The Brooklyn Rail

Plays with girls aren’t new.

In the opening pages of his 1953 play The Crucible, Arthur Miller describes Abigail Williams—orphan, girl, witch—as someone with “an endless capacity for dissembling.” She is a mystery, a looming antagonist not offered the same depth of character as Miller’s hero, John Proctor. Miller’s end goal is a scathing commentary on McCarthyism, and in prioritizing that, he fails to dive into the psyche of the young women he writes about. Because while plays with girls aren’t new, plays about girls are.

In 2016, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves premiered off Broadway. Following a high school soccer team over six pre-game warmups, The Wolves threw you into the world of teenage girls, their camaraderie and competition. The dialogue was different from other plays—overlapping, cacophonous—and so were the young women. They were zealous, catty, and vulnerable, and they felt true to real high school students. The Wolves was swiftly followed by Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, a look at the vicious, almost feral world of competitive dancers. Both were striking representations of young women, both were Pulitzer Prize finalists, and a new sub-genre was born: Plays About Girls Playing Sports.

Since then, there have been prominent productions of plays about girls playing basketball (Flex at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater), fencing (Athena, The Hearth), learning self-defense (How to Defend Yourself, NYTW), on a dance team (The Sensational Sea Mink-ettes, Woolly Mammoth) and plenty more. Young women—girls—are finally allowed a whole range of activities and spaces to express themselves and exorcise (and exercise) their demons. But the trend is shifting. Suddenly it’s not student athletes taking center stage, but academics. Suddenly, plays are being produced about young women who are cool and hot and irreverent and (importantly) smart.

This spring, two new plays about girls opened, one on Broadway, one off: Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain and Natalie Margolin’s All Nighter, which see girls in a high school classroom, and studying at a liberal arts college, respectively. The young women in these plays aren’t so different from their predecessors (girls have always been smart), but they aren’t pushed into constant frenetic choreography. Now that playwrights have proven Plays About Girls can work, producers will put them on stage without needing the inherent stakes of sports. A witch hunt can be adapted for eleventh grade English Lit, and the kitchen sink drama can be transposed into a college library.

John Proctor is the Villain follows a group of high school juniors at a small school in rural Georgia. It’s 2018, and both #MeToo and Lorde’s Melodrama are at the forefront of their minds as their handsome teacher leads them in a unit on The Crucible. Reckoning with what it means to be a feminist, a student, and a girl in a town where women are starting to speak out against sexual assault, the teenagers of John Proctor find resonance and plenty to critique in Miller’s work.

Sliding back in time, All Nighter takes us to 2014 and a college in Pennsylvania that Margolin referred to as a “sort of small privileged pressure cooker,” during our conversation. It’s the last week of senior year, and four besties have banded together to pull their final all-nighter. Whether they complete any assignments as they pop Adderall, take dance breaks, and fracture their relationships is anyone’s guess.

In The Wolves, we see the girls at their most unselfconscious, minimally perceived by adults or men. Belflower and Margolin’s characters are more aware of the men in their orbits, and yet we still see them get braver and grow to that point of reckless abandon. Hell hath no fury like a teenage girl, and both plays find their protagonists teetering between burning it all down—their relationships, their education—and maintaining the status quo. High school and college are periods of transition, especially for young women. As Belflower put it when I spoke with her, “That time is so dense with change [and] possibility,” which leaves girls with a chance to turn their pain and angst into a “source of power.” That the girls of John Proctor and All Nighter each succeed at varying levels only makes the plays feel more truthful.

As a young woman and recent-ish college graduate, Margolin and Belflower created works that feel remarkably familiar. The moment All Nighter began, I was back at my own liberal arts university. Their study hall was my Fishbowl, and I too had a market where I stocked up on hummus. Like the juniors in John Proctor, my friends and I had our own debates about whether Lorde’s “Green Light” was a reference to The Great Gatsby (when I asked Belflower about the song, she said, “‘Green Light’ means everything to me.”). As in both plays, my most cathartic moments are brought about by blasting music and singing and dancing around the room. Margolin noted to me that “digging into the specificity [leads to] universality” and there’s a thrill to specificity of these plays, a moment of “is this fucking play about us?” for the audience that is joyful, funny, and even kind of embarrassing.

It’s an odd but refreshing experience to see a play that is clearly targeted at you. I’ve watched plenty of theater that resonated with me, where I could find myself in characters, but walking into both of these shows, I was struck by an uncanny sensation of being just like other girls. In line for the bathroom at All Nighter, I overheard a young woman verbalize my exact thought, commenting that “they definitely reached their target demographic.”

This is due in part to the casts these productions have put together, which feature “it girls” of TV and film like Sadie Sink (Stranger Things), Alyah Chanelle Scott (The Sex Lives of College Girls) and Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms). It’s also a credit to the shows’ marketing tactics, particularly the work of social media superstar Austin Spero. Spero, who also runs socials for Oh, Mary!, brings a dramaturgical understanding to social media management. The All Nighter Instagram account (run by Carly Heitner, Our Time Influence) is filled with memes, character “starter packs,” and even a collaboration with the women’s satire site, Reductress. John Proctor’s account  recently invited followers to join its “close friends story,” creating the cool vibe of an insider club. And of course, both accounts are committed to an apt bell-hooks-meets-Olivia-Rodrigo disdain for capital letters.

But the playwrights don’t alienate audience members who aren’t female-identifying or between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. Margolin calls All Nighter a play for “anyone who wants to sit in the theater and watch the experience of young women,” and Belflower notes that while girls are her most “sacred” audience, she “[hopes] their dads come with them.”

At a time when girlhood is the subject of so much conversation, it’s moving to see theater embrace nuanced stories about young women and to consider them commercially viable; John Proctor and All Nighter are both for-profit productions. Watching John Proctor, I had the sensation of sitting in a small black box theater, then suddenly, 700 plus audience members would laugh or gasp or clap and I’d remember I was at the Booth Theatre. It’s a testament to the intimate nature of the play and how unprecedented it is to see a play about girls on Broadway.

All Nighter and John Proctor is the Villain have stuck with me because of their depiction of female friendship and intelligence, and because they allow girls to be girls. Margolin and Belflower place no pressure on their characters, and they don’t ask their audiences to either. Leaving the theater after both shows, my instinct wasn’t to dive into analysis, but to follow the characters’ lead and put on a pop song, turn the volume up, and dance. When I got home, I did just that. It was glorious and cathartic and well worth the crick in my neck the next day. Sometimes you don’t need to be a twenty-six-year-old arts administrator/dramaturg/theater writer. Sometimes you can simply be a girl.