Theater Review: A Play about Conservative Youth Hits Liberal Manhattan

Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Written by Will Arbery
Directed by Danya Taymor
Playwrights Horizon, Manhattan
October 26, 2019

Millenial playwright Will Arbery is from Texas, specifically conservative Texas. He’s written a new play Heroes of the Fourth Turning about young conservative Catholics wrestling with their faith in a disturbingly liberal world. This is a world Arbery knows well. His father is currently the president of Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative place that features a mixture of Outward Bound-style wilderness training and a traditional Western Great Books curriculum. The playwright now lives in New York, and this new play is alternately sympathetic and critical of conservative religious (and political) viewpoints. Yet it has been praised by a variety of conservative commentators, somewhat to the surprise of the playwright. This reminds me of the response to The Book of Mormon, which can be viewed by different audiences as either ribald critique or warm reflections on Mormonism.

The play’s name stems from generational theories of Howe and Strauss who posit that world history cycles through recurring series of four “turnings”: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. In each, different types of people termed nomads, prophets, heroes and artists enter different phases. Our era is part of a fourth turning (“Crisis”) where heroes (presumably like these students) enter adulthood. In the last such Crisis phase the “greatest generation” won World War II, and Howe and Strauss equate the millennials to these heroes, showing civic engagement and determination to combat global warming and societal ills. The play’s title may be an ironic critique of millennial traits, since the students’ musings seem less heroic than narcissistic and rigid. They do seem to believe that they are heroes, however. We find out why in the play.




This play is a talky interaction of four young alumni having a reunion at their small Catholic college, punctuated by a visit from the middle-aged conservative mother of one of the students, who is also president of the college. This is quite autobiographical, as noted above. The student with the parent-president is Zoe, who is most globally tolerant and philosophically questioning of the others’ rigidity, so seems like a stand-in for the playwright. The other characters are a diverse bunch. Most memorable is the smart, articulate, too-confident Emily, who wears a crisp Wall Street pantsuit and rapidly quotes Fox News-style broadsides against a variety of targets, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, abortion advocates, and permissive media. She is a little too confident, and is called out by the college president, an old-style Reagan conservative who finds Emily strident, insufficiently curious, and rigid. Emily’s screeds certainly stirred up the off-Broadway audience, who constantly muttered at her right-wing statements (e.g. “abortion is murder”), perhaps never before stated so clearly stated on stage by a smart character. This presented an interesting contrast to Linda Vista (reviewed last week) where an opinionated, equally intolerant liberal character was applauded by a similar audience for broadsides like “I wish the Trump voters would take more opioids, so we could be rid of them”. Unfortunately, Emily never rose to a level higher than a stereotype during this play, so was easy to dismiss, despite some provocative, even persuasive logic—I agree with her that framing abortion only as a woman’s right neglects discussion of what it is, a moral/ethical discussion that is important to have in framing one’s point of view. More complex were the two guys, a younger, whiny “questioning” one who tediously and narcissistically failed to get beyond his romantic and philosophic failures, and an older one who embraces the tough Western man persona, living on a ranch near the Wyoming college. The interactions of the various flavors of conservative characters was only intermittently nuanced and interesting, despite crisp, forward-moving direction by Danya Taymor, niece of big time Broadway director Julie Taymor (of the failed Spiderman musical). The playwright’s dialogue tried valiantly to balance sympathy and discomfort with the characters’ religious and societal conflicts, but never really cohered into a compelling dramatic work. The set and lighting design were basic—a single set showing a fire ring outside a rural house.






The best thing about this play was in allowing a sheltered NYC liberal audience to hear smart people state conservative principles, and to see the range of opinions within the conservative spectrum. It was an anthropologic exercise of sorts, allowing New Yorkers to see the exotic conservatives in an exhibit, as if they were behind glass at the Museum of Natural History. But there is value in this sort of play. For example, it made it possible to hear conservatives could regard abortion as murder, yet still sympathize and love a friend who underwent the procedure. I think this is why the play has received positive press from conservative commentators. Perhaps any play that portrays religious and conservative sentiments, even in the context of discord or mockery, is sufficiently unusual to draw such praise. And, I suspect that most people who live in conservative regions of the country would find little that is pathbreaking here—these arguments are more common in Trump-land than is often acknowledged in progressive enclaves like NYC. But I would like to see a similar play done a little more artfully, with less stereotypical characters. That might get me really thinking about American conservatives as something other than ill-informed intolerant bigots as they are usually portrayed in places like NYC.