John Proctor is the Villain

My own impatience doesn't typically steer me toward singular reading experiences, but that's what happened here. The substance of the play is this: in 2018, in a one-stoplight Georgia town, a high school class close reads The Crucible with their teacher, and the conversation quickly turns from the history explicitly and implicitly in its pages to what is happening in the students' community right now. I heard such good things about the production during its Broadway run, starting with reviews from the theater kids in my life, but then changes in the play's licensing (presumably due to the coming movie) meant the local-ish university production planned for this fall was canned. I resigned myself to reading the script for the time being ... and was unexpectedly charmed by that experience. I so enjoyed pouring over all the putting-it-together details laid out there that I never would have known about had I seen the production cold—the notes on casting, dialect, pace, accents, how to incorporate the Lorde song "Green Light" into the show. I don't read many contemporary scripts but this was such a good and distinctive reading experience I'm eager to read more.