A brief announcement: After 20 years of writing “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed, I am retiring at the end of the month—from the gig, that is, not from writing itself. The final column will run in two weeks.
Going to a play at the height of COVID-19 was effectively impossible, but I managed to see two productions of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning in the fall of 2020. The first performance was via Zoom. The actors did what they could, but the suspension of disbelief was never a viewer option. Heroes was then produced by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater and “captured digitally as a site-specific production, created in a closed quarantine ‘bubble’ at a private location in the Poconos, following strict health guidelines,” as press materials stated at the time.
Set at a small Catholic college in rural Wyoming during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Heroes centers on four friends (two men, two women) who reunite at a college function, a few years after graduation. They all admire a professor who has been appointed as president of the college. She joins them around two-thirds of the way through the play; one of the four is her daughter.
The audience quickly picks up that Transfiguration College of Wyoming has a curriculum based on the Great Books, with a strong dose of conservative theology—not least on matters of sexual morality. And the lessons have gone deep. None of the four has drifted away from the faith, or skewed to the left, although one is clearly more troubled by punitive rhetoric than the rest.
The play’s title alludes to a pop-sociological theory of history as moving through a cycle of four periods, each about two decades long. Since graduation, one member of the group has become a fairly successful figure in right-wing media (likely she has Steve Bannon on speed dial) and an ardent believer in the apocalypse promised by the fourth turning.
“It’s destruction,” she says. “It’s revolution, it’s war. The nation almost doesn’t survive. Great example is the Civil War, and the economic crisis before that. Or the Great Depression and World War II. And it’s right now. The national identity crisis caused by Obama. Liberals think it’s Trump. It’s the fight to save civilization. People start to collectivize and turn against each other. It seems like everything’s ending—we’re all gonna die. No one trusts each other. But the people who do trust each other form crazy bonds. Somehow we get through it, we rise from the ashes …”
The phoenix that emerges? An era of security, conformity and prosperity. The apocalypse has a happy ending.
When the play premiered off-Broadway in 2019, reviewers often imagined the discomfort it would presumably give New York theatergoers—plunged into a continuous flow of red state ideology, with no character challenging it. But the play did more than that. The figures Arbery puts on stage are characters, not ventriloquist dummies. They have known one another at close proximity for years and formed “crazy bonds” of great intensity.
Their conversation is rooted in that personal history as well as in Transfiguration College’s carefully tended vision of Judeo-Christian Western civilization. The playwright creates a good deal of inner space for the actors to occupy and move around in. When I finally got to see Heroes of the Fourth Turning onstage, in person, there were moments that felt like eavesdropping on real people.
What comes out of a character’s mouth at times echoes well-worn culture-war talking points—many unchanged now, almost eight years after when the play is set. At the same time, the characters clash over points of doctrine and ethical disagreement, and express very mixed feelings about the MAGA crusade. The closest thing to an expression of enthusiasm for the new president (then and now) is when a character calls Trump “a Golem molded from the clay of mass media … Even if he himself is confused, he has the ability to spit out digestible sound bites rooted in decades of the work of the most brilliant conservative think tanks in the country.”
This is cynical, but also naïve. When the president of the college appears before her adoring former students, she recites some points they have undoubtedly heard from her many times:
“Progressivism moves too fast and forces change and constricts liberty. Gridlock is beautiful. In the delay is deliberation and true consensus. If you just railroad something through because you want it done, that’s the passion of the mob. Delaying is the structure of the [republic], which is structured differently in order to offset the dangers of democracy. I believe in slowness, gridlock.”
She’s a fictional character, but I still wonder what she’s made of the last few weeks.
Not long after Heroes opened in 2019, Elizabeth Redden wrote an in-depth article for Inside Higher Ed about Wyoming Catholic College, the not-so-veiled original for the play’s Transfiguration College. Arbery’s father was the college’s president at the time. All of which goes some ways toward explaining how a one-act play can evoke so palpably a college that is also a counterculture.