Will Arbery

Will Arbery

Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. His play Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of an OBIE for Playwriting, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the John Gassner Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. He’s the recipient of the Whiting Award for Drama. Other plays...
Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. His play Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of an OBIE for Playwriting, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the John Gassner Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. He’s the recipient of the Whiting Award for Drama. Other plays include: Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), You Hateful Things (NYTW Dartmouth Residency), Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He’s currently under commission from MTC, Adventureland, The Met Opera and Audible. He’s a member/alum of New Dramatists, The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Page 73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. Film/TV projects with HBO, A24, BBC Films, and Hulu. MFA: Northwestern. BA: Kenyon College. willarbery.com

Plays

  • Corsicana
    In Corsicana, a small city in the heart of Texas, a woman with Down syndrome and her half-brother find themselves unmoored in the wake of their mother’s death. Needing help, Christopher asks Ginny to spend time with a local outsider artist whose outsider status extends beyond art alone: he’s different, or unique, or brilliant or complicated or wrong. In this tender quartet about community and caretaking,...
    In Corsicana, a small city in the heart of Texas, a woman with Down syndrome and her half-brother find themselves unmoored in the wake of their mother’s death. Needing help, Christopher asks Ginny to spend time with a local outsider artist whose outsider status extends beyond art alone: he’s different, or unique, or brilliant or complicated or wrong. In this tender quartet about community and caretaking, reality is a consensus not everyone consents to, whether they’re counted among the special, the “special needs,” or the so-called normal. "It’s about small groups. It’s about community. It’s about family. It’s about the dead. It’s about ghosts. It’s about gentle chaos. It’s about contracts of the heart. And the belief that when a part of the self is given away, is surrendered to the needs of a particular time, in a particular place, then community forms. From the ghosts of the parts of ourselves we’ve given away. A new particular body. Born of our own ghosts. I don’t know. It’s about Texas."
  • Heroes of the Fourth Turning
    It’s nearing midnight in Wyoming, where four young conservatives have gathered at a backyard after-party. They’ve returned home to toast their mentor Gina, newly inducted as president of a tiny Catholic college. But as their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, it becomes less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a chilly night in the middle of America,...
    It’s nearing midnight in Wyoming, where four young conservatives have gathered at a backyard after-party. They’ve returned home to toast their mentor Gina, newly inducted as president of a tiny Catholic college. But as their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, it becomes less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a chilly night in the middle of America, Will Arbery’s haunting play offers grace and disarming clarity, speaking to the heart of a country at war with itself.
  • You Hateful Things
    Nicole, Crystal and Lawrence lost their mother last year. But they still have their white dad. They love their white dad. Their white dad feels like he's made of love. One day, while they're renovating his house, they discover Dad's got a white dude in a box. This white dude in a box says he hates them. They don't love this white dude in a box.
  • Plano
    Tonight, and later, and earlier, three sisters (no, not those ones) are stricken with a series of strange plagues. Let’s talk about family nightmares. I mean, uh, memories.
  • Evanston Salt Costs Climbing
    Jane Maiworm loves her job as Assistant Director of Public Works, with more enthusiasm than her buddies, truck drivers Peter and Basil, can muster. Then advancing technology and climate changes start to threaten their jobs, and their sanity. And it's so cold outside.
  • Claustrophile
    Bob lives in Wyoming with his new wife Pepish. He's the opposite of a claustrophobe. He wants to be surrounded. He wants to fill his big empty property with as many people as possible before the volcano erupts.
  • Wheelchair
    Gordon lives alone with a severe disability. Even though he believes himself to be one of 36 righteous people in the world, Gordon is being evicted from his apartment by his niece. Meanwhile, his apartment is convulsing into the strange slow puppetry of loss. This is a new play about being one of the righteous, about being forced to change, and about feeling broken.
  • The Mongoose
    A family in Dallas may or may not have a talking mongoose living in their walls. Kay Bailey tries to hold her family together as Mom goes missing, Dad brings home strange men, Joe goes off the deep end, and Maddy talks to the mongoose, whose name is Jeff. Because here’s the thing about Jeff: Jeff listens, Jeff hears, Jeff knows.
  • The Confession
    Fr. Anthony, a Falstaffian monk at a private boys school in Texas, is accused of an indecency in the classroom, and then forced to go to confession with a priest from the diocese. Flamboyant and irreverent, a devotee of Tina Turner and Dante’s Inferno, Anthony starts the painful process of rediscovering what it was that made him a priest in the first place, and tries to rediscover who he loves the most.
  • You're Sadder Than You Realize
    A play about Justin Bieber, an 18th century French cannibal, and a Belgian super fan on the internet.