While political theater is rarely efficacious, it can challenge assumptions and open minds. The problem with most political theater in New York is that it affirms rather than challenges the assumptions of its liberal to left wing audience. In this young century, I have seen two political plays that have unsettled their audiences: Young Jean Lee’s Church and Jonathan Reynolds’ Girls in Trouble. Now comes Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which does not challenge its audience’s beliefs but does portray the humanity of its ideological opponents. And while the play did not unsettle me politically, it shook me emotionally.
Most of the play, directed by Danya Taymor, takes place at the end of a party where the host and three stragglers (the host and two of his guests are alumnae of the conservative Catholic Transfiguration College of Wyoming) await the arrival of their mentor (her daughter is the third guest), who has just been appointed president of the college.
Arbery’s aim is not to challenge the audience by forcing them to take in these people’s beliefs but, as he writes in his program notes, “I’m representing their positions, with the goal of impartiality.” And though he says, “I’m not asking you to empathize with them,” he presents their aspirations, insecurities, fears, and pains – both emotional and physical. Arbery’s parents are teachers at a similar college. He writes, “I would stay up past my bedtime, on porches and patios, listening to professors and students debating drinking, smoking cigarettes. … I love my conservative parents. They’re brilliant and compassionate and weird. They have back pains and nightmares and adorable giggles.” The play is a late night back patio conversation complete with drinking, smoking and cursing — essentially no different from the drunken late night conversations of liberal and left wing academics, students, and twenty-somethings. The physical pain of these characters goes well beyond backaches -– the college president’s daughter, Emily (Julia McDermott), is suffering from a crippling disease (it seems to be MS).
Emily is easy to sympathize with — I do not use the overused and trivialized word “empathize” for reasons that will be discussed later. She is devastated when the party’s host Justin (Jeb Kreager), who is her friend and constant support and with whom she confesses she wants to have a child, announces that he is entering a monastery. This reminded me of the character in Stephen Karam’s The Humans whose longtime partner left her just as she was about to have surgery that would leave her using a colostomy bag -– the odds of finding a romantic/sexual life companion when you have MS or a colostomy bag are daunting.
Kevin played by John Zdrojeski is in a post-college identity crisis that probably rings true for many. He has a mind-numbing job, can’t find a girlfriend, compulsively masturbates to internet porn, and (probably out of insecurity) drinks at the party with stupid adolescent abandon and is deeply humiliated when he vomits on the patio. He is also hungry to have grand theological and political discussions with his friends and mentor because he is questioning both his Catholic and conservative beliefs.
Emily, too, is questioning her beliefs. She is friends with a drag queen and with someone who works at Planned Parenthood and had a conviction-shaking encounter when she worked counseling pregnant women not to have abortions. She argues against her friends’ intolerance.
This is where Arbery seems to back away from challenging his audience –- he gives them the out of identifying with Kevin’s doubts and rooting for Emily’s criticisms.
An unambiguous conservative view comes from Theresa (Zoë Winters) a Bannonite blogger, whose moral conviction that abortion is murder is absolute. Her arguments are simplistic and hate-filled –- again, Arbery is not challenging his audience with cogent conservative ideas. She does make one point which I found compelling –- that liberals who say that abortion rights are about a woman’s right to choose what to with her body are too cowardly to admit that abortion is murder and that they want the right to murder. I wanted to shout out “yes, it is murder if you believe that a fetus is a human being in the same way a child is, and I do not –- you do, and I agree that you are morally obligated to fight abortion.” Though the play does not challenge my beliefs, it made want to defend them with stronger arguments than are usually offered by my comrades.
Yet, one point about abortion does not a coherent challenge make. The other articulation of conservative views comes from the newly appointed college president, Gina (Michelle Pawk). Gina argues against Theresa’s white identity politics, saying that the conservatism she taught her students rejects collectivism, including identity collectivism. But Theresa quickly undermines Gina’s argument when she challenges Gina to explain how her support for Pat Buchanan in 1992 is different from Theresa’s support for Bannon and Trump (Gina voted for Trump but went to confession afterward –- Kevin vomited).
While Gina’s arguments are easily undercut (she then resorts to vicious ad hominin attacks), she does have the courage –- physical courage –- of her convictions. He opposition to birth control and her belief in the sanctity of the life of the fetus led her to have eight c-sections after she was told another birth would kill her.
Though the conservative ideas in the play are not compelling to a left-liberal audience, the school’s curriculum has an appeal to a certain type of intellectual who admires the Catholic scholarly tradition –- the students are required to speak conversational Latin and memorize Gerard Manley Hopkins while mountain climbing. The slacker Kevin quotes freely from Plato and Theresa uses Hannah Arendt (hardly a Catholic conservative) to bolster her arguments.
As I previously said, one of the play’s greatest strengths is its ability to humanize people its audience does not usually see as full, complex human beings. It is true, as I’ve noted, the characters whom it is easiest to identify with are those who are questioning their conservative views. Arbery uses Gina’s c-sections and a reference to knee-replacements and constant pain to humanize her. He also has Theresa reveal that she is frightened of childbirth and generates sympathy for her with Gina’s cruel attacks and Kevin’s destructive revelation of a personal secret of hers. However, Gina and Theresa are not as sympathetic as Emily and Kevin. Justin, the least talkative of the characters, has a quiet strength that comes from his convictions (though he becomes explosively violent when Kevin reveals the above-mentioned personal secret) and is incredibly decent and kind in his care of Emily. He also seems genuinely baffled by the direction the world has taken which leads to his decision to enter the monastery.
Heroes of the Fourth Turning has a power that resists intellectual analysis. The heated debates are thrilling and had me on the edge of my seat, and it ends with a moment that left me shaken. Emily seems to take on the identity of a pregnant African American woman who, when Emily was counseling women not to have abortions, savaged her for her inability to comprehend the experience of her clients. Yet, there are moments when it becomes clear that Emily is not only speaking as this woman raging at her: Emily also rages at the ideas the other characters have expressed.
If one reads Arbery’s program notes, Emily’s adopting of, or possession by, this woman’s persona seems to be an attack on the left-liberal obsession with empathy and, perhaps, on his own play. He writes that the problem with simply recreating the conversations he heard as a child
… has to do with empathy. According to Hannah Arendt, a skeptic of empathy, the trick is “to inhabit the position, not the person.” One trains “one’s imagination to go visiting,” but we should not inhabit, which can shade into a sort of colonizing compassion. The contemporary over-emphasis on empathy has, according to Namwali Serpell, “imposed on readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized” … I’m not asking you to empathize with these characters. I’m representing their positions, with a goal of impartiality. … But, to be honest, I think I’m after something a little more dangerous. I think I’m after a fugue.
“Fugue” has two meanings:
In music: a contrapuntal composition in which a subject is introduced and then repeated by interweaving voices until the climax.
In psychology: a period of dissociating, entering another identity, losing your own, waking up in a different environment, not knowing how you got there.
The play’s engagement with the second definition of “fugue” is more complicated.
…I find this impulse tragic, because not only is it impossible, but the attempt is very dangerous. You can’t fuse with other people. If you try, you — and everything that makes you you — might disappear.
On the other hand, if you don’t read his program notes (and theatergoers should not need to read program notes to understand a play), this moment, though frightening, comes across as, on one level, positive — unlike Theresa and Gina, Emily is able to empathize with someone else and, therefore, understand someone else’s point of view. Arbery admits that this paradox is in his work. Right after the above-quoted criticism of empathy and concern over people entering fugue states, he writes, “But then what are we doing here? How close can, or should, a playwright get to a fugue state? What about an actor? What about an audience?”
Not all the play’s moments that defy rational analysis are equally powerful. The play begins with Justin shooting a deer. He later confesses that his hand trembled when he tried to gut the animal and points out blood spots that have stained the patio. In her review for Time Out, Helena Shaw writes that this is “an old image of sacrifice and stain, and a reminder that soil remembers.” Justin’s trembling hands could symbolize a shaking of his convictions that drives him into the monastery. Maybe. Or it could just be empty symbolism.
While I’m agnostic about the deer symbolism, I find a deafening screech that recurs throughout the play to be a gratuitous distraction. Justin first reassures his guests that the sound is just that of a malfunctioning generator. He later confesses to Emily that it is not the generator and speculates that it is the sound of demonic possession.
The play has other flaws. The early dialogue is written in excessively clipped lines that are reminiscent of the deliberately exaggerated naturalism of David Mamet, and it strains to achieve the random quality of party chat. The only actor who avoids coming across as stilted in his delivery of these lines is Zdrojeski as Kevin.
These last criticisms aside, Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a powerful, unsettling, and sometimes baffling evening in the theater.
xxx
Heroes of the Fourth Turning’s run at Playwrights Horizons has been extended until November 17th.