Kimberly Belflower's "John Proctor Is the Villain" will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for "The Outsiders."
Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from "Stranger Things," will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading "The Crucible" while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.
The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower's "John Proctor Is the Villain," has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction -- plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)
Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.
The play has nine characters -- seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor -- and explores how the students' ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.
"As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe," said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read "The Crucible" in a high school English class.
"Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, 'I should reread "The Crucible",' and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it," she said. "I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase 'John Proctor is the villain.'"
The Broadway production will be directed by Danya Taymor, a recent Tony Award winner for directing the musical "The Outsiders." "John Proctor Is the Villain" is scheduled to begin previews March 20 and to open April 14 at the Booth Theater.
"It's a play that takes teenage girls and the things that they go through extremely seriously," Taymor said. "It's very funny, and it gets under the skin of these girls in a way that I think needs to be felt and experienced."
Belflower wrote the play while living in a barn on a family farm in North Carolina, trying to find her footing after graduate school. She had a 2017 commission from the Farm Theater's College Collaboration program, which supports early career playwrights working on plays that can be produced at colleges. Her play had early productions at three Southern colleges, and during the last school year it had 76 school productions around the country. There have also been two well-received regional theater productions: in 2022 at Studio Theater in Washington ("a touching, and sometimes hilarious, portrait of bracingly specific 21st-century young people," wrote Celia Wren in The Washington Post), and early this year at Huntington Theater Company in Boston ("genuinely funny as well as deadly serious," wrote Don Aucoin in The Boston Globe).
An agent got the script to Sink, who as a child had performed on Broadway in "Annie" and "The Audience," and was looking for the right moment to come back.
"John Proctor Is the Villain" is being produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson and John Mara Jr. It is being capitalized for $6.7 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.