Before the characters in Northern Stage’s production of “John Proctor is the Villain” said a word in Sunday’s performance, what the audience heard was laughter.
Not a modest chuckle, but a giddy, disembodied chorus of cackles that ricocheted around the theater — the giggles of a group of girls driven to hysterics by an inside joke, or maybe the blood-chilling laughter of a coven of witches. It might depend on who’s listening.
That laughter, its glee and foreboding, stayed with me throughout the production, directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley.
Set in 2018, a year after the #MeToo movement rose to global prominence, and given thoughtful treatment by Northern Stage, “John Proctor” offers a biting, comedic portrait of five teenagers in the thick of a reckoning with what they’ve been taught about power, goodness and the validity of their own experience.
When the trill of laughter in the play’s opening moments dissipated, stage lights shone on a high school classroom where a handsome English teacher, Mr. Smith, led a unit on sex education, to everyone’s embarrassment, including his own.
The school, set in a one-stoplight town in Georgia, was facing budget cuts, so in lieu of a designated health teacher, Mr. Smith was tasked with devoting a short chunk of class time to reciting the textbook definition for “sex” and sliding condoms onto bananas (illuminating stuff).
What he and his most devoted students, a group of whip-smart girls, really wanted was to talk about Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” a staple of high school English that makes an allegorical link between the 17th-century Salem witch trials and 1950s McCarthyism.
Class discussion focused on the farmer John Proctor, who has an affair with his 17-year-old servant, Abigail Williams. When Abigail is dismissed from her job, she starts a rumor that Proctor and others in the village are practicing witchcraft. In a seemingly great act of heroism, Proctor chooses to be hanged rather than confess to such a crime, which he claims he didn’t commit.
The girls in Mr. Smith’s class normally cling to his every word, but the more they read “The Crucible,” the more they question his assertion that Proctor is a great hero of literature.
A feminist awakening is starting to take root in them, fueled by the pop anthems of Lorde and the arrival of outspoken new classmate Nell Shaw, who dazzles the group with her comparatively cosmopolitan Atlanta upbringing.
Nell, whose wit and moral center come through in Chloe Kaitlyn Brown’s endearing portrayal, pushes the girls to think for themselves. When cheerleader Raelynn Nix (Sidney Diaz) frets about whether she should give in and have sex with her pushy ex-boyfriend, Lee Turner, who cheated on her with her best friend Shelby Holcomb (Adriana Scalice), Nell interrupts her hand-wringing with a question:
“Do you want to have sex, or do you want to have sex with Lee?” (Upon reflection, the person Raelynn really wants to have sex with is Selena Gomez.)
When we encounter the girls, they’re attempting to start a feminist club, only to be met with resistance from the school until Mr. Smith swoops in to sponsor it.
But their modern values (upon which they don’t all agree) get put to the test when the girls experience sexual predation in their lives and community. It’s a lot harder to preach believing survivors when the accused are people they love and respect.
Tensions reach new heights when Shelby returns to school and the reason for her months-long leave-of-absence comes to light.
Playwright Kimberly Belflower shows great reverence for her female characters’ intelligence and precocious spirits. Their complicated bond is made stronger by Wansley’s sharp directing and the actors’ shimmering performances. Northern Stage recently announced that Wansley, the theater’s BOLD associate artistic director, will be moving on to become artistic director of the University of Delaware’s theater company in residence.
Some of the play’s best scenes on Sunday night were when the girls were alone together on stage, debating one another about feminism or pledging allegiance to Taylor Swift and her scathing lyrics about the men she’s dated. These students are weird and funny, and anxious to be appreciated for those qualities, which also makes them vulnerable to people who see that hunger as an opportunity to manipulate them.
Though the girls might not all agree on whether Proctor is indeed the play’s villain, their postmortem of his treatment of Abigail and his wife, Elizabeth Proctor, shines a red-hot light on the way narratives of power are upheld in the lessons we teach, the people we revere and the voices we stifle.
“Is his fiction more important than her fact?” Shelby asks about Proctor sacrificing himself to protect his name. A name, she argues, is make-believe anyway.
With the height of #MeToo not even a decade old, Shelby’s question still looms large today. On Monday, The New York Times reported that a New York prosecutor is reopening an investigation into accusations of a 2024 sexual assault at Cornell University from a woman who alleges she was given drugs and alcohol and raped by multiple men in a fraternity house. Who will be given credence? Whose voice will be honored and whose will be muzzled?
Belflower has some ideas. At the play’s end, the girls’ voices, their stories, can no longer be ignored. They become a force larger than themselves — physical, immutable, a whirlwind of change.
Northern Stage’s production of “John Proctor is the Villain” is up through Oct. 11 in White River Junction. For tickets ($35-$81; $29 for students and youth under 25) go to northernstage.org or call 802-297-7000.