Inquiring minds want to know: Who’s next? Who’s next in this season’s inclination to peg a sequel or a prequel to The Crucible? That is, of course, Arthur Miller’s look into the actual 1692 Salem, Massachusetts witch hunts that so horrifyingly preceded the House Un-American Committee witch hunts held in the 1950s and the witch hunts Donald J. Trump relentlessly insists are occurring here, there, and everywhere today.
Only a few months back, Sarah Ruhl checked in on the Lincoln Center campus with Rebecca Nurse of Salem. It was a sequel wherein contemporary Rebecca Nurse, also of Salem and a descendent of the 17th-century Rebecca Nurse, descends into contemporary witch-y behavior to no ultimate avail.
Now, with the Ruhl work hardly faded from memory, arrives The Good John Proctor. For this prequel, Talene Monahon appropriates the name of the man hanged as a witch in the classic Miller opus as she dispenses implications of how those young Salem girls came to name names (hey, there HUAC!) with multiple homicidal results.
Yes, they were girls, not yet women. And when Isabella Byrd’s restrained lights go up, two of them – 12-year-old Abigail Williams (Susannah Perkins) and Betty Parris (Sharlene Cruz), hardly reaching two digits in age – are discovered reclining in nighties (Phuong Nguyen the costumer) on a structure that set designer Cate McRae) has slyly fashioned to resemble a foreshadowing gallows.
With Abigail having the age edge on Betty, they begin the sort of girl-talk that any young girls of their age in any age might have, the banter continuing when the sun comes up and they jump off their down beds to start their day interacting with other Salem denizens.
The one resounding difference is that the 1690s Abigail and Betty know about the possibility of witches potentially assailing their community – perhaps by sneaking from the nearby forbidden woods. They know from bible studies and village chatter that Satan, sometimes called Lucifer, is waiting, baiting and agitating.
Once this introductory day ends, the Byrd lights extinguish, and once again Abigail and Betty awaken to a new day during which they girl–talk some more, becoming additionally open about their beliefs – many of those beliefs founded on unenlightened superstitions.
The sketch-like turns persist and they are joined by Mary Warren (Brittany K. Allen), new to Salem, and trouble-making Mercy Lewis (Tavi Gevinson, a graduate of Ivo van Hove’s Crucible 2016 revival as Mary Warren). With each successive gossipy, often competitive exchange, the four delve into more specific discussions of what’s happening to them as they mature. They bandy pieces of misguided information they’ve received about what to expect.
Increasingly, Betty, Abigail, Mercy, and Mary attempt to make sense of their lives. Increasingly, they attribute what they’re experiencing to the tales they’ve heard of the supernatural, of witches, of Satan, of what malevolence lurks in the woods. Menstruation is a worrying issue. Faces imagined in blood occupy their fears. A Satan sighting and his unabating attack on a woman one of them claims to have witnessed enthralls.
Monahon’s mounting scenes indisputably have their accumulating point. She’s discoursing on the manner the Salem girls reach name-calling as a result of being misled throughout childhood as to the nature of being. The broader point is that childhood is a stage that needs intelligent monitoring, whatever the century. (Stephen Sondheim makes the same observation during Sunday in the Park With George’s “Children Will Listen.”)
But the problem with The Good John Proctor – excellent as the acting is, and as is Caitlin Sullivan’s direction – gathers while playwright Monahan keeps piling the scenes one on top of the other. Too soon spectators see exactly where she’s going. The inanities the girls are fed and which they feed each other can only lead to their emergence as the Salem name-callers and victims, Theirs is even a more certain reality with Monahon’s names neatly plucked from Miller. Long before the girls predictably stride into the woods, ticket buyers are there to greet them.
Monahon also supplies another aggravating element: her dialogue. These Salem youngsters talk like sailors used to be accused of talking. They salt sentences with the s-word and the f-word until the sentences sink under the weight. Is Satan making Monahon do it? Incidentally, her quartet has plenty on Nora in the current A Doll’s House revival. She only joyfully blurts one f*** and not a single s***.
What gives? Are todays’ playwrights out to demonstrate that their females, no matter what era they populate, have the right to wax dirty with men? Is this societal development what empowerment has wrought? Perhaps the best we can hope is that when and if the next Miller-Crucible bow shuffles along, the women in it will resist the now numbingly-cliché profanities.
The Good John Proctor opened March 19, 2023, at the Connelly Theatre and runs through April 1. Tickets and information: bedlam.org
