See it.
Playwright Will Arbery’s 2019 script Heroes of the Fourth Turning offers uniquely challenging perspectives and this strong mounting from Mitch and Murray Productions contains two downright stellar performances.
The characters in Heroes of the Fourth Turning are bound to one another by their relationships to Transfiguration College, a conservative Catholic institution in in-the-middle-of-nowhere Wyoming. It’s 2017 and Trump is just a few months into his first term.
We’re at a summer gathering in the yard of Justin’s rural home. Justin has invited a group of students who, like him, graduated from Transfiguration seven years earlier. They’re all in town because Gina Presson, a teacher who meaningfully shaped their worldviews, has just been made president of the college.
No play other than Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which I’ve seen twice, has offered me the opportunity to consider the lives, struggles, and intellectual positions of conservative Christian academics. In our polarized world, to use a weary phrase, it’s important to recognize the humanity on all sides. And Arbery knows what he’s talking about: both his parents taught at a Christian college in Wyoming that sounds a lot like Transfiguration.
Importantly, Arbery shatters the stereotype of the monolithic — and stupid — Christian conservative. All the characters we meet are smart and, although every one of them has voted for Trump, several did so with trepidation, and one guy, a self-described holy fool named Kevin, admits that he puked afterwards.
On a deeper level, Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a meditation on suffering, specifically the role of suffering in Christian theology.
The first time I saw Heroes of the Fourth Turning was just over four years ago in an online production from Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre. The threats of Trumpism have become so much more pressing in Trump’s second term that, watching Heroes of the Fourth Turning this time, I found myself less open to considering the humanity behind the misogynistic, racist, and homophobic rhetoric of the Christian right. No doubt, that’s partly why it took me longer to engage with the play in this mounting.
But it’s also because director John Murphy has made stylistic errors in my opinion. Kevin (the puker) is one of the first characters we meet — and he’s very drunk. Under Murphy’s direction, actor David Kaye shows us Kevin’s drunkenness, making it a broad joke, rather than convincingly inhabiting it. He overacts.
And it’s not long before we meet Teresa, an ambitious, coke-snorting blogger, Steve Bannon fan, and intellectual bully. Arbery gives Teresa an enormous monologue in the early going; under Murphy’s direction, actor Nyiri Karakas delivers it at an exaggerated speed that’s more performative than credible.
So, off the top, the tone felt a bit fake on opening night — with exceptions, most notably Elizabeth Barrett’s characterization of Emily, a young woman who is in constant, debilitating pain. Always genuinely listening, Barrett’s Emily is undeniably human from the get-go.
Fortunately, all the performances — including Kaye’s and Karakas’s — settled in and ripened as the evening progressed.
And thematically, the play deepens as it unfolds.
There’s a stunner of an intellectual climax when Gina, the new college president, arrives and falls into a confrontation with Teresa, who idolizes her. Gina, an old-school, Barry Goldwater Republican, is appalled by Teresa’s MAGA politics, which she characterizes as identitarian, a mirror image of the “wokeism” it decries.
In its combination of gravitas, intellectual heft, love, arrogance, and casual cruelty, Jennifer Clement’s portrait of Gina is one of the stellar performances I referred to up top.
The other is Barrett’s Emily. Emily is the clearest exemplar of the play’s investigation of suffering. She struggles to embody compassion in a religious culture that is hostile to the body, anti-sexual, anti-female, racist, and suspicious of naturally occurring diversity. In a monologue that’s more like an aria — or a scream — Emily flips through realities, through variations on pain. It’s a beast of a passage to pull off. Not many actors could to it. And Barrett soars through it.
There’s an echo that strengthens my hunch that the central concern in Heroes of the Fourth Turning is the struggle to act lovingly within the sometimes-ruthless orthodoxy of Christian conservatism: as Justin (a fully committed Aaron Craven) observes Emily’s near-exorcism, we’re reminded that, in the evening’s first passage, we saw Justin shoot a deer, haul its body onstage — and tremble as he tried to gut it.
HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING By Will Arbery. Directed by John Murphy. A Mitch and Murray Productions presentation at Studio 16 until February 9. Tickets and information
(Photo of Aaron Craven and Elizabeth Barret by Danielle Merchant)
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