Theatre Journal

The past year saw productions of two original plays inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain and Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor. In their exciting scripts, Belflower and Monahon respond to how Miller’s play pulled the focus from women (particularly the adolescent girls who acted as accusers in the story), to center and sanctify the character of John Proctor. Proctor is considered a “modern tragic hero” and a paragon of integrity by a slew of literary critics.

Belflower and Monahon present contemporary feminist narratives that recenter women while helping to fill in the gaps that remain in official, patriarchal histories of the Salem Witch Trials. In this sense, the female characters in both plays engage in a kind of witchcraft—not as a religious practice, but rather as redefined by Sylvia Frederici as a “transfer of [feminist] knowledge.” Both playwrights engage a feminist perspective to question John Proctor’s character—but with different, equally dynamic approaches.

Belflower uses a high school class studying The Crucible to resurrect and embody the women failed by Proctor in Miller’s play, namely Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor, as a commentary on the #MeToo movement. In contrast, Monahon returns to the seventeenth century and reimagines the period that led to Salem’s witch hysteria. Playing with contemporary language to show how Abigail Williams and her younger cousin Betty (both central to Miller’s narrative), were forced into their situation, Monahon exposes a world where Puritan superstition, draconian rules, and rampant misogyny grounded in religious fervor ensured that women in 1692 Salem were denied authority, voice, and freedom.

Miller wrote The Crucible as a theatrical excoriation of the Red Scare in the United States, taking up fear of witches as an allegory of McCarthyism. The play remains a widely produced fictionalization of real-life events, and while it was never Miller’s intention to write an accurate account of the Trials, The Crucible has undoubtedly become the interpretation encountered by most people. Such confusion is exacerbated by an ongoing cultural obsession with Salem’s witchy history, which has in turn inspired a variety of adaptations of the story that are more often interested in occult fantasy than historical fact.

Belflower pulls upon the ubiquitous popularity of The Crucible by setting her play in a high school English class in rural Georgia. Miller’s play is a part of the curriculum—just as it has been across the United States since its publication. Much like in The Crucible, the plot largely revolves around [End Page 366] teenage girls—Raelyn (Jordan Slattery), the Baptist minister’s daughter who longs to see more of the world than her one-stoplight town; Shelby (Juliana Sass), Raelyn’s former best friend, who has only just returned after leaving town for several months amidst rumors that she got an abortion after getting pregnant with Raelyn’s boyfriend; Beth (Miranda Rizzolo), a Pollyannaish, straight-A student whose feminist intentions are sometimes clouded by her Christian conservatism; Ivy (Resa Mishina), whose father has just been accused of having an affair with his secretary; and finally Nell (Deidre Staples), a Black student, whose family has just relocated from Atlanta, and who is sometimes perplexed by the small-minded inequities of backwoods politics, where church and state are anything but separate. The hyper-realistic classroom set design by Luciana Stecconi reminded the audience that while the classroom is supposedly designed to be a space for the dissemination of knowledge and hopefully the generation of new, more inclusive ideas, the public education system in places like rural Georgia can also be a site of censorship...