Reviewed by:

• John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower, and: The Good John Proctor by Talene Monahon
• Sean F. Edgecomb

The past year saw productions of two original plays inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain and Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor. In their exciting scripts, Belflower and Monahon respond to how Miller’s play pulled the focus from women (particularly the adolescent girls who acted as accusers in the story), to center and sanctify the character of John Proctor. Proctor is considered a “modern tragic hero” and a paragon of integrity by a slew of literary critics.

Belflower and Monahon present contemporary feminist narratives that recenter women while helping to fill in the gaps that remain in official, patriarchal histories of the Salem Witch Trials. In this sense, the female characters in both plays engage in a kind of witchcraft—not as a religious practice, but rather as redefined by Sylvia Frederici as a “transfer of [feminist] knowledge.” Both playwrights engage a feminist perspective to question John Proctor’s character—but with different, equally dynamic approaches.

Belflower uses a high school class studying The Crucible to resurrect and embody the women failed by Proctor in Miller’s play, namely Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor, as a commentary on the #MeToo movement. In contrast, Monahon returns to the seventeenth century and reimagines the period that led to Salem’s witch hysteria. Playing with contemporary language to show how Abigail Williams and her younger cousin Betty (both central to Miller’s narrative), were forced into their situation, Monahon exposes a world where Puritan superstition, draconian rules, and rampant misogyny grounded in religious fervor ensured that women in 1692 Salem were denied authority, voice, and freedom.

Miller wrote The Crucible as a theatrical excoriation of the Red Scare in the United States, taking up fear of witches as an allegory of McCarthyism. The play remains a widely produced fictionalization of real-life events, and while it was never Miller’s intention to write an accurate account of the Trials, The Crucible has undoubtedly become the interpretation encountered by most people. Such confusion is exacerbated by an ongoing cultural obsession with Salem’s witchy history, which has in turn inspired a variety of adaptations of the story that are more often interested in occult fantasy than historical fact.

Jordan Slattery (Raelyn), Miranda Rizzolo (Beth), and Deidre Staples (Nell) in John Proctor is the Villain. Photo: Margot Schulman.

Belflower pulls upon the ubiquitous popularity of The Crucible by setting her play in a high school English class in rural Georgia. Miller’s play is a part of the curriculum—just as it has been across the United States since its publication. Much like in The Crucible, the plot largely revolves around [End Page 366] teenage girls—Raelyn (Jordan Slattery), the Baptist minister’s daughter who longs to see more of the world than her one-stoplight town; Shelby (Juliana Sass), Raelyn’s former best friend, who has only just returned after leaving town for several months amidst rumors that she got an abortion after getting pregnant with Raelyn’s boyfriend; Beth (Miranda Rizzolo), a Pollyannaish, straight-A student whose feminist intentions are sometimes clouded by her Christian conservatism; Ivy (Resa Mishina), whose father has just been accused of having an affair with his secretary; and finally Nell (Deidre Staples), a Black student, whose family has just relocated from Atlanta, and who is sometimes perplexed by the small-minded inequities of backwoods politics, where church and state are anything but separate. The hyper-realistic classroom set design by Luciana Stecconi reminded the audience that while the classroom is supposedly designed to be a space for the dissemination of knowledge and hopefully the generation of new, more inclusive ideas, the public education system in places like rural Georgia can also be a site of censorship...

审阅者：

• 约翰·普罗克特（John Proctor）是金伯利·贝尔弗劳尔（Kimberly Belflower）的恶棍，以及塔林·莫纳洪（Talene Monahon）的《好约翰·普罗克特》
• 肖恩·F·埃奇科姆

去年，受阿瑟·米勒的《坩埚》启发，制作了两部原创戏剧：金伯利·贝尔弗劳尔的《约翰·普罗克特是恶棍》和塔林·莫纳洪的《好约翰·普罗克托》。在他们激动人心的剧本中，贝尔弗劳尔和莫纳洪回应了米勒的戏剧如何将注意力从女性（尤其是故事中充当原告的青春期女孩）转移到中心并神圣化约翰·普罗克特的角色。普罗克托被众多文学评论家视为“现代悲剧英雄”和正直的典范。

贝尔弗劳尔和莫纳洪呈现了当代女权主义叙事，这些叙事重新审视了女性，同时帮助填补了塞勒姆女巫审判的官方父权历史中仍然存在的空白。从这个意义上说，两部剧中的女性角色都从事一种巫术——不是一种宗教活动，而是被西尔维娅·弗雷德里奇重新定义为“[女权主义]知识的转移”。两位剧作家都从女权主义的角度来质疑约翰·普罗克特的性格，但采用了不同但同样充满活力的方法。

贝尔弗劳尔利用高中班级学习《坩埚》的方式，复活并体现了米勒戏剧中被普罗克特失败的女性，即阿比盖尔·威廉姆斯和伊丽莎白·普罗克特，作为对#MeToo运动的评论。相比之下，莫纳洪回到了十七世纪，重新想象了导致塞勒姆女巫歇斯底里的那个时期。莫纳洪运用当代语言来展示阿比盖尔·威廉姆斯和她的表弟贝蒂（两人都是米勒叙述的核心）如何被迫陷入自己的处境，揭露了一个清教徒迷信、严厉的规则和根植于宗教狂热的猖獗的厌女症的世界，确保妇女在1692 塞勒姆被剥夺了权力、发言权和自由。

米勒将《坩埚》写成对美国红色恐慌的戏剧性谴责，将对女巫的恐惧视为麦卡锡主义的寓言。该剧仍然是对现实生活事件进行广泛制作的虚构作品，虽然米勒从来没有意图准确地描述审判，但《坩埚》无疑已成为大多数人遇到的解释。这种混乱因对塞勒姆巫术历史的持续文化痴迷而加剧，这反过来又激发了对该故事的各种改编，这些改编往往对神秘幻想而不是历史事实更感兴趣。

《约翰·普罗克特》中的反派是乔丹·斯莱特里（雷琳饰）、米兰达·里佐罗（贝丝饰）和黛德丽·斯台普斯（内尔饰） 。照片：玛戈特·舒尔曼。

贝尔弗劳尔利用《坩埚》的普遍受欢迎，将她的戏剧设定在佐治亚州乡村的一所高中英语课上。米勒的戏剧是课程的一部分——正如它自出版以来在美国各地的普及一样。就像《坩埚》一样，故事情节主要围绕[完第366页]十几岁的女孩展开——雷琳（乔丹·斯莱特里饰），浸信会牧师的女儿，渴望看到更多的世界，而不仅仅是她的一号灯小镇；谢尔比（朱莉安娜·萨斯饰）是雷琳以前最好的朋友，她离开小镇几个月后才回来，因为有传言说她怀上了雷琳的男朋友而堕胎；贝丝（米兰达·里佐罗饰）是一位盲目乐观的全优学生，她的女权主义意图有时会被她的基督教保守主义所蒙蔽。艾维（Resa Mishina 饰）的父亲刚刚被指控与他的秘书有染；最后是内尔（黛德丽·斯台普斯饰），一名黑人学生，他的家人刚刚从亚特兰大搬来，有时他对边远地区政治中狭隘的不平等感到困惑，在这种政治中，教会和国家根本不是分开的。Luciana Stecconi 的超现实教室布景设计提醒观众，虽然教室应该被设计为传播知识并希望产生新的、更具包容性的想法的空间，但佐治亚州农村等地的公共教育系统可以也成为审查网站...