If you had told a college-aged Kimberly Belflower that one day she’d have a play on Broadway while teaching promising young playwrights at Emory University, she might not have believed you.
“I’d have been like, ‘Uh, what do you mean?’” she laughs.
These days, the assistant professor of dramatic writing in Emory’s theatre studies and creative writing programs says she’s soaking in every moment of the Broadway debut of her play “John Proctor is the Villain.”
The drama is a coming-of-age story about a group of high school girls reading the Arthur Miller play “The Crucible” at their small-town Georgia high school when they start to notice similarities between the lives of the characters in the play and scandals brewing in their own world.
Belflower’s play, which draws parallels between the Salem witch trials and the #MeToo movement, garnered acclaim during runs at Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., and Huntington Theatre in Boston. Its Broadway premiere at the Booth Theater in April is directed by Dayna Taymor and features Sadie Sink in the lead.
Belflower’s previous plays include “Gondal,” “Lost Girl” (winner of the Kennedy Center Darrell Ayers Playwriting Award), “The Sky Game” and “Only Reason” (formerly titled “Teen Girl FANtasties;” co-written with Megan Tabaque). Her work has been commissioned, produced and developed by theaters and colleges around the country.
“It’s been pretty thrilling,” says Belflower of her Broadway debut. “At the same time, I’m also trying to remind myself to just slow down and be present for it.”
Getting to Broadway
That’s been the case every step of the way, says Belflower, who’s still a little floored about how her acclaimed play reached this point.
It started with a movie star. Or, more accurately, with a text from her agent about a movie star.
“My agent told me he was going to get my play in front of Sadie Sink,” Belflower says.
Sink, famous for playing Max in the Netflix series “Stranger Things” and starring in that 10-minute Taylor Swift music video for the song “All Too Well,” began her career on Broadway and wished to return to the stage.
Belflower says she dismissed the idea as a long shot.
“Then, a few months later — long enough that I’d forgotten about it — he texted me, ‘Sadie Sink read the play. She loves it. She wants to be Shelby,’ which is one of the two leads.”
So began a whirlwind year and a half which included a staged script-reading with Sink and other actors, chats about creative direction with Tony-winning director Taymor, “whom I’d been dying to work with,” says Belflower, and waiting. Lots of waiting.
Finally, the play’s Broadway debut was confirmed in October.
“And I’m so excited,” Belflower says. “At every moment I try to tell myself, ‘If all that happens is this, then this is more than I ever thought would happen, and I’m gonna just try really hard to soak it up, be present and take it day by day.’”
Why ‘John Proctor is the Villain’
The story of the play began in 2017, when Belflower picked up a book by historian Stacy Schiff about the Salem witch trials, a topic she thinks “a lot of women and girls are interested in.”
She says one reason for this interest can be found in an assertion Schiff makes early on: that the witch trials and the suffrage movement were the only two moments in American history when women played the central role.
Belflower says the book opened her eyes to the historical realities of the young women accused of witchcraft in late-1600s Massachusetts.
“Many were orphans,” she says. “Many of them had been sexually assaulted; it was just this really bleak reality of these men manipulating them in order to get land or gain power.”
Shortly after she finished the book, the world saw the first accusations that would proliferate into the #MeToo movement, in which women publicized their experiences of sexual harassment or assault, often using social media.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, this feels like another moment in time when women are at the center,’” Belflower says. “And then, I think it was Woody Allen who first called #MeToo a ‘witch hunt.’”
Belflower decided to reread “The Crucible,” the Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch trials based loosely on historical records. At the center of the play is the protagonist John Proctor, who has rebuffed the advances of his former servant, 17-year-old Abigail, after ending a previous affair between them.
“When I’d read it in high school, John Proctor had been this classic tragic hero, and Abigail, this teenage hussy,” Belflower recalls.
Rereading the play in the aftermath of #MeToo, she adds, shocked her. “I heard myself say, ‘It’s crazy, because John Proctor feels like the villain.’”
That’s when a bell went off. “When I start to get certain feelings in my gut and in my brain,” she says, “I know, ‘This is going to be something.’”
She had already submitted a different play to the Farm Theater’s College Collaboration Project supporting early-career playwrights. During her interview, the program’s director asked what else she was working on.
She told him about her new obsession with “The Crucible” and #MeToo. “And he said, ‘Oh, that’s the play I want to commission,’” Belflower recalls.
As part of her research, Belflower interviewed young women who’d been in high school and college during #MeToo. She asked them about topics ranging from their recollections of “The Crucible,” to their experience of sex education.
The conversations led to a breakthrough. Belflower says she realized that the students felt no connection to the men who’d been outed for sexual misconduct, including “Harvey Weinstein, this dude who’d produced movies before most of them were born.”
She asked them: “‘What would you feel like if Harry Styles were accused of the same things?’ And they were like, ‘Well, he wouldn’t be.’ And I said, ‘Okay, but what if he was?’”
Belflower was discovering a central conflict of her play: What happens when someone you know and trust is guilty of sexual misconduct? What are the implications for the larger world you live in?
At the same time, she says she saw parallels between the conservative, religious small town where she was raised and the culture of Puritan New England depicted in “The Crucible.”
“I keep saying, I wish this play wasn’t still relevant,” she says, “but things repeat themselves.”
