Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He’s a member of New Dramatists, and an alum of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. He's currently the Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons, where he is also under commission. His plays have received additional support from NYTW, The Vineyard, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater Project, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. Dance work: Pioneer Works, MCA Chicago, Watermill Center. MFA: Northwestern. BA: Kenyon College.
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Heroes of the Fourth TurningA PlayFrom"Heroes of the Fourth Turning"
KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude.
KEVIN
What
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy.
KEVIN
A pale what
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
Heroes of the Fourth TurningPremiered in2019- Print Books
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PLANOA Play
ISABEL
What’s the red ribbon?
GENEVIEVE
Nothing.
ANNE
It’s when we were kids.
ISABEL
A thing happened? Why didn’t you tell me?
GENEVIEVE
Because we’re not allowed to talk about the past. There’s no such thing as a meaningful past!
ANNE
It’s earlier. We’re kids. Isabel you’re a baby. We live in that house on Berkeley Street – Dad is gone on a trip to Santa Fe – and we’re playing, and we see, we all see a red ribbon snake down the staircase, slow, step by step, like this.
She demonstrates a red ribbon snaking down a staircase.
We watch it go all the way down. Then Mom grabs it and burns it in the backyard. And that day lasts for thirty years. And why is Dad always gone? And why has Mom been so hard on us? And even though Dad is away in Santa Fe, why do we swear we see him one day, laughing and screaming through the upstairs bathroom window?
PLANOPremiered in2018- Print Books
- Samuel French Acting Edition
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Heroes of the Fourth TurningA Play
JUSTIN
How do I help
EMILY
You don’t have to help
JUSTIN
I didn’t know
EMILY
You do know
JUSTIN
I didn’t really know
EMILY
Know what
JUSTIN
The pain
EMILY
It’s okay
I love pain
I love it
I love pain
We love it
Heroes of the Fourth TurningPremiered in2019- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
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“It’s delicious to see a playwright binding genres so confidently (body-double horror and rueful family comedy), but the real pleasure is in how much Plano manages to bend how you perceive reality beyond the proscenium.” —Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
“Astonishing and riveting. Heroes of the Fourth Turning risks a rare stage subject: Christian conservatism. A red-state unicorn." —Jesse Green, New York Times
“. . . A formally lovely, subtly horrifying play about the death rattle of ideologies and the thin line between devotion and delusion.” —Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker [on Heroes of the Fourth Turning]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Samuel French Acting Edition
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop
Despite their wit and charm, Will Arbery’s complicated and generous plays are deadly serious. His heroes are young people confused and disturbed by a world that has disappointed them. Intellectually audacious, formally sly, he has the courage to let these characters seize the stage with impassioned arguments about morality and meaning. He knows how to make ideas incandescent in time and space and his ear for the rhythms of speech is impeccable, yet he always cracks a window in naturalism, letting a shaft of eeriness in. His writing moves to the beat of multiple metronomes: the rhythms of thought, the counterpoint of competing logics, the heartbeat of human longing.