Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning opened last night in a production by the Howland Company in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s.  This is a play about a group of people who have assembled in the wilds of Wyoming for the inauguration of a new President at a small, extremely conservative, Catholic university.  All of them, to greater or lesser extent, buy into the mix of ideas; an essentially pre-Vatican II Catholicism, traditional American Conservatism rooted in an idea of “Western Civilization:” and a kind of neo-Spartan survivalism, taught at the university in question.  The play is a long (over two hours without a break) conversation between these characters about ideas and values.  I strongly suspect these ideas and values are not shared by the author or the director (Philip Akin). but they are treated in the play on their own terms with no attempt at satire or parody.  I don’t share those values either but I shall try in this review to keep my own feelings out of it as well.

There are five characters.  Justin (Mac Fyfe) owns the ranch where the play takes place.  He’s an ex marine who came to the college as a mature student.  He hunts and breaks horses and teaches horse riding at the university.  He’s quiet, non confrontational and contemplating entering a monastery since creating some sort of conservative Catholic enclave entirely divorced from the modern world doesn’t look very realistic.  That said, he’s advocating for teaching firearms skills at the university; just in case?  Teresa (Ruth Goodwin) is a Connecticut girl living in New York.  She’s bright and brash and a disciple of Steve Bannon.  Her education allows her to pick and choose which parts of Catholic doctrine are for her (she has no time for “empathy”) and it gives her the rhetorical skills to, for example, equate abortion with the Holocaust. She believes absolutely that the Culture Wars will turn into shooting wars and that it’s the mission of people like her to save “Western Civilization”.  Kevin (Cameron Laurie) has a dead end job in Nebraska.  His experience in the world is making it harder for him to reconcile the political values he has imbibed with what he sees around him and he finds it hard to combine traditional (celibate) Catholicism with having any kind of a life.  He questions the assumption that Catholics have to be politically conservative but is too deeply indoctrinated and maybe not bright enough to chart an alternative course.  His solution is drink and he’s drunk for most of the play causing him to act in various embarrassing ways interspersed with some of the plays most lucid moments.  He likes the idea of a coming war as it offers a chance for martyrdom.

Emily (Hally Seline) is the daughter of the new university President.  Educated somewhere else (“to get away from her parents”) she’s in constant pain from some unrevealed disease.  She works for a Catholic women’s counselling service in Chicago and is finding it hard to reconcile what she sees in the world with the “good people will always get on through faith and hard work” philosophy of her parents.  Finally there’s Gina (Maria Ricossa); the new university President.  Her political ideas were formed during Goldwater’s presidential campaign and she hasn’t changed.  She’s fierce about abortion and birth control and seeks a kind of martyrdom through repeated child bearing.  She can see absolutely no line of descent from her Goldwater era conservatism to the Bannon belief system espoused by Teresa who is her protege.

Interspersed through the two hours of, mostly, talking are a number of incidents that are strangely ignored or not taken seriously by anybody.  The ranch itself appears to be possessed.  There are odd and very loud noises that are explained away, rather unconvincingly as a faulty generator.  Right at the beginning Justin shoots a deer but when he tries to gut it his hand is strangely paralysed.  Kevin gives an account of a vision he had on an undergraduate wilderness trip but no-one takes it seriously.  Emily starts to channel one of her clients.  None of this is accepted as a real religious experience.  So many aspects of Catholicism, not least caritas, seem to have been refined out in the intellectual diet of Plato, Aristotle and the Church Fathers with a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins thrown in and the sexually repressive regime of wilderness camping and (I imagine) cold baths.

The mix of characters is explosive and our two hours witness multiple confrontations; some purely verbal, others getting physical.  Emily and Teresa confront each other of over Emily having a friend who works for Planned Parenthood.  To Teresa such a person is the equivalent of a Nazi death camp guard and she doesn’t hold back.  Kevin confronts Justin and Teresa about a long ago undergraduate fling; almost provoking a fist fight.  In perhaps the most consequential scene Gina accuses Teresa of betraying everything she has taught her by embracing the “charlatan” Bannon.  Teresa, in her finest hour, deftly demonstrates the equivalency between Gina’s beliefs and her own; including an accommodating racism, but Gina won’t have it.  And that perhaps is the key to how these people work; Teresa and Gina can pick and choose which bits of church teaching and which bits of reality they accept.  The others, to greater or lesser degree, are torn apart by the contradictions they experience between their lived lives and what they have been taught is “Truth”.

All this takes place in the tiny space of the Studio Theatre at Crow’s without an interval.  There is no escape.  The audience has to experience what these characters have to say and what they believe.  It’s very uncomfortable.  Even the funny bits, and there are some very funny bits, are uncomfortably funny.  It’s reinforced by a skilfully claustrophobic set, lighting and sound design.  The acting is brilliant.  We are forced to take the characters for what they are. They are complex, human, dangerous or pathetic but they are not laughable, dismissable stereotypes.  That’s pretty scary.

Last night may have been the most profoundly uncomfortable two hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre but I would not have missed it.  It’s a really powerful theatrical experience.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning continues in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s Theatre until October 29th.  See it if you can; which isn’t going to be easy because it’s mostly sold out.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz