On Monday night, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s Broadway show “John Proctor is the Villain” opened to the public. The show, starring “Stranger Things” actress Sadie Sink, has already received rave reviews for its comedic and emotional depth. Alongside Tony Award-winner Danya Taymor, two of Brown’s own community members joined forces on the production team.
Before becoming a producer on the show, Nathan Winoto ’25 — a senior studying music, sociology and economics — was involved in theater at Brown. Since joining his first year, he has directed various productions at Brown, including Ensemble’s “Tick, Tick… Boom!” and Brown Opera Productions’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
In an interview with The Herald, Winoto said that joining his first Broadway show has been “very exciting.”
As part of his position on the production team, Winoto spent the past school year commuting between New York and Providence, gathering funding, contacting investors and participating in marketing and sales decisions.
But Winoto is not the only Brunonian taking their skills to Broadway. Jillian Robbins ’11, who was involved with Musical Forum during her time on College Hill, told The Herald that she got the “theater bug” after graduating and moving to New York.
Now a producer at Wagner Johnson Productions, Robbins’ role in bringing the show to life on Broadway involved “everything from choosing content, getting the rights to said content and engaging lawyers and general managers,” she said.
When a show makes its Broadway debut, Robbins explained that there’s a certain amount of “brand building that’s part of the equation.”
Robbins worked closely with the cast and crew to identify the show’s potential audience. While they initially leveraged the fanbases of Sink and Taymor, Robbins said that members of the “New York intelligentsia” — New York’s artistic elite — also quickly became part of the equation.
Rather than solely appealing to journalists and mainstream publications, Winoto noted the show has taken a more modern and social-media-centered approach to advertising, leveraging platforms such as TikTok. With a primary goal of reaching “people of our generation” who the show revolves around, Winoto said the production team was committed to finding “new ways to get the word out.”
The show takes place in Appalachian Georgia amid the wake of the #MeToo movement, following a group of female high schoolers as they read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in English class. The characters grapple with what it means to be a woman in today’s society, in a way Robbins describes as “incredibly funny” but also “relevant and important.” The play offers a new spin on “female rage and urgency,” Winoto said, as well as modern interpretations of classic texts.
After he saw a full run of the show for the first time, Winoto said the cast and crew “got it down to a T.”
Robbins was particularly drawn to how the cast and creatives huddled up together on stage after being “moved to tears” and “laughing hysterically.” To Robbins, theater is “at its heart collaborative,” and the moment the team shared represented a “very authentic moment of celebration that wasn’t planned but felt cathartic.”
The show is set to run at the Booth Theater until at least July 6.
