The Catholic Culture Podcast: Episode 52—Off-Broadway Play Accurately Portrays Conservative Thought: Zoology or Spiritual Wisdom?

Oct 21, 2019

In the new off-Broadway play Heroes of the Fourth
Turning, playwright Will Arbery (son of two Wyoming Catholic
College professors) offers a nuanced, accurate portrayal of the way
conservatives talk to each other when progressives aren’t around.
The characters are instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent
time among well-educated Catholic conservatives. The play has
attracted positive attention from both secular and Catholic
media.

Is Heroes a zoological exhibit for
progressives to gape at, or something deeper? Is it ultimately more
unsettling to a perceptive Catholic viewer, for whom Arbery’s
troubled characters might function as an indictment of a Catholic
conservatism that can be focused more on ideas and temporal
concerns than on the reality of Christ?

And if so, does the play itself recognize the nature of the
problem? That is, does it deal substantively with its characters’
Catholicism, or, like some of those characters, does it merely use
certain Catholic ideas in the service of temporal political
debates? Having seen Heroes of the Fourth Turning,
Thomas Mirus and James Majewski discuss.

Links

Heroes of the Fourth Turning https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/plays/heroes-fourth-turning/

C. C. Pecknold’s review: https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/10/01/an-extraordinary-play-that-challenges-progressives-and-conservatives-alike/

Rod Dreher’s commentary: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher-tags/heroes-of-the-fourth-turning/

Theme music: “Franciscan Eyes”, written and performed by
Thomas Mirus.

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you
like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio