Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a remarkable first. It is the first time that New York’s buzziest off-Broadway play has received a review in the American Conservative before getting one in the New Yorker. Considering that the play, the creation of rising playwright Will Arbery, follows young, Catholic conservatives grappling with their faith and politics, perhaps this should come as no surprise. It has received rave reviews and been extended twice, but the play’s reception is evidence of something larger than what happens on stage: American audiences’ hunger for genuinely Catholic art.
Heroes is an exploration of our nation’s divisions, so your experience will be informed by your politics. Set at the tail end of a party in rural Wyoming, the play follows four former schoolmates who have gathered to celebrate the new president of their ultra-Catholic alma mater. Kevin once dreamed of being a priest but has become another lost boy working a dead-end job and yearning for big conversations. Theresa lives in Brooklyn and is a rising pundit for a fire-breathing populist website, essentially Breitbart. Her rapid-fire monologues about a looming civil war display her fierce pro-life convictions — and her burgeoning cocaine addiction. Emily, whose mother, Gina, is the college’s new president, suffers from an unnamed illness and admits to having a friend who works for Planned Parenthood. When the others cast her friends as enemies, Emily asks for a bigger dose of empathy. Justin is an ex-soldier who wants nothing to do with the secular world. Within this group, there are secret romances, old scars, and fresh wounds. Occasionally, their arguments on politics and theology are interrupted by Justin’s generator, which emits a banshee-like shriek.
Heroes is a play of ideas and is at its best early on, when it establishes its central preoccupation: the complexities of being a Catholic in Trump’s America. In one of the first lines of the play, Kevin stares up at the stars and yells, “This is something true.” All of the characters comment on the sky’s beauty, and this accumulates meaning as the play navigates through difficult conversations — about abortion, empathy, and the relationship of politics to religion — in which the truth is unclear. The use of the sky to represent the truth, or the divine, is powerful because it relies on the unique characteristics of theater as a medium. There is something beautiful offstage that the audience simply cannot see. It’s redolent of God’s silence but also dramatizes the play’s organizing idea.
That idea is the “scandal of the particular.” It is introduced early on when Kevin asks why Catholics have to love the Virgin Mary. Theresa explains that God reveals himself in the “particulars” of his creation. Believers are scandalized that God communicates his grandeur through the ordinary, even the grotesque. With the “scandal of the particular” in mind, the stars offstage confront the audience with a powerful challenge: Are you so sure you’re in the position to recognize grace? Are you sure you’re still human enough to recognize beauty when it comes from political enemies? But there is something false in Kevin and Theresa’s conversation.
A Catholic such as Kevin would be familiar with the scandal of the particular or at least with similar ideas. Why does he need Theresa to explain? It’s purely for the audience’s benefit. The organizing idea of the story is delivered through clunky exposition. The play often stumbles in this way.
Heroes focuses on ideas rather than character development, so the ideas become muddy and the drama unengaging. The monologues are self-indulgent and lack emotional resonance. To be fair, the characters are meant to be self-indulgent. But the play is unfaithful to them in order to shoehorn in more idea-focused writing. For example, when Emily’s mother, an old-school conservative, arrives late in the play, the story wanders away from the human drama of estranged friends and veers into a discussion about Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act. When Heroes does aim for drama, the effect is unconvincing. Theresa spends the play proclaiming populist ideas, but in her final lines, she makes an emotional confession: She’s afraid her wedding won’t be beautiful. She’s afraid she’s too private with her love. This is supposed to reveal the vulnerability behind her brawler persona, but it falls flat on its face. The emotional resonance of a confession like that has to be earned, and the play hasn’t put in the effort.
Early drafts of fiction often contain false symbolic structures that writers use to shore up their own confidence — an author will pretend that their rom-com is based on the book of Exodus, for example. Zadie Smith calls these structures “scaffolding” and has argued that writers need to recognize and dismantle them for their work to reach its full potential. Heroes still has much of its scaffolding intact. Take the “fourth turning” from the play’s title, a reference to a book of generational theory often cited by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Theresa, a Bannon disciple, explains that different epochs produce different archetypes. There are four archetypes, and there are four characters on stage. Get it?
The play has everything it needs to stand on its own, but it’s crippled by a restless insecurity. It chucks ideas at the audience without developing them, and when the end finally arrives, it makes no attempt to resolve anything, gesturing instead toward the supernatural or demonic. First, Kevin shares a spooky dream/hallucination before leaving the stage. Dream/hallucination endings are a mistake that young writers make when they don’t know how to wrap things up. They are an attempt to escape judgment by retreating to the subjective. Luckily, the play doesn’t quite end there. Justin reveals that the mechanical screaming throughout the show isn’t the generator. No one knows what it is. He’s had the house blessed. Bum! Bum! Buuumm! The delivery is the clumsiest of the night, descending into B-movie horror territory.
The play almost redeems itself with Emily’s final monologue. Without giving too much away, the play gestures toward a connection between empathy and demonic possession. For a brief moment, it feels like Heroes is going to achieve something truly wonderful. But the moment passes, and the play ends without an emotional punch.
Heroes throws a lot in the air without quite managing to catch it all. The most uncharitable take would be to say that the play’s success stems from an act of cultural arbitrage: Arbery, recognizing that ordinary Catholic discourse is immensely compelling, has simply repackaged and sold it to a left-wing audience whose alleged sophistication masks a near-total provincialism in matters of religion. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Arbery is young and talented and may go on to create significant works in the future. But for now, Heroes simply points to shifting cultural winds. Audiences are ready for stories that come from outside the secular literati’s gaze. Perhaps more artists will find success at the well of the Catholic imagination.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
