←Recommendations of Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I saw a production of this play in Los Angeles and found it revelatory; to be able to see into a side of America that bewilders me was most enlightening and felt real and true. This play demands top-notch performers, and the LA production fortunately had them. Highly recommend.

Arbery humanizes characters who are often antagonized on stage and does so with such nuance and grace that provides audiences both with an encounter of reality and a work of art.

I went into reading this play pretty blind. I'm glad I did! Will Arbery has crafted characters that aren't often seen in theatre with such sincerity! I found myself on edge through most of this script thanks to the masterful dialogue and well-developed characters. The story yanked me immediately back to when I was in the evangelical church. The self-loathing of some of the characters was deeply relatable. The conversation on the conservative relationship with Trump is nuanced and fascinating. All in all, this is a piece of exceptional writing that belongs on the stage.

In an art form that skews liberal, this play is an important and thoughtful presentation of conservative viewpoints—the kind of story that could help break down divisions because it finds humanity in people and views many of us (myself included) are inclined to demonize or reject outright. The characters are archetypes: the independent outdoorsman, the audience-seeking blogger, the committed activist, the tortured idealist. However, Arbery skillfully walks the line between presenting them as “types” but also as people who are damaged, flawed, and committed to ushering in a world I hope I never have to live in.

This play will stay with me for a long, long time. Arbery lifts the veil and invites us in among people with such strong, heartfelt beliefs, who possess the desire for creation and preservation of what is good, but who simultaneously contribute to destruction. There are lyrical, symbolic moments throughout the piece that hearken to what is "missing" - grace, perhaps, or forgiveness. The play neither condemns nor excuses. Instead, Arbery fills his work with real, complicated people. People who are trying to be "good" while all the while being tragically flawed - just as we all are.

One of the most powerful plays I've had the pleasure of hearing. The play does not shy away from delving deep into its characters' moral arguments, and neither does it lose its flailing characters within that rhetoric. Just purchased a paper copy so I can read it many more times.

Will Arbery's 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning' presents the idea that "the Left will eat itself," and just as quickly as it does so, it shows us the truth: that the Right will eat itself too. A haunting and deeply classical new American play that, with minimal physical action or spectacle, takes us to the complex core of the void that is American Conservatism in the deep Wyoming night.

Whew! An entirely human, unsettling, and profound piece. A couple of presumptions I make as a liberal reader/writer/human is that (1) conservatism feels like it is unified around hatred of perceived threats to power and (2) that liberal movements cannibalize themselves with fractious opinions. Here Will Arbery so fully and humanely illustrates a microcosm of intra-movement tensions within various swaths of conservative populations, capturing these humans' fear, pride, anger, hubris, and sadness. So very much an illuminating piece of the exact moment and one that looks ahead to forboding times that need to confronted and disrupted now.

A riveting, challenging look at five catholic conservative intellectuals at war with each other, themselves, and their spectrum of right-leaning ideologies. Arbery gives us a disarmingly nuanced and empathetic portrait of characters almost never explored this deeply in the theatre. At turns funny, squirmy, infuriating, and profoundly sad. I can’t stop thinking about this play.

I love this kind of play: characters who are smart and screwed-up, dialogue that's stuffed with ideas, a story that smuggles life-changing stakes into seemingly idle chatter. The fact that the characters all inhabit a brand of conservative spirituality that never gets dramatized in today's American theater makes it all the more compelling. Urgently contemporary and eloquently timeless.