An unexpected, dry, skeletal laugh broke the silence during a wrenching monologue at a Booth Theater preview of John Proctor Is the Villain. The play follows high school girls in small-town Georgia who start a feminism club amid the MeToo era. The characters grapple with sexual violence, accusations, and gaps left by abstinence-only education. The laugh registered as weary cynicism toward claims that men in charge will lose power and toward hopes for systemic renewal. The reaction suggested collective despair and a sense that visible atrocities and ongoing abuses undermine belief in building a newer, better world.
How to describe what I heard from the orchestra? It happened one night at the Booth Theater during a preview performance of John Proctor Is the Villain. Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo), the preacher's daughter, was delivering the final part of her monologue: "One day, maybe, the new world we were promised will actually be new. One day, maybe, the men in charge won'tbe in charge anymore." The scene is wrenching; the audience held its breath.
"I can say that I have seen the state of the world and that I am not optimistic any population can return from some of the lines people have collectively crossed," Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in his essay on living with despair. "I do not think that there's a newer and better world that can be built with the knowledge of a genocidal campaign being carried out on a live stream for a year and a half and counting."
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