Sadie Sink confronts ‘The Crucible’

Virtually no high school English course in the United States is immune to the study of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play that used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism’s hunt for accused communists.

Kimberly Belflower, the playwright behind 2025’s buzzed-about Broadway production John Proctor Is the Villain, first read Miller’s work her junior year while growing up in a small rural town in Appalachia, Ga. She specifically remembers how her class unpacked the “Christian, moral fortitude” of John Proctor, a married Salem man who has an affair with Abigail, an orphaned teenage girl who used to work in his home and is now accusing townsfolk of witchcraft. Nowadays, we have a better vocabulary to more accurately describe what transpired between John and Abigail.

“I was raised in a Southern Baptist church,” Belflower tells Entertainment Weekly over the phone, days before the show’s opening night on April 14. “I also was very much a Beth” — the character in her play, performed on Broadway by Fina Strazza — “so I really just took anything any authority figure, and teacher especially, said to me as the gospel: ‘That’s what they say John Proctor is, [so] that’s what he is.'”

She read the play again a few years later in a college script analysis class — a course, she says, that catered to the work of white men. But it wasn’t until she reread it for a second time in the fall of 2017, when The New York Times broke the story on the Harvey Weinstein allegations and gave the #MeToo movement the fuel it needed, that inspiration truly struck.

“I had just read this amazing nonfiction book, The Witches by Stacy Schiff, that was all about recontextualizing what was going on in the lives of these young girls during the Salem witch trials,” Belflower recalls. “Then when Woody Allen called #MeToo a witch hunt, I was like, ‘Oh! I should reread The Crucible.’ It just really brought certain dynamics to the surface.”

Over the next seven years, Belflower wrote John Proctor Is the Villain, first commissioned by The Farm Theater in 2017 and performed in Washington, D.C., and Boston. Now opening today at Broadway’s Booth Theatre under the direction of Tony winner Danya Taymor, the production follows a group of high school junior girls living in a one-stoplight community — not unlike Belflower’s hometown — in Appalachia in 2018.

In the story, Stranger Things breakthrough star Sadie Sink plays Shelby Holcomb, who used to be best friends with Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo) before Shelby hooked up with her boyfriend, Lee Turner (Hagan Oliveras), and left town to supposedly live with family in Atlanta. But now Shelby’s back, which ruffles the friend group, including the studious Beth Powell (Strazza), the WASP-y Ivy Watkins (Maggie Kuntz), and new student and Atlanta transplant Nell Shaw (Morgan Scott).

The girls attempt to launch a feminist club as their English class begins their study of Miller’s The Crucible, led by their teacher Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert), but when accusations of sexual misconduct begin to roll through their town at this unique convergence, it forces them to confront their own traumas.

The cast also includes Nihar Duvvuri as Lee’s friend Mason Adams and Molly Griggs as Ms. Bailey Gallagher, the school guidance counselor.

“I think some people assume that, oh, I hate The Crucible, I’m trying to cancel The Crucible,” Belflower says. “I think it would be pretty miserable to spend seven years of my life writing a play in conversation with something I hated. I certainly don’t hate The Crucible. The way that The Crucible is taught is actually what the play is digging into, which is a smaller school version of how power structures on the biggest and smaller scales are built to perpetuate one narrative and encourage very binary thinking and prioritize select few people — which goes back to that college class where it was only white men. And then Arthur Miller himself wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism. So it just felt like such a natural fit to interrogate these things.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

As the larger #MeToo movement progressed, so did Belflower’s list of inspirations. Taylor Swift’s legal battle against former radio DJ David Mueller was one touchstone. In 2017, Swift won her sexual assault lawsuit in Denver after she sued Mueller for groping her during a meet-and-greet. Hoping to use the trial as an example for other women, she sought only a single dollar in damages, which a judge awarded her.

John Proctor Is the Villain makes multiple Swift references, including to this trial, because Belflower is a self-proclaimed Swiftie — not just because one of her stars, Sink, was featured in the singer’s 2021 All Too Well: The Short Film.

“I remember that moment,” the playwright says of Swift’s trial. “It started happening right before the huge [#MeToo] tidal wave happened and then coincided with it. So much of her early career was such ‘the quintessential good girl,’ and she was just so agreeable… ‘I don’t want to talk about politics, I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, I’m just a sweet girl.’ I really identified with that. That’s how I was. So to see her push back against that and be like, ‘No, this happened to me, I’m not going to just swallow it’… I remember that feeling shocking and thrilling.”

Belflower continues, “A lot of the #MeToo movement really made me look back on my own life and look at things that I wrote off.”

She can rest assured that no one will be writing off John Proctor Is the Villain this Broadway season.

John Proctor Is the Villain opens today at Broadway’s Booth Theatre.