Sadie Sink Heads Back to School, in Broadway’s ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’

For much of her high school career, Sadie Sink took her lessons inside an old lifeguard shack that had been converted into a schoolhouse for the child actors on the set of “Stranger Things.” When the cast wasn’t battling Demogorgons in a parallel dimension, “everyone was studying different things at the same time,” Sink told me recently of her experience in the shack. “It was chaos.”

With that hit Netflix series nearing its end, and as Sink plotted her next move, she read the script for Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a play about teenagers reading “The Crucible,” together, in a more typical school setting — though one that hides troubles of its own.

On a February afternoon, Sink sat at a desk in a rehearsal space in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, in a simulated classroom that had a timeless quality. There were pencil grooves atop the melamine desks, tennis balls at the bottom of the chair legs. On a blackboard in the back, cryptic remnants of a lesson: “SEX IS POWER” was scrawled in chalk in uppercase letters, and below that, in lowercase, the words “changes nothing.”

Just as “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic, used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, “John Proctor Is the Villain” uses “The Crucible” to interrogate the complexity of growing up in the #MeToo era. In an English class in Appalachia in 2018, the students are studying Miller’s play just as that movement against sexual violence tears through their one-stoplight town, breaches the doors of their school and collides with their reading of the play itself.

The result is a prismatic revelation: “John Proctor Is the Villain” is, at turns, a literary critique, a tender bildungsroman, a loopy comedy, a study of rural America and a Taylor Swift appreciation post. This month, it becomes a Broadway show, directed by the Tony Award-winning Danya Taymor.