Heroes of the Fourth Turning: Let’s Have a Big Conversation

Graphic by Abby Miller

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

Playbill.com announced last week that Will Arbery’s play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, would be staged virtually for five performances from Oct. 21-24. 

Playwright Jeremy O’Harris (“Slave Play”) produced the virtual production as a part of his partnership with HBO to fund new theater projects. The original cast of the play’s debut at Playwright’s Horizons last fall–Zoë Winters, Julia McDermott, Jeb Kreager, John Zdrojski and Michelle Pawk–reunited to present “Heroes” again. This was the second time this play had been performed digitally, the first being a Zoom reading produced by Play-Per-View this past June. 

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” tells the story of four Catholic conservative young adults, Teresa, Justin, Kevin and Emily, who reunite for one evening to celebrate the promotion of their old professor and Emily’s mother, Gina, to the president of their small Catholic college in rural Wyoming.

Kevin starts off the night by saying that he wants to have a “big conversation” as they used to in college and thus starts the two-hour discussion, uninterrupted by an intermission. We sit in a theater, or on our couch, for two hours, and two hours pass in the world of the play. 

Their “big conversation” is like any discussion you might find in one of King’s apartments at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. As the night unfolds, they discuss what they’ve learned about the relationship between politics, empathy, religion, pain and whether or not we’re at the brink of a culture war in the wake of the 2016 election, all while fighting to be understood by their peers.  

I got to see “Heroes” during the Playwright’s Horizons run a year ago and have not been able to stop thinking about it since. I know these people. You can probably pick them out from your professors and peers. You may even find yourself in them too. 

It is so rare to see politically conservative characters portrayed in such an honest and unchallenged way, and publications on both sides of the political aisle from the New York Times to the Catholic Herald praised Arbery for his pointed storytelling. Everyone from my Christian parents in Georgia to my liberal friends in New York love this play. They all come away with different talking points about what Arbery is trying to say through it. 

Conservative audience members praise Arbery for giving their voice a platform and portraying their side with nuance. These characters do not agree with each other. Teresa is the most conservative of the group and Emily is the most moderate. Justin is an agrarian Wendell Berry-type, and Kevin is the archetype of millennial angst, unsure what his life is even for. And Gina, whose promotion the group has gathered to celebrate, surprisingly chides Teresa for her extremist views and harsh tactics while praising Kevin’s honest quest for answers.

All of these characters voted for Trump in 2016, but only one of them, Teresa, actually likes him as a politician. Kevin says that “after I voted for Trump, I vomited next to my car,” and Emily's opinion of Trump is that “he’s a gaseous barf bag and I pray for his soul.”

 “Heroes'''may have been the first introduction into the world of conservative intellectualism for many members of Playwright’s Horizons’s typically liberal audience base. On the night I attended last year, there were several occasions when the audience laughed at something like Teresa’s insistence of an impending culture war, a statement that would have gone by without a second thought at my parents’ church in the suburbs of Atlanta. 

With Amy Coney Barrett's recent confirmation, the American public is getting an eye into the possibly unfamiliar world of conservative intellectualism: a world that Arbery knows well and is ready to bring his audience into. The seventh of eight children, Arbery grew up as the child of two professors who taught at mostly Catholic, Great Books colleges around the country like the fictional Transfiguration College of Wyoming that “Heroes” is set around and like King’s.  

The play opens with Justin sitting on the porch before the house lights even go down. And when the house lights do go out, there is no light anywhere. You will try to find the exit sign for something to bring you back to reality, but it’s behind you. So you sit in the dark until your eyes adjust. When they do adjust, you find Justin hauling off a deer that he’s shot in the woods behind his house. He scrubs the porch like Lady Macbeth, believing that there’s still blood. The light remains hazy, and the concave shape of the set makes it so you can’t tell how deep the space actually is. Everything is forest and fog. 

Three to four herbal cigarettes are smoked throughout the course of the play. The smell fills the entire theater. You will be thankful you’re not sitting closer. This is not a casual smoke break. These are panic cigarettes. You smell the anxiety in the air. 

When the generator malfunctions, you see the characters’ reactions on Zoom, but sitting in the theater you are forced to cover up your ears too. The noise comes from every side of the space and knocks you out of the trance you had been in while listening to Teresa go off on some tangent. There’s an urgency. You can’t sit back. 

“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t my total intention to leave people feeling like they had to figure it out for a long time. If they could settle it in the space of the theater, then I would have failed,” Arbery told Vox.

While Zoom readings of our favorite shows are not perfect replacements for live theater, there is still value in hearing words spoken aloud, allowing them to affect you in the moment, and letting them creep into your life in the days, weeks, and months afterward. And, I know we’ve been hearing this for months, but with Broadway now shut down through May 2021, it’s increasingly important to support theater artists through online platforms when we can to keep the industry alive.

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is a play that is meant to make you think. And, at a place like King’s where we pride ourselves in having “big conversations,” this is a conversation that’s worth taking part in. “Heroes'' reminds us that we don’t think in a vacuum. What do we do when those we love disagree with us? We have to figure it out in community. It’s in community that we can have “big conversations,” have our beliefs challenged, and wrestle through life’s questions together.