, and my body was having a reaction before my brain caught up," which is what happened when I first heard "Green Light.”

How did you get into theatre?

I did a community theatre play when I was, like, 11, but then I didn't do theatre again until I was a senior in high school. I had the greatest theatre teacher; she passed away about nine years ago. [...] She saw something in me before I [did]. I played basketball because my brother played basketball, and I did everything everybody expected me to do. [She] came up to me in the hall one day and was like, "You're going to take my advanced drama class."

Playwriting came later, but theatre came first. I look back to that moment in the hallway in high school as the moment that changed my life.

Have you ever had a theatre experience as an audience member that really moved you?

I lived in New York in my 20s during the original production of Mr. Burns by Anne Washburn. I saw, like, the third preview, before the reviews were out. I just left being like, "Holy shit. The world just changed. I don't understand." That has really stuck with me, the way she plays with form; it feels like such a love letter to theatre and storytelling in general.

I also saw the original Broadway production [of] Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, a massively influential play to me. I also threw up and passed out during it because I was so worried about the characters. I'm dying to tell Jez Butterworth this story, but he hasn't been at any of the Tony events so far.

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This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Top image credit: Kimberly Belflower. (Photo courtesy of production)
In-article image credit: John Proctor Is the Villain on Broadway. (Photos by Julieta Cervantes)