Will Arbery's play Heroes of the Fourth Turning has been nominated for Pulitzer Prize and has become a much-discussed production since it premiered off-Broadway in 2019.Set in a small, conservative Catholic college a week after the 2017 “Unite the white” riots in Charlottesville, Va., it features four alumni in their 20s and 30s who have gathered to celebrate the induction of their mentor as the school’s president.
“That’s when I really started writing it in earnest, made it a full-length, two-act play and spent the next couple of years on it, getting it ready for performance and seeing if anyone was brave enough to produce it.” “One of the characters in the play lives in the same area, and that became an ongoing fascination of mine,” Arbery says. “It made me think that members of the far right also live in places like this, places thought of as being progressive. The epicentres of their media empires, their power bases, their donors, are there too. I got a big kick out of imagining what it must be like to feel like a spy. Just as I felt like a fly on the wall or a spy in my family.
Now, with the Writers Guild of America’s strike resolved, he’s involved in various projects, including a feature film script for the edgy indie company A24.