“John Proctor is the villain”

In John Proctor is the villainKimberly Belflower’s angry, funny and excellent new piece, both the surprise and the true potency of the title in how quickly his moment pulled at a speed – the speed at which the expression gushes an idea and, perhaps even more decisively, with which he is released. In a classroom of the 11th grade in rural Georgia, seven students read The melting pot With her very cool teacher Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert, who demonstrates his genius for subtle terrifying characters, who, like such sweet, funny, sensitive boys, seem to be). Mr. Smith is the guy who enchants children, no matter where they are on the sexual continuous continuum: secular, potential ivy (Maggie Kuntz) and the clever, especially shoes transfer, Nell (Morgan Scott) titter over his hunting pants than it is out of the room, while the anxious, heterosexual, heter yoo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yoo-yoo-yo-yoo-yo-yo-my-my-my-my-Fina-Streza). Friend. “A student named Shelby Holcomb (Sadie Sink, who takes a break from Hawkins and gives a body strike of a performance) is not there for this conversation. She has been away from school in mysterious ways for months, and the wild joke of the girls is slowed down when her name is mentioned – after all, she was lifelong best friends with Raelynn (Amalia Yoo) until she was with Raynn’s friend (Hagan Oliveras).

Shelby’s A-Lot-Ness-Focus a few scenes later when Mr. Smith tries to argue about Arthur Miller. “Because it is my name! Because I can’t have anyone else in my life!” All except Shelby. “I don’t understand … her name is literally just a word that someone else gave them,” she emphasizes. “… that’s called Are: You are fiction. But my body is a fact. I live in it … Abigail was a person … but John Proctor is only obsessed with this invented thing … He just pretends that I don’t know how his fiction is more important than her fact? I mean, that’s shit. John Proctor is clearly the villain, isn’t it? “

Bless the director Danya Taymor that she takes a closer look at Belelwer’s note to speed. “The number of pages may be high,” writes the playwright, “but this game moves very, very quickly. If it is over 1: 45-1: 50ish, they become too slow.” Taymor keeps things crackling (it comes by an hour and 40 minutes), as well as falling energy and visibly rattles around in it like so many hydrogen atoms that are ready to burn. After her return, Shelby has brought something dangerous and explosive into her old classroom, her old group of friends, her old life – something for which you are not ready to articulate it herself. It finds in her criticism of voice of The melting potBut Mr. Smith jumps to close it. “John Proctor is one of the great heroes of the American theater,” he explains – defensively. At that moment I wondered how many spectators had a look back: my own teacher of 11th grade practically used the same words. We loved this game. We loved Proctors speech. He had DefectsYes, but he was an honorable man, a Good Man. We were taught the same about Robert E. Lee.

Together with a skill to work out the character from the casual contours of the contemporary language The melting pot But not too much. This is not a reef or a rewriting. Miller’s text acts as a kind of flint – a surface on which the characters of Belflower, especially Shelby, can produce sparks, but the fire that grows. They are the living, rings souls who deal more with more than every teenager and do just like many. They are the corpses of the name of Proctor – and they have a lot to puzzle and threaten them before he and his fiction enter the picture. “Oh no …” gasped Beth for air and checks your phone at lunch. “Oh my god. Your people. Oh my god.” One of the sharp, sad jokes of John Proctor Is that Beth and her friends have tried to found a “feminism club” (to “spread awareness, promote dialogue and ignite changes”, recites his founder with the zeal with college applications), but the everyday women in life stand in the way. On this day, the girls’ phones are weakened with a panicked text by Ivy: their rich, successful father was accused by a former employee. “She says that how stuff happened Between them. I mean, not good things in a not good kind, ”Beth joked, as was rejected by her usual fervor.

Belflower, real disasters, real moral and emotional complications begin to approach the fabric of the days of the pupils and the piece they read in restless new relief begins with the sharpest needles. “I don’t know if I still feel good …”, Ivy tells her friends close to tears when she tries to return from the Feminism Club after her father’s shame. “I mean, these are people of people FathersYou know? “It is true that it is not in the way the poor ivy means. Women, no matter what,” says Beth, shaken and thanks after your teacher was involved. “But I only know him, know how the best person I know is preferably Person … “

In a way, John Proctor is the villain Forms a powerful accompanying piece for Bess. liberation. One closes when the other opens; One testifies to a group of women 50 years ago and used every tool they had to try to get a better world for themselves and their daughters, literally and in other ways. The other turns the daughters of their daughters from half a century “progress” behind them, intersectionality in their vocabulary and Taylor Swift and Lorde are on their iPhones Despite it Confronting, even internalizing daily assumptions at the basic level of their own fewer people, their own fundamental inferiority in the ranks of mankind. The game of Belfower is full of cing and zest, but there is also a heartache at every moment when the wonderful Yoo’s Raelyn-Ssoor was carefully, thoughtfully and with doubt-attempted to construct a feeling of self-worth, after seven years in which he was with a boy like Lee, and for a lifetime with a mother who did my face. Every moment when Beth checks; Or Ivy Retreats; Or the well-meaning, flawless southern school advisor Miss Gallagher (Molly Griggs) encourages the girls to “choose their words with care” because “feminism is only the people at the moment, it is a confidant and terrible encryption. Since NASA is ordered, refer to women in leaders Women Appears on a list of terms in which the current administration tries to wipe out of federal materials. How can we not appear and see together with Shelby? “Maybe she didn’t go crazy because she was always crazy,” jokes Raelynn. Or maybe crazy Is the way every awakening soul looks and feels in such a crazy and brutal world. Forget the villain – Belflowers game hits as hard as it is because it is the kind of heroes that we actually need when you fight through a hell of a junior year that we actually need.

John Proctor is the villain is at the stand theater.