Reader Ellen Vandevort Wolf went to see Will Arbery’s play Heroes Of The Fourth Turning, and sent me this letter about it (if you don’t know what the play is about, read the first thing I wrote about it):

I wasn’t able to comment in your post about the play but after seeing the matinee yesterday, I just had to write.

In NYMag, Sarah Holdren starts her review this way: “Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning is so frighteningly well written, it’s hard to write about. It’s the rare play where standing and picking up your shit and shuffling down steps and going outside—especially onto 42nd Street—immediately after feels like a kind of violence. You’re not ready for it yet. You’re still in Arbery’s world — murky yet lit by lightning, lyrical and scary, brave and terribly gentle. Coming out of the whole thing is like waking to a bucket of water thrown in your face. But even that jolt feels right in its way, because Heroes is a kind of nightmare.”

With the exception of that last phrase, this was my reaction as well. What I really wanted to do was stay in my seat and sob to the depths of my being. I’m still trying to articulate what it meant to sit there for two hours, in which most of the time I was oh so uncomfortable, hearing conservative arguments I’m well acquainted with but which very few of my fellow New Yorkers have ever heard, afraid of how the audience would respond. While I was uncomfortable, the woman sitting next to me seemed viscerally angry. But gradually I found my head forgetting the characters’ political leanings and my heart breaking for these beautiful broken people as the play climaxes, when Arbery shatters the political zeitgeist and sends us careening into the supernatural, confusing, devastating pain of humanity where we all truly live. When the lights came up, everyone seemed shaken, including the girl next to me.

The trick Arbery used that kept everyone in their seats was his resistance to agitprop and his skill at creating five “deplorables” who are undeniably human. He left us at the end with no absolution for either side of the political spectrum. Every time one of his characters started to sound like the liberal caricature of a conservative, he inserted an insightful self-evaluation or a pointed challenge from another character to deny the audience any chance of feeling justified or superior. His most empathetic character, Emily, responds to Theresa’s rabid attack on pro-abortionists by insisting that one can still like pro-choice people. I was sure he’d make Emily pro-choice but he didn’t. It was genius. He would take a character just to the brink of a liberal’s comfort zone, but never hand any of the characters over to vilify. At the same time, he didn’t affirm or valorize any of the five characters’ conservative leanings. What he did was show fully-realized, particular, complicated conservatives, a very rare event for an American stage.

I’m not sure what Arbery really thinks of conservatives. He mentioned in an NYT article being angry at Trump’s victory and needing to write about what kind of person could possibly vote for him. He certainly sounds, at the very least, ambivalent. NYMag’s Holdren seems to think the play indicates that the conservative worldview is on its last breath, not worth saving, and that the generator’s scream doubles the characters over like “devils in torment, hearing the sound of their own sad, poisoned souls.” It’s telling, then, that the bar is so low that right-leaners will grab at any little crumb that comes their way from the entertainment world, even one that isn’t really, at its core, for them. It’s to his immense credit that he’s willing to run the risk of conservatives hailing him as their champion, even if he feels otherwise. And it’s to his immense talent, that if he is as ambivalent as he sounds, conservatives consider this a positive description. (Also, I said to my husband that only a Catholic could have written the ending with the supernatural surprises. How he touched down, just for a second, on that topic [regarding Kevin’s parting story and Justin’s “lie”] was superb story-telling. Emily’s unrelenting channeling was devastating.)

Arbery keeps the liberals in their seats because of his riveting, intelligent, funny dialogue, he keeps the conservatives there by reflecting back to them characters they–to some degree–recognize, and he keeps the rest of us there by giving voice to our longing that both sides would stop for a second and recognize that we’re all human, and that we deserve to be treated with the respect due for simply being human. I came to New York to work in theater and have seen countless excellent plays in my life. But I can count on one hand the number of times a production has reached a place so deep within me that I couldn’t breathe and sobbing seemed like the only response. I will not soon forget this play. Please thank Will Arbery from this New Yorker for counting all of us human.

Done.

I’ve been thinking more about that play, and its deeper meaning. I think the core meaning has to do with the Millennial generation’s haunting sense of dispossession. This is a generation that has been exiled from the givenness of life — even from the givenness of their own bodies (though there are no transgender characters, transgenderism as a form of alienation from physical givenness would very much fit the philosophical framework of the play). These characters are struggling to find a place for themselves — a place where they can hope — in a world that is beset by a malign spirit that no one can quite name.