Heroes of the Fourth Turning: becoming voyeuristic almost-participants in a very scary world
11 Oct 2023

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

The staging for Heroes of the Fourth Turning is extremely intimate. The audience is a guest in the backyard of a rustic cottage or farmhouse, complete with a rickety screen door and some upturned logs serving as extra seating. Adding to the feeling of Canadiana is the entrance, morning coffee in hand, of Mac Fyfe (The Cold War, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet) in full hipster redneck drag: baseball cap, ponytail and flannel. He enjoys the fresh air and the quiet, before starting the evening's explosive events with a bang, gunning down Bambi's mom. Unfortunately he can't bring himself to gut the carcass. He can kill with glee but not for necessity. To shore up his masculinity but not because he needs to eat.

Playwright Will Arbery takes his time revealing the context of Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Turns out it is not Canadiana, but rather the US midwest, and Fyfe is hosting a party in honour of a former teacher who has been promoted to dean. The rest of the cast are also graduates of the evangelical Catholic college except for Hallie Seline (Prodigal, The Wolves) who is the influential teacher's dutiful but somewhat estranged daughter. The initial exchanges between the characters are the most compelling as we struggle to get our bearings, and adjust to a most unusual theatrical situation. All of these characters are extremely right wing. They are casually but rigidly anti-abortion, misogynistic, homophobic, racist and Christian, specifically Catholic. And they are being given space on stage to expound and debate at great length. Without it being satirical. Without being mocked or judged. It is disorienting and morbidly mesmerizing.

Director Philip Akin (Maanomaa, My Brother, Pass Over) takes the characters as seriously as they take themselves. Any ironic content is completely organic. What could be played for laughs is wisely turned to melodrama. In a world that hosts Gaetz, Poilievre, Boebert, Didulo, Green, etc, getting laughs at the expense of the far right is a cheap shot. Too easy. Arbery is trying to let us into their minds, to see what they see. He does not expect us to agree or to find them anything less than abhorrent, but he does want us to understand. How they hunger for a world that never was, believe in figureheads that are frauds, follow religiously and without question. Trump is mentioned in passing and just his name gets distracting titters, a playwright could never create satire broad or crude enough to compete with what we consume daily in the news. And it would be a shame to waste actors this talented on caricatures.

Ruth Goodwin (The Wolves) is the most strident. And the most convincing. The title of the play comes from a theory of hers, presented as fact, that is one of her justifications for the war she believes is coming. She is an Ann Coulter in a chic suit and without, initially, the baggage and blatant nastiness. She impresses Cameron Laurie (Prodigal, Genesis & Other Stories) who is less solid in his beliefs, most likely because of unfortunate exposure to LGBTQ people. He has also had way too much to drink. The daughter suffers from an unspecified painful disease that may be psychological, and each character has a secret, or two, in their past. By the time the teacher, now dean, Maria Ricossa (Big Plans) makes her fashionably late entrance in her so late they're past their due date Nancy Reagan fashions, the evening is starting to spin out of control. It is here that Arbery makes another unusual choice. Instead of the expected revelations and explosive conflict, he sidesteps, turning one character into a metaphor for the malignancy that all the characters fester with, and adding a supernatural metaphor for the dubiousness of faith.

After the dazzling flow of words, morally repugnant much of the time but nonetheless dazzling and occasionally even disturbingly persuasive, the climax feels forced. Despite a lot of obscenities and sound effects, the finale drags. The tautness goes slack and we realize just how long, two hours plus, we have been paying rapt attention to a steady flow of words, concepts and ideas. The cast who are mere inches away at times, are fortunately flawless and almost pull it off. They are utterly convincing in their simmering repression and blinkered beliefs. Even more impressive is that while one is soaring or trolling with a meaty monologue—these characters, as the right is wont to do, tend to alternately monologue as opposed to dialogue—the others appear to be listening, absorbing and processing, hearing for the very first time. Again it pulls us into the discussion, making us complicit in our observational silence, voyeuristic almost-participants. And that is an uncomfortable and unusual but fascinating and invigorating place to be.