Sarah on theater

It’s a good play that I think would be hard to nail the pacing on because the story it wants to tell is interpolating another play. The first hour necessarily slogs through a lot of exposition (the characters, The Crucible, the societal context) to make sure that the ending hits for everybody. It definitely does come together, but at the end of the first hour I was like, “What is everybody smoking? You like this?”

This production is mostly very good, too. Sadie Sink is a highlight, but feels strange to feature by herself on the poster since she only shows up halfway through! A couple of inconsistent performances mar an otherwise-strong supporting cast (though nobody maintains their accents very well, which I admit is kind of a bugaboo for me - they probably could have skipped them and set this in Anytown, USA). Loved the set and the soundtrack made my millennial heart happy.

(One of the best Playbill designs 🤩)

Glad to have a chance to catch John Proctor is the Villain once more before it leaves, and interesting to see it with a few months’ extra seasoning over previews.

The veteran cast is discernibly more settled in their roles. New addition Chiara Aurelia feels a bit like a mimic of Sadie Sink as Shelby, which I think I’ve seen other people comment on. Her primary effect here is rebalancing the misleading star-vehicle expectations set by the original marketing, giving way to a true ensemble piece and especially allowing Fina Strazza’s Beth and Gabriel Ebert’s Mr. Smith to shine. Victoria Vourkoutiotis fills in ably enough for Amalia Yoo as Raelynn, if perhaps lacking some chemistry here and there in certain scenes with the other girls—but she’s understudying no fewer than four of them, so that’s understandable.

I really ought to have seen this twice in the first place to get a firmer grasp on the text. The first time around, I felt that it was more good than great and noted some issues with the pacing. I don’t think I was entirely off-base—I still feel like there’s a bit of a lull at about the 45-minute mark when it feels like we’ve gotten an awful lot of table-setting, but not yet a lot of plot—however, that may have been a little nitpicky. The last 15 or 20 minutes pay off in such a big way, it‘s a bit of a moot point. It’s difficult not to cry when the final scene hits its crescendo and the lights change, and that’s a product of meticulous construction by Kimberly Belflower and wise-beyond-their-years performances by the young cast.

While I was definitely quick on the uptake with respect to Mr. Smith’s eventual arc the first time around, I mistakenly chalked it up to predictability (i.e. “this is the only way this can go,” or “I think I’m smarter than the play”) when, in fact, this has more to do with effective foreshadowing and a supremely subtextually-slimy performance by Ebert. In fact, I would say this is one of the very strongest aspects of John Proctor…: it reads very differently before and after that essential confirmation, exploring the area where questionable chumminess crosses over into the machinations of a predator.

Going beyond the play itself, I’ve seen a fair number of people referring to its nebulous “importance,” and I get stuck on that a little bit. In my head, this is fundamentally a period piece—a good one—describing the mindset of the late 2010s, but not exceeding that. No ambiguity here—the MeToo movement has been essential upheaval in a world where sexual harassment and abuse of women by men is both common and normalized, and it’s so, so, so important for that to propagate all the way down into small town classrooms. It’s shameful that we force girls to grow up so fast, but better they be prepared than not.

I think John Proctor… is a pretty excellent, compact bit of drama about that dialogue, if not necessarily a meaningful contributor to it. (And it doesn’t have to be, to be clear! I’m just ruminating on the cultural context.) What has become apparent in the years since 2018 is that both men and women have grievances with the state of the social contract, and increasingly this is the key fault line of zero-sum sociopolitical conflict. Every man in the play is somewhere between a clueless enabler and actively evil, and the women are all doe-eyed innocents who want to dance in the woods. Does this play add anything to the conversation, or merely validate an already-sympathetic audience?