Intermission at the Seymour Centre, a little over an hour deep into Will Arbery’s 2019, Pulitzer-nominated play. Mutterings in the seat behind me affirmed what I also felt: there was no clear arc or ideological thrust. No sense of a map to follow. No cues to follow for prefabricated conclusions, no position for a mind (left-leaning or right) to fall righteously, comfortably into. Arbery’s presence felt far away, even as his flesh-clad creations thrust and cut and spewed and keened his language of pain. 

Kate Raison and Madeleine Jones in Outhouse Theatre Co’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Photo © Richad Farland

The effect was one of creeping, destabilising awe, culminating another hour later, in a shattering final scene which left me shaken and close to tears. And I’m still – after all that talk, all that philosophical and theological threshing out that we had witnessed – in the gloaming of how to integrate this play into my feelings and thoughts. 

“I think I’m after a fugue,”‘ Arbery wrote in his note on the play. On the other side of the world, in a foreign country...