Inside the ‘Witchy Circle' of the ‘John Proctor Is the Villain' Cast
It comes as no surprise that the women of 'John Proctor Is the Villain' have an especially epic group text.
The Broadway hit, which heads into this weekend's Tony Awards with seven nominations including Best Play, is set in a rural Southern high school classroom and follows a set of mostly young female students who have been classmates their whole lives, so bonding off set was crucial when it came to selling the story.
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'Danya [Taymor, the show's director] was so good about that because I think especially for these students in a small town, you're in the same class with the same people your entire life, and that chemistry is really important,' says star Sadie Sink, over Zoom from her dressing room. 'And that was never lost on Danya at all. So she would really incorporate a lot of team-building exercises into rehearsal that would maybe seem silly at first, but over time just really added up and became super meaningful and important into establishing that kind of connection.'
The real bonding — which is evident from chatting with Sink and costars Molly Griggs and Fina Strazza, each from their respective dressing rooms — has come since the show officially opened, be it from picnics in the park between shows or the 'witchy circle' of 'giggling and being dumb' they form before each show.
'After you're out of rehearsals and previews and you get out of your own actor brain where you're thinking you're doing everything wrong, then you get closer with your cast and there's room to breathe,' Sink says.
'We have a lot of weird downtime together and that's when the friendships really get deep,' Griggs adds. 'And we have a group chat that is powerful.'
'John Proctor Is the Villain' is one of this season's biggest hits, with Tony nominations for best play, best actor for Sink, best featured actress for Strazza and best direction, among others. The production, written by Kimberly Belflower, is set in a high school in small town Georgia amid a class reading 'The Crucible.'
'The show is such a special story about young women taking up space,' Strazza says of what drew her in. 'Being a young woman myself, I loved how much Kimberly captured the accuracy of being a teenage girl and what it really feels like to be misunderstood by your community and wanting to make real change when you're often looked down upon and silenced.'
Griggs meanwhile immediately related to the authenticity of the Southerness in the characters, being from the South herself.
'They really do sound and feel like Southern people and the rhythm of their speech, and in the sense of humor too, that just feels so cozy to me,' Griggs says. 'I know that feels like a surface thing, but it's actually really deep for me. It is about home and it's about a place and it's about sensibility.'
Sink grew up in Texas, and recalls trying to shake her Southern accent when she first moved to New York City.
'So I was really charmed by how this play depicted not only teenage girls, but teenage girls from the South too, and how it really just embraced that culture and the parts that felt resonant to me, but also in the flaws as well. It was just this perfect cocktail of a love letter to girlhood and also the South, which I was really drawn to.'
The show is drawing a wide audience, but in particular many teenage girls, who often come to the stage door to meet the cast at the end of the night.
'We've had a lot of young people in the stage door line say that this is their first Broadway show,' Griggs says. 'And that is so cool to me that not only did they have a really wonderful experience with our play in particular, but it may open the door for them to be theater people and to be people who want to come and see plays every season.'
They're also meeting high schoolers who have been in productions of the show themselves: the rights to the play were released to students before it arrived on Broadway.
'I love when people at the stage door have already done the play themselves in their communities, and so they already have this really deep connection with it, and they're so excited to see it done on stage,' Strazza says.
The show references the Lorde song 'Green Light' several times throughout, and while the pop star has yet to make it to a show, the cast knows that she's well aware of her song's role in the show.
'We know she wants to come, but it's busy being Lorde,' Sink says. 'But we're dying to get her here.'
'We do the show for her every night,' Strazza adds.
'It'll happen whenever it happens,' Sink says. 'We'll have to summon her in our circle one day.'
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