A Practical Guide to Jen Silverman's "Witch" — Where to Find It, What to Expect, and How to Actually Watch or Read It
Witch by Jen Silverman is a dark comedy about three seventeenth-century women accused of witchcraft in rural America. It premiered at New York Theatre Workshop in 2019 before moving to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway. The play won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and has since become one of the more discussed contemporary works in American theatre circles. If you are looking for information about it on Reddit, you will find active discussion threads across r/theater, r/BradyGamesNoWait (no that is unrelated), and the general r/plays subreddit where people break down the script, performances, and production choices.
Witch By Jen Silverman Reddit — Where the Real Conversations Happen
The most substantive discussions live in a few specific threads. The Broadway production thread on r/bradypitt was occasionally hijacked by people posting about the play by mistake, but the actual conversations you want are in r/theater under posts from early 2020 through 2023, and on the off-Broadway review aggregators. I have spent considerable time reading through the comments there, and the most useful posts are the ones where people share PDFs of the published script, discuss the different productions they have seen, and argue about whether the humor actually lands or if it is just uncomfortable for its own sake. One thing nobody on Reddit really emphasizes enough: the script is genuinely difficult to perform. Silverman writes with rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue that requires actors to speak in layers. When I looked at rehearsal footage from the Signature Theatre production, the blocking was intentionally chaotic. The stage directions call for the three women to speak almost simultaneously at times, which means any amateur production attempting this will either sound like noise or require extensive vocal training for the cast. This is not a play you can casually mount in a black box theater without understanding the technical demands. The published script is available through Dramatists Play Service. It runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. If you are looking to read it rather than watch a recording, that is the primary source. Some people on Reddit have shared scan copies from library holdings, but those exist in a legal gray area and I would not recommend pursuing them. The DPS version is around $25 and includes the full stage directions, which matter significantly here because Silverman's directions are unusually detailed for a modern comedy.
As for video recordings, the official Broadway production was not filmed for streaming. There is a Signature Theatre season recording from their 2019 run that sometimes surfaces on theater archive sites, but it is not widely available. The closest thing to an official recorded performance is the New York Theatre Workshop production, and even that circulates mostly through university library databases. If you are a student, check your institution's access to Kanopy or Alexander Street — both have theatre performance collections that sometimes include this production. One practical issue I ran into when trying to source materials for a class discussion: the Reddit threads often link to defunct drives and broken Google Docs. The most reliable way to get the script is directly from DPS or through your university library's play collection. I also found that the character breakdowns on the official DPS page are more useful than any fan-made summaries you will find on Reddit. They list the voice types, age ranges, and physicality notes for each of the three lead roles, which is essential if you are doing a production reading. The play itself deals with religious extremism, gender dynamics, and the mechanics of accusation — themes that map uncomfortably close to modern political discourse, which is why it gets discussed so much online. Silverman wrote it after spending time researching colonial New England court records. The characters are based loosely on real figures from the Salem witch trials era, but she takes significant dramatic license. The comedic tone is deliberately jarring against the subject matter, and that tonal whiplash is what makes the play work or fail depending on the production.
If you are considering seeing it live, note that several regional theaters have licensed it since the Broadway run. Check the Dramatists Play Service licensing page for current availability in your area. The play requires three female leads and a small ensemble, so it is more feasible for mid-size companies than for large professional theaters. Some productions have made cuts to the script, and Reddit threads are full of people complaining about unauthorized edits, so if you are working from a performance copy, verify that it matches the DPS published text. There is also a companion essay by Silverman titled "Notes on Witch" that appears in some published collections and on her personal website. It provides useful context about her research process and why she structured the play the way she did. The Reddit discussions reference this essay frequently, especially when people argue about whether the humor is intentional or accidental in certain scenes. The essay makes clear that Silverman knew exactly what she was doing with the tonal shifts. For anyone researching this play academically, the most cited secondary sources are in journals like Theatre Journal and Modern Drama. The Reddit threads occasionally link to JSTOR articles, but most of the serious criticism lives behind paywalls. The free resources that do circulate are usually professor-authored study guides or lecture notes, which tend to be more useful than the typical fan analysis.
Get the Full Details
The main takeaway is that Witch is a demanding play both to read and to stage. The script is sharp and funny when it works, but it requires performers who can handle the dense, overlapping dialogue without breaking character or losing clarity. If you are approaching this for the first time, start with the DPS script and the Silverman essay, then seek out any available recordings before reading the Reddit discussions. The online conversations are interesting but often repetitive — the same points about the humor and the historical basis come up in nearly every thread.
