The searing, funny "John Proctor Is the Villain," which has been nominated for seven Tonys, including Best Play, centers on five boisterously articulate teen girls reading "The Crucible" in an honors English class in rural Georgia; a key moment features cathartic dancing to "Green Light," by Lorde. The rare non-musical Broadway show that inspires rapturous teen hollering, "John Proctor" can seem to generate a giddy, righteous energy loop among the actors, the much discussed Salem-witch-trial girls, and the audience. Offstage, young fans flock to the play's author, Kimberly Belflower, hoping to connect. ("She's our Tennessee Williams," Natasha Katz, the play's lighting designer, observed one night, watching a line form.) On a recent sunny day, Belflower, who is thirty-seven, headed to a favorite old haunt: Tiny Doll House, a shop on East Seventy-eighth Street. "I think my girlhood lives, like, really large and feels very, very potent and clear to me," she said. She's tall, with glasses, springy brown hair, and a quality of joyful expansiveness. She wore a patterned blue skirt and top and old-school Adidases. Admiring a little dining-room set, she said, "I love tiny things so, so, so much!" and hiked up her skirt. "Not to immediately show off my leg tattoo, but this is my childhood doll house, with my kitten on it," she said. "Literally right after we got her, she was climbing around the doll-house porch. I was, like, 'I'm going to explode. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen.' "
Belflower, who grew up in Georgia, lives in Atlanta with her partner, Dan Stemmerman, and teaches playwriting at Emory. She's been in Manhattan for the play's duration -- her longest stint in the city since her twenties, when she had day jobs (bookstore clerk, nanny), connected with fellow-artists, and saw as much theatre as she could. The doll-house shop reminded her of Annie Baker's play "John," which features a miniatures-loving protagonist: "She says, like, 'When there's too much small stuff I get so excited that I start to grind my teeth.' That's how I feel." Belflower loves set models, too. Her play takes place in a school "built in the fifties, when 'The Crucible' premièred -- there are these layers of time in the classroom."
Belflower's other tattoos depict Ramona Quimby, Matilda, and Harriet the Spy. After admiring more miniatures ("Teen-agers!" "Mice!"), she bought a tiny basket and a tiny cake, then walked to Harriet the Spy's hangout, Carl Schurz Park. Growing up, Belflower had assumed that Louise Fitzhugh, who wrote and illustrated "Harriet the Spy," was a New Yorker. She later learned that Fitzhugh was a Southerner (no wonder Harriet loved tomato sandwiches -- "Such a Southern thing," Belflower said) who'd had a lonely childhood but found happiness in New York. Harriet played a game called Town in the dirt; Belflower, while her brother climbed trees, "would be holding a rock and a stick, making them talk to each other." Belflower's home town is much like the one in "John Proctor": it had two stoplights, no bookstore, twelve Baptist churches, and an emphasis on "purity culture." Despite good friends and a supportive family, she, too, felt like a misfit. Reading and theatre helped. (She based Beth, the play's apologizing overachiever, on her younger self.)
Belflower eventually got an M.F.A. in playwriting at U.T. Austin. "There's a poetry to the way that teen-age girls talk," she said, walking along the park's esplanade. "The repetitions and the apologies and the 'like's and the 'um's and the kind of, like, finding the circuitous path to the thing you want to say." There's a timelessness in that speech, she went on, as well as "the cultural references and finding yourself in the things you're consuming." Behind her, a teen-age boy and girl were having a sprinting contest. "Fast like the Flash!" the boy yelled. Belflower found a plaque honoring Harriet the Spy and beamed at it, taking a picture.
Motifs of ecstatic teen dancing appear in both "The Crucible" and "John Proctor." "There is something so ancient and primal with women and dancing," Belflower said; in high school, she and her friends made up dances all the time. An "Aha!" moment came when she first heard "Green Light," in her office at U.T. "It just immediately did something wild to me," she said. She listened on repeat, then went to teach a class and had her students listen to it. "Structurally, it's doing something so interesting -- rebelling against these established rules and the math of pop songs, both sonically and lyrically," she said. The song evokes what it's like "to go through something painful or dramatic and get out on the other side and be, like, 'Oh, I'm going to make something from that.' "
At the Tonys, Belflower's youth will be reflected in several forms. Two close friends from her early New York era, Andrew Durand and Taylor Trensch, are fellow-nominees; her date is her "theatre best friend" from high school. "We made a pact when we were teen-agers in his bedroom in Cleveland, Georgia, that if one of us ever got nominated for a Tony we would bring each other," she said, laughing. "And so -- it's happening!" ♦