Review: Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery
New York: Samuel French, Inc., 2020; 98 pp., $12.00

Night in the wilderness is dark and noisy, and the audience is drawn into that experience at the opening of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. The opening audio echoes the chatter of a summer night; next, the song of crickets and other insects gradually modulates into music. The audience is forced to stare into the darkness for an uncomfortable amount of time. The lights rise so gradually that you question what exactly you are seeing. At a certain point of illumination (which differs depending on one’s eyesight), we make out the opening scene: a man sitting on his porch in the dim light, sipping a mug of coffee. His demeanor is calm: according to the stage directions, “he might be praying.” He sees something off stage and grabs his rifle. Another uncomfortably long pause unfolds as we watch him waiting. Even though we know it is coming, we still feel the shock when his rifle is fired. The man returns with a doe carcass and places it on a tarp. After considering it a while, he gets a knife to gut it, but his hands are shaking uncontrollably. He utters one word—“Damn”—breathes, then proceeds to gut the deer. Throughout the rest of the play, a blood stain remains on the porch, one that this man will from time to time attempt to clean away.

This silent opening contrasts with the exuberant verbal banter the audience will hear for most of the rest of this critically acclaimed play. In the fall of 2020, I was fortunate enough to attend a performance with the original cast on Zoom. It says much about the power of the play and the virtuosity of the performers that we were riveted to a Zoom screen for two hours in breathless wonder. Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a drama whose complexities are hard to pin down, indebted not only to playwrights like Chekov and Beckett, but also to the great Catholic authors Gerard Manley Hopkins and Flannery O’Connor. What one takes away from this play says as much about the audience as it does the play itself, and my own review will of necessity miss important layers of meaning in the drama. But Heroes of the Fourth Turning raises questions and problems about the value of Catholic liberal education that demand the attention of those who care about such things. Late in the drama, the president of the fictional Transfiguration College of Wyoming (TCW) asks some graduates, “Has the curriculum served you?”, to which they respond in superlatively positive terms: “It was everything”; “Made me who I am today”; “The curriculum was AMAZING.” This sort of enthusiasm from graduates is heartening to hear if one is a college president, professor, or director of admissions, but the play challenges us to think more critically about how exactly the curriculum has “served” these people. Catholic colleges like Transfiguration College of Wyoming—and its real-world inspiration, Wyoming Catholic College—claim that their education makes its students into better people. Does this education make a person better? In a more moderate interpretation, the play presents a portrait of people for whom this education actually failed in its intended purpose. The four central characters exist in states of arrested development, unsure of themselves or the world, and it is no accident that theirs is a late-night after-party: they are the ones left behind once other alumni with families, parishes, or religious communities have gone to bed.

Before unknotting such problems, however, Arbery immerses us in a world of beautifully crafted, humane characters. Arbery grew up among undergraduates and graduate students, and he gives us college graduates who are charming, annoying, attractive, and broken, displaying all the complexity of real human persons. The “essential thisness” of things comes up a few times in the play, a reference to Hopkin’s “inscape” and Scotus’s haecceitas: the utter particularity of an individual (this theory is brought up early on in relation to the theological “scandal of particularity”). Part of the delight of reading or watching the play is enjoying the haecceitas or inscape of each character.

While Arbery’s play reveals both the conscious and unconscious tethers linking certain strains of conservative American Catholicism to white supremacy, it is not savage—is utterly gentle, in fact—towards the people lured by these views. Dr. Gina might come off as a “villain” after utterly berating Teresa, then claiming that Teresa’s problem is just “fear of motherhood,” using diction that furthers the imagined sense of heroism: “Don’t invent a war just because you’re afraid to give your own body away to something higher.” Dr. Gina also loses some of our sympathy when she questions the seriousness of her daughter’s illness, despite the fact that Emily is “out of bed for the first time in months.” Emily, however, ends up defending her mother in terms of Gina’s own physical suffering:

She’s ridiculous, she’s on a power trip. She’s constantly trying to fix people, she’s never meeting them where they are. She’s constantly just focusing on what they’re not. Ahh, I’m sorry, y’all. But she’s also a hero. I mean seriously, after all those C-sections, she survived breast cancer. And taught full-time the whole time. And she’s got basically paper for knees and she’s walking around in tremendous pain every freaking day. And she never complains. That’s some faith. That’s some faith. So y’all I guess we can forgive her for being a little intense. (86)

The final gesture towards forgiveness is telling. It is worth noting here that Emily is based very closely on one of Arbery’s sisters, right down to her chronic illness and eloquent spirituality. Arbery dedicates the play “to her, my hero.” For Emily, no character in this play is a monster, even if they behave monstrously at times.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning may not be a play for the ages, but it certainly captures the questions and problems of this age. It is well worth a read or watch not only for its own content, but for the conversations it forces us to have with ourselves and others. The tone owes some of its intensity to Arbery’s critique of his own familial education. His father (a professor and actual president of Wyoming Catholic College) opined that he wished Will had set the play in Montana, and Will noted in an interview that the Thanksgiving after the play premiered was rather awkward. Earlier in 2022 saw the debut of Corsicana, a play that also draws on Arbery’s family experiences and, from early reviews, may be more redemptive. I, for one, want to see and hear more.