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 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 the year of the trials (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 to true to life than it is.

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 American 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).

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 page 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, is 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 actors 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 a 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 unfortunate 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 on it 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 (and even a film, I hear) of this piece are cropping up all over the country. 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 and child abusers. It often ended with the said predator 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.