A Play About God and Trump, From a Writer Raised on the Right

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/theater/heroes-of-the-fourth-turning-will-arbery.html

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For a young playwright in New York, it’s one thing to draw buzz from critics and theater fans. It’s quite another to have your dense and boundary-pushing Off Broadway play become a talking point among religious conservatives — and not because they hate it.

Shortly before the opening last week of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” — his new play about a group of conservative Roman Catholic millennials arguing all night in a Wyoming backyard about God, love and Donald Trump — Will Arbery sent the script to Rod Dreher, the prominent Orthodox Christian blogger.

And Dreher responded with an exuberant 5,000-word blog post, praising the play’s “depth of moral vision” and declaring, “I don’t know how anyone — progressive, conservative, anyone — walks out of ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’ without the conviction that somehow, they have to change their life.”

There was also praise in the Catholic Herald and the conservative journal First Things, neither normally quoted on theater marquees. All of which left Arbery feeling both happy amazement at, as he put it, “writing a play that Catholics like,” along with wariness of any purely celebratory embrace.

“I would never want this play to breed any complacency on either side,” he said over lunch at a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “This was a play that was meant to trouble.”

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” directed by Danya Taymor and extended through Nov. 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is hardly the first play to be hailed as illuminating our polarized political moment. (Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “astonishing” and “riveting.”)

But where most works of theater seen as “explaining Trump” have explored the economic anxieties of the Rust Belt white working-class, “Heroes” focuses on the distinctive, heady and what Arbery calls the “secretive” world of conservative Catholic intellectuals.

It’s a world Arbery, who recently turned 30, knows well. His father, a literary scholar, is currently the president of Wyoming Catholic College, a tiny conservative institution whose mixture of Outward Bound-style wilderness training and Great Books curriculum inspired the play’s fictional Transfiguration College. His mother, a political philosopher, also teaches there.

Arbery, the only boy in a family of seven sisters, describes his parents as supportive of all their children following their passions. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t so nervous before showing them the script for the first time that he had to go into therapy.

“It ended up being great, but I was really scared,” he said. “I am a sort of quiet and affable presence in my family, and this felt like such a declaration of how much I’d been listening and absorbing.”

He grew up in Texas, where his parents ran a cultural organization connected with the University of Dallas, a Catholic institution. It was a home full of art and argument, he recalls, where dinner-table conversation was likely to include discussion of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and St. Augustine.

He wrote and acted in plays at an all-boys school run by Hungarian monks, and also devoured every movie he could find at the public library.

“I always felt a tension between the very rich, complex, nuanced, passionate hive of ideas and faith that was my household, and all the beauty of everything else and everyone else,” Arbery said. “I was always pulled between those two, and endlessly curious about everyone else.”

He began the process of “uncoiling,” as he puts it, at the secular Kenyon College, where he majored in English and drama, and attended Mass regularly until about halfway through his junior year.

Today, Arbery — who wears hipster-nerd glasses and described his plays as partly about “unpacking whiteness” — might blend in with any number of self-questioning, progressive-minded young artists in Brooklyn. Asked about his current relationship to Catholicism, Arbery, already given to thoughtful pauses, paused even longer.

“I struggle with it,” he said. “I don’t know how to even put it into words.”

He paused again. “I feel called to investigate that rather than deny it.” And then again. “It was hard for me to admit this, but to deny myself my own particularity was not what the world was asking of me.”

Arbery, who received an M.F.A. at Northwestern University, drew on his family obliquely in “Plano,” a surreal comedy about three Catholic sisters haunted by the men in their lives (and, seemingly, an actual ghost) that was produced by Clubbed Thumb last spring at the Connelly Theater in the East Village.

“Heroes,” with its more frontal turn toward the world of his parents, grew out of a short piece presented at Ensemble Studio Theater the Sunday before the 2016 election. Set in the imagined aftermath, it featured early versions of some of the same characters bemoaning what Arbery presumed would be a Hillary Clinton victory.

Instead, of course, Donald Trump won, sending Arbery, along with most of the predominantly progressive New York theater world, into disoriented shock, and convincing him that he needed to write a full play.

“I personally felt a lot of anger, and perceived a lot of anger, at the people who could’ve made that happen,” he recalled. “I just felt like I had a responsibility to write about five of those people.”

Running two intermission-less hours, “Heroes” unfurls in big sweeps of intense, rapid-fire political and theological debate intertwined with revelations of its characters’ complicated histories with each other. Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and “The Benedict Option” (Dreher’s manifesto arguing that Christians, having lost the culture war, should build their own counterculture) are invoked. So are “Portlandia,” “BoJack Horseman” and Townes Van Zandt.

The play takes its title from “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 pop-history treatise on the supposed cycles of American history by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has been embraced by Steve Bannon, and by the character Teresa, an ambitious, Bannon-loving writer living in Brooklyn, who enthusiastically warns, “There’s a war coming, dude.”

As it happens, Teresa’s hunger for culture war, and the skeptical reaction from some other characters, echoes a recent ideological clash among real-life conservatives. And some of the combatants have stopped by to see Arbery’s take on it.

At one preview, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, sat with Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at The New York Post and author of a recent manifesto in the journal calling on conservatives to stop being “nice” and fight back against drag-queen story hours at public libraries and other weapons of progressive “mono-thought.” It touched off months of fierce debate on the right.

Both men, like much of the audience, could be seen doubling over in laughter at some of the play’s comic high points, including a scene where a recitation of the rosary is interrupted by a spectacularly messy bit of bodily stage business.

Reno, who is friendly with Arbery’s parents, said that even just presenting anti-abortion and anti-L.G.B.T. views onstage without signposting those airing them as villains, or satirizing them, was “huge.”

“They disagree among themselves in profound ways,” Reno said of the characters, not all of whom admire President Trump. “But there’s no liberal reassuring the audience by correcting them.”

The lack of any overt liberal counterpoint, Arbery said, had been a stumbling block for some theaters that considered staging the play. And it has been a point of criticism for some theatergoers on Show Score, an audience rating site, which Arbery sheepishly confessed to checking “because I’m a masochist.”

The goal, he said, wasn’t to convince anyone or to stir empathy — a concept both he, and the play’s characters, question — but to ask audiences to sit with the characters’ ideas, which he calls “a radical act.” Still, he confessed to having his own doubts as he was writing the play, at one point even “thinking it was evil.”

“There was the worry that it was just giving a platform to hateful speech,” he said. “And there was the worry that I was exploiting people I love, using their story and their pain for my benefit.”

One person he drew on was his younger sister Monica, whose ordeal with chronic Lyme disease and experiences working in a home for underprivileged pregnant women inspired the character of Emily. (She opposes abortion, but her belief — hotly contested by Teresa — that someone who works for Planned Parenthood can still be a good person makes Emily the play’s closest thing to a liberal foil.)

And the character of Gina, Emily’s mother and the newly installed president of Transfiguration, is based on Arbery’s mother, Virginia, down to the Barry Goldwater poster in her office.

In a joint telephone interview, both parents bubbled over with pride, along with a bewildered wariness at drawing attention to themselves or the school, which forgoes federal funding to avoid regulations that might compromise its Catholic principles.

“I told Will, couldn’t you have made the school in Montana or something?” his father, Glenn, said with a laugh.

Arbery said his parents had questioned the play’s ending. But they said they would reserve judgment about that until they saw the production later this month — the first time they will have seen one of his plays since freshman year in college.

“If it’s a really good play, it shouldn’t just send you out with your opinions confirmed,” Glenn Arbery said. “It should shake you.”