How ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ Uses Lorde to Celebrate Girlhood

For playwright Kimberly Belflower, there’s countless individuals that helped turn her play John Proctor Is the Villain from a collaborative college workshop into the hit play currently running on Broadway. But the person she uniquely credits the core of the show might take people by surprise: Australian-born global superstar Lorde. 

John Proctor Is the Villain premiered on Broadway on April 14, dropping audiences straight into the middle of a Georgia school year. Led by their fearless teacher Mr. Smith (Gabriel Ebert) and a bucketful of Southern twang, high school juniors Beth (Fina Strazza), Nell (Morgan Scott), Ivy (Maggie Kuntz), Raelyn (Amalia Yoo) are overwhelmed the stresses of high school, boyfriends, and their failing attempts to start a feminism club. But when their classmate Shelby (Sadie Sink) returns to school from a mysterious absence, class discussions on their new section on The Crucible turns the spotlight away from their books and directly onto each other. John Proctor Is the Villain continually brings up problems and tensions that feel bigger than this small Georgia classroom, but Belflower’s play makes a surprising and emotional argument: when things feel like they can’t be solved, they can still be felt. 

“As someone who grew up in a culture that [emphasized] girls should be polite, it’s kind of pushing back against that,” Belflower says, both describing the songs used for the play and the show’s core tension as well. “It’s like, ‘Why should I have to be polite? I’m fucking mad.’ We’re all enraged for different reasons, but to see that in each other opens us up to something. Shared rage can be so powerful.” 

Even before the curtains opens, audiences are treated to a playlist — curated by Belflower, director Danya Taymor, and sound designer Palmer Hefferan— of female pop hits from artists like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Katy Perry, and Janelle Monáe, all meant to evoke that indescribable feeling of being a teenager and angry as fuck. It’s a setting that feels almost explosive, an energy Belflower tells Rolling Stone she felt while writing it in 2018 and wanted to capture. But the musical lynchpin of the show is Lorde’s “Green Light,” off the singer’s 2017 record Melodrama — which is mentioned, discussed, and dissected throughout the show, eventually culminating an explosive performance before the curtain falls. 

“Even before I knew how the play was going to end, I knew there would be a dance to Green Light,” Belflower, 37,  tells Rolling Stone. “When I listened to it [for the first time] it punched me in the gut and ripped open my soul.” 

It’s one thing to be inspired by a song off a Grammy-nominated album. It’s another thing to have the entire song in your play. The road from conception to performance, including publishing the play, involved detailed negotiations between Belflower’s and Lorde’s team. But Belflower felt like one more thing was necessary: a letter addressed to Lorde herself. 

“‘Green Light’ captures what it’s like to move through trauma, a painful experience, and come out on the other side knowing that I’m gonna make something out of it. I’ve been through hell but that hell has given me access to something new. It’s the axis of defiance,” Belflower says. “I wrote her explaining what the song means to me and what it means to the characters — and why it had to be that song.” 

In the show, Mr. Smith uses classes to hone in on some of the most memorable aspects of Miller’s work. The girls found naked in the forest and accused of witchcraft quickly turn the eyes of the law from themselves onto the townspeople, starting a fever of trials. John Proctor, who is revealed to have had an affair with 17-year-old Abigail Williams, ends the story as a hero, never having apologized to the women he hurt but dying with his name — and integrity — intact. Beth, Nell, Shelby, Ivy, and Raelyn discuss the book in and out of class, drawing lines between the plot and modern movements like #MeToo and the Women’s March. But the strength of the work comes from how all of the girls, especially best friends Raelynn and Shelby, realize that taking action can be something as simple as letting your emotions roil to the surface. Dancing naked in the woods made the girls in the Crucible feel something. Maybe these Georgia teens need it too. 

Having Sink play such a pivotal role in a story around blinding anger isn’t an accident. The Stranger Things actress is also known for starring in the short film for Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” a song practically made to scream and cry unintelligible on a long drive with friends. “I remember who I was when I heard “All Too Well” for the first time,” Belflower says. “For Sadie to be the Taylor Swift avatar in that short film and for that song to have carried me from my mid 20s to my mid 30s, it’s so meaningful to me.” 

Coming-of-age stories are pretty common settings for artistic projects, but the play is debuting alongside a newfound popularity for girlhood in pop culture. In the past two years, some of the biggest trends included girl math, girl dinner, viral TikTok formats and sounds about being “girls together.” The concept of girlhood has become part of the connective tissue of online culture. But at the same time, the rise of the girl feels inescapable from a political climate that seems determined to strip women of their rights from every angle. From a lack of abortion access to intense attacks on trans girls on sports teams at every level, it feels hard to imagine celebration existing at the same time as all of this concern. But Belflower thinks the attacks are proof that there’s something powerful about what women can do as a collective, and why even a full body dance to a Lorde song can mean something deeper — something freeing. 

“People are naming girlhood as this precious thing and I hope that it makes us feel more protective of it. Politicians are feeling threatened by the collective power of it. They’re trying to strip us of the connection we have to each other by limiting who can be [a part],” Belflower says. “The play has always been concerned with how power perpetuates itself and how hierarchies are built to last and hard to disrupt. The systems are not going to take care of us. We have to take care of each other.”