“John Proctor is the villain” comes to the West Coast: cast and creative team announced for the San Francisco premiere

The cast and creative team have been set for the West Coast premiere of Kimberly Belflower’s play “John Proctor is the villain”, as Playbill reports. The show will run from November 12 to December 6 at the Toni Rembe Theater of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, with opening night on November 18.

Direction is by Jess McLeod, while the cast consists of Ameer Ali (Mason Adams), Stevie Allen (Ivy Watkins), Lilla Crawford — the star of the musical “Annie” — in the role of Shelby Holcomb, Varinique “V” Davis (Nell Shaw), Olivia Finkelstein (Beth Powell), Kyle Harris (Carter Smith), Mario Houle (Lee Turner), Kaylee Kaneshiro (Raelynn Nix) and Erika Vetter (Bailey Gallagher).

The play is set in Georgia, in a high school AP literature class, where five young girls begin to question the stories and heroes they have been taught to believe in. As the class analyses Arthur Miller’s classic work “The Crucible”, the parallels between the play and their lives become disturbingly real, and they begin to reconsider whom we call a hero, whom we call a villain — and who gets burned in the process.

“John Proctor is the villain” debuted on Broadway in 2025 at the Booth Theatre, where it received seven Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Broadway Play. After its San Francisco engagement, the production will travel to Seattle Repertory Theater and to the Mark Taper Forum of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.