Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Broadcast by the Wilma Theater

Or: Tresspas

So this is American Chekov. Four friends gathering out under the stars, the words of poets and philosophers luminous in their mouths, spines staled with a zeal, bellies sick with doubt, each striving desperately to convince the other that their path to the future is the true one, to save their souls. They strive for goodness, and purpose in their lives. There’s even an indescribable sound that swoops with demonic force upon the conversation.

In this case, two days before the 2017 solar eclipse, in a small Wyoming town in the path of Totality, the intellectuals out hammering their lives are four graduates of the local Catholic collage, four conservatives on very different paths. Justin (Jered McLenigan) an ex-marine who loves the Lord and fears for the future of mankind, has thrown a small party in honor of his mentor, the newly elected president of the collage, Dr. Gina Preston (Mary Elizabeth Scallen). Her daughter, Emily (Campbell O’Hare), suffering from debilitating disease is tended to by Justin and while struggling to keep love in her heart for all creation and pain from swallowing her entirely. Her situation is not helped by Kevin (Justin Jain) who chooses the party to get dangerously drunk and go spelunking in the depths of his fear and self loathing, nor by the arrival of Teresa (Sarah Gilko), a Bannon-Molded political personality, back from New York and afire with news of the heroic times ahead.

Much of the play’s fission comes from the novelty of seeing American conservatives on stage. Not as villainous bigots or the lost and bewildered souls of Sam Hunter’s dramas, but true believers. Their conversations are as likely to burst with recitations of Tennyson as confused derision over their supposed enemies. But playwright Will Arbery’s deftness lies not only in showcasing the rhetoric, but peeling it away to show the human wants and fears inside. The conversation sparks, leaping luminously back and forth and scuttling back to earlier points (particularly well placed Kevin’s ramblings, which Jian, though taking a little time to get the swing of, slurs masterfully). Arbery even sloughs off some of the smooth skin of the play to show us the working muscles, in one part when Teresa rapturously shows off the eponymous theory, with everything but a powerpoint conjured from the night air to showcase each character’s relation to her much-petter theories archetypes.

There is always some surprise in the script, some sudden revelation or reversal you cannot see coming. McLengian’s Justin especially is a font unexpected lines that had me snorting and scrambling for the pause button, his western stillness and general air of competency (sometimes noble, sometimes disturbingly tilted towards violence) allows the most outrageous pronouncements shade to curl under before striking out like rattle snakes (piteously Cherry Orchard moment of thwarted declaration, and hilariously in his pitch of a christian picture book).

Gilko is another perfectly suited actor to her part. Her Teresa exhibits a hunger, pouncing on ideas and gleefully tasting her own thoughts, and pawing at Kevin’s squishiness. Her fervency matches Arbery’s zealous and conniving script, that couches horrible ideas of violence and damnation is ways that are almost believable. She is the flint on which the plays most incandescent writing is struck (wonderfully between women, first with O’Hares magnetic simplicity of conviction and later against Scallen’s personable imperiousness) but can crack and fray to show moments of delicious vulnerability.

We get wonderful chances to savor every actors performance. The play is done in the happiest of plague-reduced circumstances. The Wilma theater gathered and disinfected the cast for a video shooting “At a remote location in the Poconos,” and even lists a COVID Officer on staff (Missy Furth). The camera leans into the little things an audience lives for, focusing on a jealous face framed by two conversationists, or inching down during a group hug to see hand surreptitiously holding hand. I do wish we could have seen the supplementary reactions of characters while the rhetorical fireworks blaze, and while the play flows effortlessly over its two and a half hours, you could feel the ghost pauses where uproarious laughter or screams or gasps marshaled by a theater in tandem with your own. When Dr. Preston (a marvelous mix by Scallen of spiritual grace, spiky arrogance, and endearing tipsiness) tells off a wayward student, “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed.” I physically ached to miss the many harmony to my own involuntary “Oooooooh.” (We all know that disappointed is so much worse.)

Of all the many plays in my memory designed to “Spark Conversation” (and there have been many, and many good at that) Heroes of the Fourth Turning does an admirable job. It’s not about giving Conservatism its time in the spotlight, but showing how deep the disconnect is between rural and urban, religious and secular. When the characters steer wrong Arbery tears them gloriously wrong, but at the heart of it each of them is searching for purpose in their life and peace in their heart. For all their talk of heroes, of reclaiming the country, what the Graduates of Transfiguration crave is love and friendship and freedom from pain, and they will claw after it basely, poignantly, beautifully. It is a play that strives to find “inherent goodness” (the cornerstone of Gina’s philosophy) and comes up with flashes in its pan.