JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN is Not the Villain; Neither is John Proctor

In the fall of 1999, I played John Proctor in a theatre-in-the-round production at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Initially, our acting teacher wanted to do Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, but the other students encouraged me to introduce the idea of doing The Crucible as we finally had enough men in the company to do so and my opinion was valued by the teacher. It also, I knew, wouldn’t be a bad idea to get the chance to play John Proctor, a sought-out character by many actors, from Arthur Kennedy and Liam Neeson onstage to Yves Montand and Daniel Day-Lewis in the film versions.

In 1953, it premiered on Broadway in what has only ever been described as a lousy production by Jed Harris, but it still managed to win the seventh Tony Award for Best Play despite the two-act, edited version. It was clearly seen as an allegorical reaction to the McCarthyite anti-Communism of the day. Despite doing his own research into the Puritans of Salem, Miller’s play departed from historical accuracy in many ways, including (most famously) making the accused (and eventually executed) John Proctor much younger and heightening the action by presenting him as a man who is struggling to repair his relationship with his wife after having had an affair with Abigail Williams, whose age was raised. While in real life, Williams did accuse Proctor, she would have been around 11 or 12 at the time while Proctor died in his late fifties in 1692 (for the time, an old man). Miller admitted his historical liberties in the published reader’s version, but he also added commentary on his invented characters liberally in the text, perhaps making some readers believe it was more true to life than it was.

The play eventually became a classic and, in the mid-1990s, it was revisited by Nicholas Hytner as a film that was a commentary not on McCarthyism, but the witch-hunts of the daycare scandals of the early 1980s through the mid-1990s. Each time it is performed, we are most likely to be in the midst of another moral panic, jettisoning people from society. In fact, international productions were plentiful even during the #metoo movement, referred to by some actors as a kind of witch hunt of its own even if that’s not exactly accurate. While the sexual harassment cases were based on real happenings (unlike the HUAC and cases like the McMartin preschool case), attention began to focus more and more on the accusers rather than the accused. A couple of years before #metoo exploded, Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem 1692 became one of the first serious studies on the Salem Witch Trials in many years and attempted in a well-written way to explain the social, political, and religious reasons for the Salem girls’ behavior.

Over the years, people have speculated everything from poisoned food to being used as pawns by wealthy landowners with grudges. But, most likely, it was their less-than status and the horribly oppressive world of Puritan New England—along with an interest in magic that continued to be of interest to Americans well in the early 19^th century (and is making a comeback now—half of stores like Books a Million are filled with books on white magic, tarot cards, and the like).

Kimberly Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain was probably, like the sinking of the Titanic, an inevitable play given our society’s predilection for looking back at the past and revising time-honored and more traditional explanations of historical events. Its huge success, though, could probably lead to a misreading of one of America’s greatest dramas about one of our country’s greatest tragedies.

I kept seeing the play’s name everywhere and it is one of those titles that is meant to provoke. I wonder how many actors like me who played Proctor read the title and were dumbfounded. Even when I hadn’t read her play, I couldn’t imagine the author really felt that way because the Arthur Miller Foundation gave her free reign to quote liberally from the text. But the synopsis of a group of teenage girls beginning a feminist club in the midst of #metoo and rethinking everything they’ve been led to believe about men troubled me enough to bite the bullet and read it though I was pre-disposed not to like it. I have, after all, taught teenagers and I believe we are giving their ideas more and more credence despite the fact that their brains are not fully formed.

The massive text (in performance, only an hour and forty-five minutes, but on paper over 160 pages because it is written in a style that is almost verse-like with little punctuation, capitalization of words that are meant to be emphasized, thus giving us much blank space) was a quick read and I no longer believe that John Proctor is the Villain is the villain, but a comment from a playwright friend that Miller’s Proctor could be, for all intents and purposes, dead gives me a lot of pause.

There is much more to Bellflower’s play than a revisionist look at The Crucible. It is set in a world where high school art programs are being cut while abstinence-only sex education is still shoved down kids’ throats, a local minister admits to an affair, the teenage boys act entitled to what they desire, and the curious long-time sabbatical of a student ends and you realize the young women of the classroom have a lot more in common with the girls of Salem than you might think. Like most American teenagers, they are discovering their power and themselves, even those dealing with their own foibles. Except for the character of Nell—who is one of the few students the author says must be Black, a tough-minded kid from Atlanta who, I’m afraid, is terribly stereotyped with character traits that have negative connotations sassiness and an enlarged sense of seriousness being the most obvious—the female characters are drawn well. The male characters, on the other hand (except for Mason, who also “could,” the author says, be a person of color). Bellflower’s notes on the characters are over-described, probably to counter the idea that the South is still mostly homogenous and still segregated (though there areas in which this is the case).

A well-meaning former golden boy is the teacher. He is described as charming and goofy (sometimes annoyingly so) and seems to know when he is insulting the kids’ intelligence, but he does not remain unscathed as revelations that he might have problems sleeping with students becomes a major factor later in the play.

The play is set in 2018 (the height of #metoo) and the “revelation” that Proctor might be the true villain of the piece is kind of belated in the text, but after it is mentioned, I can see a lot of young women seeing this play and misreading the other in this fashion. They jeer at all this talk of Proctor’s “goodness” and his time-specific use of calling Abigail a whore (another invention of Miller’s). But, as this misreading continues, the play becomes a lot more about their love of Taylor Swift and Lorde than taking the text in its historical context—not only in the context of the 1950s, but its Puritan setting as well.

Puritan women (and girls especially) were the lowest people on the totem pole except possibly for the local Indigenous people who were regarded as savages. For most of human history, women have had a rough go of it, and it is entirely possible that the actions of Williams, Mary Warren, and others could be seen as liberating after they realize the ways they are oppressed. But here’s the problem with that: was it worth over two hundred people being accused of something that was false and the deaths of 19 people? Even as #metoo wore on, questions were raised about whether trial by media and the lack of due process was perhaps having more of an abject effect in general even if it was enlightening (and terrifying) to learn how many women in various industries were struggling.

Bellflower is from the Appalachian South, the same area in which I grew up and wrote all my original plays from 2002 to 2014. She has an unusual love of the word “dang” in her own stage directions—a little embarrassing to me, actually—but she is not untalented in any way. There is a reason so many productions of this piece are cropping up all over the country (and it's been optioned as a film, I hear). The ending exhibits a kind of release for the girls who, many of which have experienced abuse. I would almost describe the ending as regression into scream therapy, one of the many methods psychological counselors used in the 1980s for female patients (the kind of stuff from The Courage to Heal which was unscientific and full of the misandry that accompanied the third wave of feminism).

But, as a playwright only a few years younger than me who grew up in the South, she should know that while we have as many predators as any other place in the world, Southern men historically had a way of dealing with women/child abusers. It often ended with the said predator being beaten within an inch of his life, castrated, or killed while the law looked the other way. I’m not saying this is a good way of dealing with it, and feminists would criticize me for suggesting that men should even be necessary in the process because women have their own innate strength. Instead, John Proctor is the Villain feels less Southern to me in its attitudes. While most of the girls are rural, there are characters like Nell who bring big city Atlanta thinking to the “one stop light” town. Perhaps if it were set in a performing arts school where a production of The Crucible is being mounted and there becomes a revolt, it would seem more true to life. But Bellflower is as equally interested in criticizing the shrinking of arts education as she is shouting down and dramatizing “toxic masculinity.”

Is John Proctor the villain in The Crucible? No. He is a very flawed hero-sinner who is stuck in moral conundrums he cannot face. In fact, he’s Miller trying to deal with his own infidelities so to criticize Proctor in a simple-minded way is to just as easily say Arthur Miller is the Villain or just men in general, which was most certainly one of the bad after-effects of #metoo culture as some men were falsely accused.

The Puritan girls aren’t the villains either. The “villain” of the play isn’t actually a character at all, but a hysterical society represented by faux-pious ministers, farmers with a grudge, overzealous judges, and girls who are only a shade above slaves like Tituba (made of African descent by Miller to highlight other injustices of the era in which he wrote). It is a very complex play indeed for this reason, a complexity that is belittled in Bellflower’s play because it is about young people who are often impetuous, quick to anger, and exhibit the kind of qualities that have actually started hysterical episodes in our nation’s history. Now, this play won’t do that, but it’s very possible with its provocative title alone that there will be a couple of generations who might misinterpret and misread one of the ten greatest plays this country has produced.

John Proctor is the Villain has a right to exist. But it doesn’t have the right to do that.

The Snapping Turtle: Ginny, Georgia, Storytelling, and Representation

Whether I’m entitled or not, I am encouraged more and more to express some thoughts I would have previously never considered posting. It is my own blog, after all. Some of this will be hard for folks to take, but it comes out of a deep respect for the makeup of our nation and an even deeper respect for dramatic storytelling. When Netflix premiered Ginny & Georgia, it was divisive from the start. Because its subjects dealt with teen self-harm, poverty, race, and just about every other cause being fought for in an activist world, few paid attention to what mattered: the storytelling. 

I follow many theatre companies on social media and some Hollywood “news” accounts. They want, very seriously, in a decade’s time, to make up for hundreds of years of oppression, an idea so idiotic as to not even consider with any sincerity. Hollywood has much to apologize for (The Birth of a Nation is both the great synthesis of early cinema and one of the most horrible sociological documents of all time). The theatre has much less to apologize for. It has craved diverse voices since its earliest days. Yes, there were no paid female playwrights until 1660, but if you consider the fact that Sophokles and Shakespeare were (at the very least) partly homosexual, we have been have never been a homogenized group. In the 20^thcentury, we welcomed Anita Loos and Lillian Hellman between the Wars, Amiri Baraka and Lorraine Hansberry in the ‘60s, David Henry Hwang and Frank Chin in the ‘70s-‘80s and not a single person who looks like me has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in eight years.

In the post George Floyd and #metoo era, there are many thoughts drilled in our heads to make us believe illogical things: that silence is violence, that our differences are more important than what unites us, and that representation, above anything else, is more important than almost anything.

There is actually an old Jewish concept (in the Talmud) that, in the midst of a mourning (even mass tragedy) silence is the appropriate response. And someone not speaking ever hurt anyone as much as a weapon. We are descending further and further into a tribal nation. We have never been more divided in ideals, in outlook, in a sense of our future self. America is still, relatively speaking, an adolescent nation in its petulant teenage years. It is true we have sins for which we can never be forgiven, slavery being the most prominent, but not the only one. Lastly, representation is important. Just not as important as great art.

The late Professor Harold Bloom was derided by almost every outlet for his 1994 masterpiece The Western Canon, in which he defended (mostly, but not entirely) dead white authors without whom we would have no great literary foundation in the West. He spoke against replacing Cervantes with third-rate writers in course syllabi just because they represented a neglected group. And, despite his identity as a Jewish man, he was called everything but the prophet he was of the times in which we are now living (this is not uncommon among Jewish people—they are considered “white” and, therefore, less than in some circles) despite their being slain scapegoats during most of their time on Earth.

Ginny & Georgia’s first kerfuffle was a line about “Opression Olympics,” which sent the internet into a frenzy. And yet, the only identity or ethnicity not represented on the show might be a snapping turtle. Its main character comes from the poverty-stricken South (a group that no one has ever given a damn about), the other main character is biracial and self-harms, Ginny’s brother is on his way toward Generalized Anxiety Disorder, their neighbor family includes a lesbian, a teen struggling with addiction and depression and a deaf father; the local coffee shop owner is Indian-American; Abby (played by the remarkable Katie Douglas) deals with body dysmorphia and is exploring her own sexuality, Norah is both adopted and of Asian descent; there are also characters who have been on life support, who have been bullied, the list goes on. If a show could ever make a comment about the Oppression Olympics, this is the one. In no corner of the world is such a concoction of people communicating on a regular basis. Even in the world of Ginny & Georgia, we still primarily focus on the relationship between Georgia and Paul, the standard “white” couple and Ginny’s African American friends are a separate group that never interacts with her other group (called MANG).

[The second controversy was an innocent joke about Taylor Swift’s myriad number of exes. To criticize her is to be called misogynist (and she fully played into this in her social media feeds, criticizing Netflix itself—a great waste of time).]

Now, one might say, “Isn’t that wonderful? Our country is so diverse and inclusive!” Yes, that is one of the many great things about this country. But G&G tries much too hard to create a world that, given the multiple illnesses affecting almost everyone, you would never want to be a part of. It is true that mental illness among teenagers is rising. Whether that is some part of evolution or the madness of our age, or an over-exaggeration of something that’s always been true, it’s best left to social scientists to figure it out (if you can call sociology a science, which it isn’t because the factor of bias is too great).

Oh, Ryan, but what about the young deaf person who sees themselves represented onscreen in perhaps one of the most touching performances (the father of Max)? Yes. Again—wonderful—and if it weren’t pitted against a multicultural fairy tale, it would be a delight. The truth is, in the real world, we are growing further apart than closer together. I am not a strict realist, but for a show that is produced as naturalism, one wonders if the choice of representation over storytelling is anything natural at all.

I have just completed the third season of the show. In some ways, it has lost almost all the joy that was present in the first two seasons. Part of this is the nature of the plot (Georgia’s trial), but I remember when I thought Max was one of the most interesting characters on TV, I remember the uncontrollable laughter from Georgia, I remember feeling Ginny’s pain in a palpable way. In this season, which is plotted so scattershot that the trial is even mishandled by the writing staff leading to an anticlimax and an overly long denouement in the final episode, every episode felt like it lasted 3 hours as we plumbed further and further the depths of our differences.

Perhaps I will never catch up to today’s society. Sometimes, I wish I would have never seen the 21st century with its various methods towards progress that are actually regressions into infinite adolescence. I grew up in the early ‘90s (back when the newly termed “political correctness” was merely a benign cyst rather than the malignant tumor it is today) and I learned all the respectful terms and treated them as sacrosanct. My generation grew up with shows where “tokenism” played a large part in the casting of extras on sitcoms while the families in these shows themselves remained homogenous. Unfortunately, even though they were 30-minute sitcoms with no sense of reality, they were more true to life than G&G which aims to please everyone and will eventually satisfy no one, especially if it continues on this track waxing and waning on character and avoiding the finer points of storytelling.

Maybe my biggest fear is that, one day, when we’ve all inter-bred, we will find other ways of hating each other, much like the Sneecthes on the beaches from Dr. Seuss’ immortal poem. But the fear for now is that we are overcompensating for slights in our past. It’s called the past for a reason. There are still treasures in G&G; sadly good dramatic episodic writing is slipping away as we make way for the next in line to be represented. The snapping turtle awaits.

Ryan C. Tittle: Film Critic

In the early days of podcast fever and the proliferation of online film critics, I had just finished a miserable four and a half years teaching in public schools and was looking for something—anything—else to do, always with that latent dream of writing full-time. A friend of mine, Ricky Headrick (who was running the best barbecue joint in town) was wanting to start a website with a focus on movies and television. The site was to be called Moon Beach Island, and his handle would be “Cap’n Ricky.” I don’t know how we got on the subject, but he offered me a gig writing movie reviews—enough money for my tickets and a little extra scratch.

Should've crashed.

I had been publishing film reviews on my own blog starting in 2009 and those efforts won me that paid gig and also a brief stint writing Hollywood humor pieces for a site called The Studio Exec, a cross between The A/V Club and The Onion. The review I submitted was of Robert Zemeckis’ phony-baloney Flight, a meager attempt at a serious drama wasting the skill of a half-dozen actors with Zemeckis’ typical romanticizing instead of dealing with difficult life subjects head-on. The review was titled “Trying to Take Flight” and ended with a line hoping, if Denzel snagged the Oscar, he would enjoy his “thirty pieces of silver.” Ouch.

But, if you’re in the reviewing business, everyone knows a bad review is infinitely more fun to write than a good review. Usually only the makers of the film remember the good ones, but everyone knows Rolling Stone once wrote a one-word review of a Styx album that simply said, “No.” And Roger Ebert’s famous review of Rob Reiner’s North (in which he “hated, hated, hated, hated” the movie spawned three books of Roger’s half and no star reviews. Ebert was always my ideal critic. It was simple: he was born a newspaperman, but he was a magnificent writer. He wasn’t just reviewing—he was writing film criticism—an important distinction as some who are in the profession know nothing about the world of film and are myopic when it comes to true innovation.

The one and only.

Ebert was not always right. His negative review of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and his positive review of Blue Crush (the Hamlet of surfer movies?) puzzled many of his readers. But he knew the whole four-star system was imperfect. If he liked a slapstick comedy, he judged them against those of its kind. But, when he was on, he was brilliant, and he was more right than wrong most of the time for a business that can seem totally subjective. As my series of “Non-Guilty Pleasures” proves, I follow a similar trajectory. He was not just a great critic, by the way—his memoir Life Itself is among my favorite books.

So, there I was, getting paid to write for the first time in a decade when I won prize money and royalties off an early short play I wrote as a teenager. It was fun. The whole endeavor led to a former collaborator and I to host a podcast for Moon Beach (at least for the first three to four seasons) and I, perhaps, was most proud of my review of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey which I called “The Neverending Story.” I had my detractors. I was widely lambasted for praising the film version of Les Misérables, but I rather liked the close ups and the emotion, something akin to Sinéad O’Connor’s music video for Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

I cherish my signed copy.

I was formally taught film history, screenwriting, and criticism. My screenwriting mentor at Bennington was Steven Bach, a noted biographer and the author of one of the relatively few books about movies you should own (Final Cut, about the making of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate) and, unexpectedly, I took a course in criticism from a Dance professor named Dana Hall, who was in the ensemble for the original production of Einstein on the Beach (1976). We read Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael (with whom I never once agreed, but her talent was obvious). Even the work of food critics, some of the best writing we read.

So fetch.

I was initially not doing well in the class as my prose at the time was still in its infancy. But I’ll never forget the day I had a breakthrough and brought in an eleven-page review of Mean Girls (it had just opened) that shocked the class with its length and praise. I seemed to be the only one in the room who knew how meaningful and quotable that movie would become. Dana was a great teacher; Steven was more of a friend to me than professor. He once said my screenplays were better than my plays, but I don’t think he ever saw my plays. We were natural soulmates when it came to films, Sondheim, and the screenwork of William Goldman. But he screened for us every film that mattered in film history and it was a joy.

I have written relatively few movie reviews for this blog because I rarely go to the movies anymore. I did see the continuation of The Naked Gun series, but like with Elvis (one of the last movies I saw in cinemas before accidentally buying tickets to It Ends with Us (which I liked; stop reading the nonsense “news” stories and judge the film itself), but (like I said), there’s only so many adjectives for great films. Bad films bring out the fun in your work. You rely less on adjectives than you do creative expression. There’s only so many ways you can say I love you to a film. And, as anyone will tell you, I might sound hyperbolic with some reviews of good movies, but I do reserve my best judgement only for movies that push the form, showing us something new and/or unique. That’s why streaming is a much better option than these days because I’m sick of superheroes and computer animation.

Moon Beach Island, I don’t think, lasted more than two years. When you all have full-time jobs, you really have to invest everything to make blogs, websites, and podcasts work for you. But it was a unique time—the era where sequelitis reemerged, epic films were losing their luster, and good superhero movies (like The Dark Knight) were being released. It was the time when Judd Apatow was the King of Comedy and Christopher Nolan the King of everything else (he still is).

A promo pic from the 2nd season of The Old Mill podcast from Moon Beach Island.

Every Friday, I still check Roger Ebert’s website. It is now run by his widow with a plethora of critics from across the country—a few good ones (Tallerico especially) and a few who assure you that films are up to date with identity politics (reviews that will not be read a hundred years from now, unlike Ebert’s). Sometimes, I think I still visit just to see if Roger’s death was a hoax and I’ll see a new filing from him from Cannes. But mortality awaits us all. If The New York Times would have it, with their recent announcement, film criticism may have its expiration date too. I hope not; I hope we will still have movies to see (that are worth it) and critics who do more than make sure every cloth is cut to today’s fabric.

You can read my film reviews in my collection Everyone Else is Wrong (And You Know It).