WHY WOMEN ARE LEAVING THIS SHOW IN TEARS

I cried the first time I saw the play John Proctor Is the Villain, set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the #MeToo movement, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears.

- Michelle Goldberg

At least since the time of Aristotle, catharsis has been understood as one of the chief purposes of theatre, but it’s been a while since I've experienced it so viscerally, and I kept wondering why this play is having such an intense effect on so many. (No other play has received more Tony nominations this year.)

One reason for its power, I suspect, is that it transports the viewer back to a time when #MeToo still felt alive with possibility, the moment before the backlash when it seemed we might be on the cusp of a more just and equal world.

John Proctor Is the Villain takes place in 2018 and revolves around an honours English class studying Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The girls in the class are smart and ambitious; they're also, like many teenagers everywhere, swoony and bursting with contradictory emotions. They're so excited about the #MeToo movement that they want to start a feminism club at their school, which school officials do not, at first, want to allow. Tensions in the community, their guidance counsellor tells them, are too high.