Playwright Kimberly Belflower grew up in a two-stoplight town in a dry county in rural Georgia. Back in high school, Belflower didn’t think of her experience as distinctive. But when she started writing, her vision of her past changed.
“The South can be a very misunderstood place so when I started to become a young artist, I felt I had to kind of hide the fact that I was from the South or people wouldn’t take me seriously,” she told the Herald. “As I got older, I realized (my upbringing) was a gold mine of specificity and it means more and more to me.”
Belflower unearthed nuggets from her life to build the world of “John Proctor is the Villain” — presented by the Huntington now through March 10 at the Calderwood Pavilion.
The play takes a hard, biting look at “The Crucible” as a group of 11th graders study Arthur Miller’s work about the Salem witch trials at their backwater Georgia high school. Through class, “The Crucible,” and the trials of the modern high school experience, friends Beth, Raelynn, Nell, Ivy, and Shelby find their own definitions of friendship, feminism, and repressive, destructive gender-based power dynamics.
In the wake of the Me Too movement, Belflower reflected on her own past and the power dynamics she grew up with while writing “John Proctor is the Villain.”
“As a 30-year-old, I looked back and reframed all of these things that I just accepted as fact (and wondered) ‘What would it be like to be coming of age in this moment when the cultural norms are shifting? When the rules are being rewritten in real time?” she said. “I also wanted to write about where I grew up and examine in what ways was the place isolated and in what ways was it connected to the large culture in a new way.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, “John Proctor is the Villain” is often described as a comedy. Belflower doesn’t dispute this description, but she also doesn’t think it defines the work.
“It’s a comedy until it’s not,” she said. “There is some structural trickery. We talked a lot in rehearsals about not wanting to tip the hat to the central reveal (of the play).”
Part of this comes from Belflower’s writing style. Part of it comes from the natural language of teenagers.
“Comedy is just so central to how groups of teenager friends are with each other,” she said.
The Huntington’s production arrives in Salem’s backyard. The witch trials examined in “The Crucible” and reinterpreted in “John Proctor is the Villain” happened just up the road.
But Belflower’s work — as grounded as it is in a specific place — serves as a reminder that these unjust, unrelenting power dynamics are ubiquitous. They run from 17th century Salem to rural Georgia to Boston.
For tickets and details, visit huntingtontheatre.org
