Radical Conformity
The goal, he said, wasn’t to convince anyone or to stir empathy — a concept both he, and the play’s characters, question — but to ask audiences to sit with the characters’ ideas, which he calls “a radical act.” Still, he confessed to having his own doubts as he was writing the play, at one point even “thinking it was evil.”
I knew people were going to love this show. It seemed inevitable given the theatre industry’s recently purported push to be more “inclusive” in their seasons, replacing traditionally white plays with those that are not, creating an appetite for a genuine, non-satirical white identity story. Lest we forget, theatregoers are not changing at pace with season programs, and especially in this age of white nationalism run amok, it is perhaps refreshing to see white conservatives challenge each other’s values on stage. I say this not to diminish the substance of the play, but rather to contextualize it.
Danya Taymor’s production of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning is, on its own, a beautiful piece of theatre. It is an intimate portrait of four young conservatives reflecting on and challenging their system of values in Trump’s America. It is a well acted, well designed, and deftly written play. Coming off the heels of Plano at Clubbed Thumb last summer, Heroes reifies Arbery’s proficiency with language, his ability to create uniquely delicate characters and very subdued, yet fecund dramatic tension. It’s a satisfying production by many standards.
What it is not, however, is radical. To ask audiences to “sit with characters whose beliefs they don’t share”—specifically conservative beliefs—is, quite frankly, aggressively conformist and is in lock step with how conservative politics operates nationally.
Arbery has stated to the NY Times that he does not want his play “to breed complacency,” that his play was “meant to trouble.” It is in this spirit that I respond to Heroes in relation to our larger political landscape.
Let’s rewind.
In September, I managed to see Eureka Day upon reading some of the glittering reviews: Ben Brantley called it “an explosive comedy” and the “perfect play for our age of disagreement,” and Michael Sommers and Steve Suskin both gave it 5/5 stars. I am not typically swayed by critics, but since the praise was unanimously positive (bordering on saccharine), I was intrigued.
In a nutshell, the play is about an ultra “liberal” private day school where the relationships between the parents breaks down when some of them refuse to vaccinate their children. It’s a funny satire that honestly portrays the anti-vaxxer perspective while poking fun at the “liberal values” that some in NYC love to tout. The play never takes the side of the anti-vaxxers, but It doesn’t condescend to them either. It treats them as complicated human beings and this refreshing portrayal is the big draw. It shows the human side of the wild, conspiratorial, anti-vaccine perspective and forces us to, at the very least, reckon with it; to consider their side—no matter how kooky or dangerous—for 90 minutes. By the end, we may walk away feeling moved, enlightened, or bored and unchanged, but with an understanding that we are all in the same complicated boat.
At face value, this is a wonderful thing. Isn’t art, at its core, about empathy? Yes, I would agree. To open a window into the unknown, into the “other,” art has the capacity to challenge and enlighten. However, the problem with anti-vaxxers is that despite being a relative minority they hold an inordinate amount of power, even political power. Not vaccinating children puts the entire community at risk for disease, essentially holding them hostage. It is specifically this dynamic—one of minority rule—that creates an illusion of validity and credence, and it is shows like Eureka Day that reinforce this prevailing narrative. It is specifically because anti-vaxxers have an outsized influence that we don’t immediately dismiss it.
This is not the fault of the production. Art has a responsibility to respond to the current social and political issues of our time. What really caught my attention was how we, as the audience, receive this art. Is empathy for a group of people with outsized influence an impressive feat? Is this a radical act?
As I was leaving the theatre I wasn’t so much thinking about Eureka Day, but a different play I had just read (and later saw) called Heroes of the Fourth Turning that was set to begin performances in a few weeks. I knew that if people loved the former play, they were going to lose their minds for the latter one, because what’s even more attractive than a “complicated” portrayal of liberal anti-vaxxers are conservative Republicans.
Heroes doesn’t deal with just any conservatives but young conservatives who are religious. Vigorously religious and intellectual. It is these two traits that inform their politics. They debate and discuss all things existentially Catholic, attempting to navigate their lives in the tumultuous and “divisive” times we live in. The many insecurities and personal struggles they deal with are filtered through their faith. Arbery, having grown up in a very religious household in Wyoming then later relocating to NYC, is particularly suited to tell this story. These are his friends and relatives in his hometown and, what I assume, is a large part of who he is and what he had to reckon with. This honest portrayal feels refreshing and much like Eureka Day, critics and audiences alike seem to agree on this point.
In the Playwrights Horizons playbill for Heroes, Will Arbery writes: “I’m representing their positions, with a goal of impartiality. You can do what you want with that access.” In this sense, he is incredibly successful. The impartiality makes the characters truthful and authentic, and despite his fear of having no liberal counterpoint in the play, this omission makes them feel more relatable. (We tend to surround ourselves with people we agree with, don’t we?) This is all well and good if Heroes was a play about Catholicism, but it is not. At its core, it is about political conservatism.
One may argue that the tension between religion and politics is the play, but this presumes the apocryphal notion that white Western religions acts as a catalyst for conservatism. The play’s central conflict is the dissonance between the characters’ religious beliefs (their upbringing, morality, system of values) and how that informs their political beliefs (abortion, queer rights, Trump), but this is not how conservatism operates. Conservatism has never wavered to religion because, in this country, white faith is a tool wielded by conservatism.
When Arbery attaches lofty philosophical ideas stemming from religion to his characters’ system of values, it peddles the faux narrative that religion, as it pertains to political conservatism, is anything other than a tool to preserve a white hegemony. Take the play’s contentious issue of abortion, in which Teresa (an anti-abortion hardliner) goes on a tirade after hearing that her friend Emily may not believe it as an absolute evil. We instinctively believe that abortion is a religious issue, but this is false. Historically, various denominations had differing views on abortion and it was never a key cultural flashpoint until the 70s. The catalyst was the Supreme Court case Green vs. Connally, which ruled that racially segregated private schools will no longer receive tax exemptions. As desegregation took effect in America, the nation’s white students fled from public schools to tax exempted private ones run by evangelicals. Finding themselves in another existential threat (first by integration and now funding), these religious leaders decided to enter politics. However, racism was not a good sell for unifying voters so instead they amplified abortion.
To Arbery’s credit, he does attempt to address this tension when Teresa (a Steve Bannon acolyte) confronts Gina (the professor of a Catholic university) about Gina’s self-righteous anti-Trump rhetoric while ignoring the racist implications of supporting Pat Buchanan in the 90s. Teresa is more willing to accept the racism and xenophobia from the party because she understands that it is about self-preservation and survival. It is about retaining power. She sees it as a war of identities, willing to rationalize her religion to fit modern conservatism. This is the true, unfiltered version of conservatism. Gina, on the other hand, dismisses modern conservatism as having forgotten its own identity. She has a “this is not my Republican party” mentality and believes the party needs to return to a moral high ground of sorts; a values driven party; “moral conservatism.” In this exchange, we catch a glimpse of the futility that religion serves in the realm of conservatism, how the dissonance is perhaps too large to reconcile.
But this is an obvious observation that hardly needs to be explained. It is low hanging fruit. Of course there is dissonance. Of course there is hypocrisy. Conservatism has forced on to Americans the idea that religion is the engine behind their agenda to mask the preservation of a white oligarchy. Religion is the smoke and mirrors. By utilizing divine ordinance, they can claim that their agendas are moral while simultaneously censuring dissidents as godless or evil. Republicans and conservatives do not have a monopoly on religion and yet we treat it like a monolith because conservatism has created such an illusion. Black people are the most religious ethnic group in the country, yet they are the most consistently democratic voting constituency. Granted, homophobia and other queer issues are still contentious within all religious groups, but when it comes to conservatism, it has truly weaponized religion to far greater lengths than Heroes’ capacity to interrogate.
This is nobody’s fault and there isn’t anything the play can, should, or needs to do. Like Eureka Day, Heroes is reacting and reflecting on our current times. Teresa, at one point, even urges her friends against empathy, disparaging it as a liberal quality. Take the play for what it is and consider these characters. Undoubtedly, there are young conservatives out there who are beginning to question their values and upbringing, for which this play may resonate on a more profound level than it did for me.
Regardless, the play is not a radical act.
To lend an ear to their struggles, their pain, even to a room full of liberals who only watch MSNBC and listen to Pod Save America, is not a radical act. It doesn’t matter that the characters in Heroes watch Bojack Horseman and read Flannery O’Connor. Republicans have given them a terrifying amount of power—real political power—in this country. Conservatives have shaped—and continue to shape—the laws in their favor even when they are the political minority. That is how they built the system. It is conservatism that maneuvers around a majority vote, consolidates power, and silences you. They are the mainstream and we all live in their world, but they will still claim victimhood.
Fear of losing political power while gripping the levers to it is the bonding agent that holds the (white) conservative coalition together. It is this hypocrisy that is central to its survival and we, as a society, have bought it. It is why Tucker Carlson can go on TV and vomit nativist populism and rail against the “ruling class” despite being a literal coastal elite who is a card carrying member of said class. It is why, with no sense of irony, Donald Trump, Jr. can mock Hunter Biden’s success as purely a product of nepotism. It is why the Tea Party can claim to be grassroots, despite being funded by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers. It is why Muslims must constantly defend Islam from being labeled as extremist, but Christians are never accountable to the KKK. Hypocrisy—doublespeak—is conservatism.
Will Arbery can claim his play is a radical act because conservatism has deemed it so.
