Playwright and 'Succession' screenwriter Will Arbery's 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning' has its Southern California premiere in a Rogue Machine production at the Matrix Theatre.
, does something rare in the American theater. It turns the stage over to young religious conservatives, whose ideologies and articles of faith are presented without apology or indictment. When the work premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, audiences and critics seemed grateful for the opportunity to eavesdrop on the reunion of four friends who have gathered to celebrate the inauguration of a new president of Transfiguration College, a conservative Catholic institution in Wyoming that has shaped who they are today.
In the still early days of Donald Trump’s divisive presidency, when party lines are hardening and public dialogue is coarsening, these late-night stragglers hash out around a fire pit their shifting political and religious priorities. So much of conservative discourse these days seems bent on “owning the libs.” “Heroes” invites liberal theatergoers to listen to the other side reflect on the polarized historical moment when supposedly out of the enemy‘s earshot. The characters hardly form a monolith. They vary in disposition as well as ideological conviction, but all would be considered hardliners. Arbery denies progressive audiences a surrogate and then compounds that challenge by asking them to witness the vexing complexity of the characters as they bare their troubled souls. Re-encountering the play at the Matrix Theatre, where Rogue Machine is presenting the Southern California premiere, I am struck by how prophetic it seems. Set in Western Wyoming on Aug. 19, 2017, one week after the Charlottesville riot and two days before the solar eclipse that became known as “the Great American Eclipse,” “Heroes” predates the Jan. 6 insurrection and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade yet now seems to anticipate both of these watershed events. Playwright Will Arbery, whose play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is having its Southern California premiere courtesy of Rogue Machine Theatre at the Matrix.studio upstairs at the Matrix Theatre when rehearsals were still underway, Arbery said that the decision to situate the play at a precise point in time freed him from making revisions that might be seen as a “a bid for relevance.” His mission was to focus on the “human and spiritual journey” of his characters while being as accurate as he could to the terms of their debate. “When the play was first going up and we were doing auditions in the spring of 2019, I hadn’t actually locked down a specific time for when the play was taking place yet,” he said. “I was going back and forth, wondering if I should change things based on current events, because so much history was happening so rapidly every day. And then I remembered that solar eclipse that was in August 2017, right after the Charlottesville riot. And it just felt like this moment when the whole country was looking at the same beautiful, terrifying thing.” One topic the characters keep returning to is the imminent battle between the secular left and the religious right for the soul of Western civilization. The militancy of this rhetoric might seem to foreshadow the violent eruption of Jan. 6, but Arbery denies he had this in sights.“The reason that I have all that language in my play about the coming war is because this was an issue that Steve Bannon talked about a lot and people on the right were obsessed with,” he said. “I remember looking at Jan. 6 news footage and being like, ‘Is this what they were talking about?’ But there’s no way in which I felt like I was writing this play in order to predict events. I was mostly just reflecting back what I was hearing.” Rogue Machine’s production of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” — Stephen Tyler Howell, Evangeline Edwards, Emily James, Roxanne Hart. Austere in form, “Heroes,” steeps us in the heated conversation of its characters as they reveal how they’ve changed since leaving the security of Transfiguration. The positions they espouse will be alienating for theatergoers accustomed to seeing their values mirrored back to them. But Arbery makes it difficult to dismiss their humanity even when they seem to be dismissing our own. This is a difficult play yet a necessary one in an America that is either unwilling or incapable of binding its own fractures. If we can’t listen to one another, we certainly won’t be able to reach anyone. “Heroes” starts from this premise.
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