Michelle Goldberg: Why women are leaving this Broadway show in tears

I cried the first time I saw the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the #MeToo movement, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears. This past weekend, I went a second time with a friend. As the houselights went up, she was crying, as was the woman in the row in front of us. They spontaneously hugged, which is something I’ve never seen before at a Broadway show. Outside the theater, two women were sobbing.

At least since the time of Aristotle, catharsis has been understood as one of the chief purposes of theater, but it’s been a while since I’ve experienced it so viscerally, and I kept wondering why this play is having such an intense effect on so many. (No other play has received more Tony nominations this year.)

One reason for its power, I suspect, is that it transports the viewer back to a time when #MeToo still felt alive with possibility, the moment before the backlash when it seemed we might be on the cusp of a more just and equal world. It’s not an uplifting play — an innocent girl is punished, and a guilty man is not — but it is still shot through with a kind of hope that’s now in short supply.

“John Proctor Is the Villain” takes place in 2018 and revolves around an honors English class studying Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” The girls in the class are smart and ambitious; they’re also, like many teenagers everywhere, swoony and bursting with contradictory emotions. They’re so excited about the #MeToo movement that they want to start a feminism club at their school, which school officials do not, at first, want to allow. Tensions in the community, their guidance counselor tells them, are too high.

Those tensions soon creep in to the high school and start to shake the girls’ solidarity. The father of one of the girls is accused of sexual harassment by two women, which leads her to question #MeToo. “We can punish the men if they’re proven guilty, but if we find out the girls are making it up they should get punished just as bad,” she says. Another girl, Shelby — played by “Stranger Things” star Sadie Sink — returns from a mysterious absence with her own destabilizing accusation. Their drama is refracted through their engagement with “The Crucible.” In “John Proctor Is the Villain” the increasingly common idea that #MeToo was a witch hunt is turned inside out.

The playwright, Kimberly Belflower, had been captivated by the #MeToo movement when it revved up in 2017. “It just felt like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re doing this. We’re naming these things,’” she told me recently. It gave her a new lens on her own adolescence in rural Georgia. “I didn’t have the vocabulary for this then, but I do now,” she said.

Belflower was first inspired to reread “The Crucible” after hearing Woody Allen caution against “a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere,” in the wake of allegations against Harvey Weinstein. She wrote the play’s culminating dialogue during the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, who at least one conservative compared to the hero of “The Crucible,” John Proctor.

It’s a scene between Raelynn, a well-behaved preacher’s daughter nurturing a secret well of rebellion, and Shelby, her childhood best friend. For a class project, they’ve imagined dialogue between Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, and the vengeful Abigail Williams, his discarded teenage mistress. “One day, maybe, the new world we were promised will actually be new,” says Raelynn as Elizabeth. “One day, maybe, the men in charge won’t be in charge anymore.”

It’s a line that must have hit very differently in 2018 than it does now, amid the #MeToo movement’s wreckage. Since the play was written, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury and then elected again as president. Andrew Cuomo, who had to resign as governor of New York over accusations of sexual harassment, will likely be New York City’s next mayor. And Weinstein, who is being retried in New York after his 2020 conviction was thrown out because of judicial errors, could well be acquitted. (He’d remain in prison for his conviction in California.)

Today, it’s become almost conventional wisdom that #MeToo was a shameful episode of mass hysteria. The movement, wrote Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press, would likely be remembered as “a machine that wrecked the lives of men by labeling them sex offenders, without due process and often without even the most perfunctory concern for whether the allegations were true.”

I don’t want to deny that the #MeToo movement made mistakes — that I made mistakes — and that the rage fueling it sometimes felt as if it was burning out of control. But it was also a period when that rage was finally taken seriously, when many women no longer felt that they needed to accept abuse and harassment as a given, when the machine that wrecks women’s lives by labeling them crazy briefly sputtered out.

“John Proctor Is the Villain” brings back the furious exhilaration of that time, though you know as you’re watching it how quickly it will be extinguished. When she wrote the play in 2018, said Belflower, “It felt like, ‘Oh, maybe we’re going to change the institutions. Maybe we’re going to change these cycles of power.’ And now it feels like, ‘OK, those institutions are not going to take care of us. We have to take care of us.’” What’s devastating in her play is watching teenage girls take care of one another when no one else will.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.