Studio Theatre Opens Season With Look At Ultraconservative Millennials With HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING

Studio Theatre presents the DC debut of playwright Will Arbery with the season-opening production of Heroes of the Fourth Turning. This portrait of the political right will run from September 21 - October 23, 2022.

Arbery's breakout play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, is a look into the thoughts and doubts of five members of the conservative Right in America, with the playwright drawing from his own family background as the child of Catholic intellectuals. The production places its characters and the Conservative movement in the near-present, opening at Studio just ahead of the midterm elections and in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a subject critical to the heart of the play.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning takes place on the edge of the Wyoming wilderness as the last guests linger late into the night at a celebration for the new President of their conservative Catholic college. Reunited after seven years, the friends toss back whiskey and name-check Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Steve Bannon, Bojack Horseman and Portlandia, tracking their distance from each other and the people they thought they'd be by now. Arbery's portrait of conservatives trying to make sense of where they-and their country-stand is an incisive yet personal look at the intelligence and despair on the Catholic right.

Arbery was inspired to write Heroes of the Fourth Turning after the 2016 elections as a window into a segment of the American right that had gained a toehold of power and influence that pundits, pollsters, and most of liberal America hadn't seen coming. Arbery's world is grounded in his own childhood, growing up in a conservative Catholic household and setting the play in Wyoming, where his father is President of Wyoming Catholic College and his mother is a professor of political philosophy.

The production will be directed by Sivan Battat, a former Studio Theatre Apprentice who currently works and resides in New York. Battat is the Associate Artistic Director of Noor Theatre, a company in residence at New York Theatre Workshop. This is the first time that a former Apprentice has returned to Studio to direct.

"Will's play is so challenging and so smart about how it works," says Battat. "We're invited into this world that he renders with such specificity-Wyoming's night sky, these friends' conversations about life and politics and the soul. The play sits squarely in realism, but the surreal hovers at every turn, in the same way that religion operates-we move through our lives with the tactile, material world around us, and religion invites us into the surreal, into the supernatural."

"It is a real pleasure to welcome Sivan back to Studio Theatre," says Artistic Director David Muse. "Sivan brings rigor and humanity to her work. I enjoyed collaborating with Sivan as an apprentice and I am excited to see what they do with Will's play."

To purchase tickets and learn more about Heroes of the Fourth Turning, please visit: https://www.studiotheatre.org/plays/play-detail/2022-2023-heroes-of-the-fourth-turning.

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