Curious Theatre kicks off Season 25 with a political showdown of sorts
It’s a pivotal year for Curious Theatre, one of Denver’s most ambitious production companies when it comes to taking on tough material. The founding team of Chip Walton and Dee Covington has turned over the reins to new artistic director Jade Suzanne Dixon, and they’re blasting out of the gate for the theatre’s 25th season with Will Arbery’s play about the conservative mind, Heroes of the Fourth Turning.
It’s a good choice that’s right up Curious’s alley. But if you’re thinking it’ll be a straightforward screed against conservatives and Trumpism — perhaps with a liberal fall-guy or -gal as punching bag, you’d be wrong. Heroes is, ahem, a curious bit of theatre both in its ambition and how it pulls back and changes the subject at key moments. It’s got a few big reveals that go unanswered, and an ending that felt like a big ol’ wet and weird blanket was draped over what would’ve otherwise been a perfectly satisfying closure.
Curious is fortunate to have snagged former Denver Center Theatre Company Artistic Director Kent Thompson to direct this one — his first helming gig in five years, according to John Moore of the Denver Gazette. With that star power also comes a splendid cast that features one of my new favorite actors on the Colorado scene, Noelia Antweiler, who lit up the three shows in the Arvada Center’s rep season last spring and returns here as a fire-breathing proto-Laura Ingraham who’s chugged the whole vat of conservative Kool-Aid and is ready to tell the world about it.
The scene is a tiny town in Wyoming, home to the fictional Transfiguration College where the students apparently get a healthy dose of philosophy ranging from Plato to Thucydides alongside a heapin’ helpin’ of Catholic dogma and conservative teachings. We learn that a quartet of recent grads is in town for the elevation of one of their profs (Gina, Tammy L. Meneghini) to college president. Along with Antweiler’s character, Teresa, there’s stunningly drunk Kevin (Sean Scrutchins, another standout from the Arvada rep season) and Justin (Lance Rasmussen), an older, gun-toting grad still living in town and doing some work for the college. Rounding out the cast is Gina’s daughter Emily (Adeline Mann), who’s got an illness that keeps her in constant pain.
Long before we hear so much as a word about politics, Arbery spends a good chunk of the first hour telling us exactly who these people are and what they mean to each other. I was rarin’ to watch the conservative fur fly, and all this exposition seemed a bit drawn out — although it does offer some clues about what’s to come. We open on Justin sitting on the back deck in his yard, and before he’s said a word, he whips out his rifle and shoots a deer that’d wandered close to the house. He goes out and brings back the (surprisingly lifelike) dead deer and lays it on the deck to prepare dressing it, but finds his hand shaking and has to pause before getting down to business.
(L-R) Adeline Mann, Sean Scrutchins and Tamara L. Meneghini listen to the conservative rants of Teresa, played by Noelia Antweiler | Photo: Michael Ensminger
We don’t know why his hand is shaking or even why this scene is necessary, but there it is. Soon, the others start filtering into the yard as the party for Gina inside winds down, and we end up with a pressure-cooker that starts disgorging all sorts of unpleasant details.
As he gets progressively drunker, Kevin turns in a performance for his friends that’s one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve seen on stage in some time. Weak and pathetic on top of being plastered, he slurs his way through a lot of uncomfortable revelations but also has moments of clarity where he asks piercing questions about the nature of what they all believe.
I’d call him the agnostic of the group, with the laconic Justin as perhaps an Oath Keeper in training and Teresa the embodiment of the Tucker Carlson millennial who’s gearing up for war. It’s 2017, and we’re just past Charlottesville in that first awful and chaotic year of the Trump administration. And while the five characters do eventually start talking politics, it isn’t until Gina shows up that they really get into it.
Smackdown
And boy, do they. Thinking she’s got a friendly ear in her beloved old professor, Teresa starts spitting some of the venom she’s ingested from conservative media, horrifying Gina and some of the others. Her credo boils down to “abortion is murder, full stop” and that everything their side does must be aimed at stopping it. Her talk of the coming war is borne out of some wackadoodle theory about an 80-year cycle of politics that has the good Americans in and out of power. In 2017, she informs us, we’re in the final, fourth stage — crisis — where people their age are the heroes who will rescue everyone from, I don’t know, George Soros and Joe Biden and the liberal baby killers who surround us all.
It’s alarming stuff but entirely believable. Antweiler nails the character, an urbanite Fox News disciple who’s utterly convinced of the evil cabal opposing them. No doubt by today she’d have a Q-anon podcast and guest spots on Fox, but in 2017 she’s just getting warmed up.
But while the showdown between Gina and Teresa is fascinating in its more academic exploration of the schisms on the right, Emily and Kevin have more simplistic takes that in some ways get more directly to essential questions about getting along together. Emily may be super pro-life, but she — gasp! — has liberal friends, one of whom actually works for the devil factory that is Planned Parenthood. She is actually more able to bring Teresa up short by appealing to her humanity and insisting we treat each other as human beings all with a vested interest in doing what we think is right.
And while Kevin’s drunkenness grows tedious after a time, it may be just that state of inebriation that allows him to strip some things down to their core elements, also disarming Gina and Teresa.
I don’t know if Heroes of the Fourth Turning told me anything I don’t know or suspect about conservative thinking, but in our media silos where liberals like me don’t often hear this stuff (unless it’s being lampooned on Pod Save America or called out on Maddow), there’s no doubt seeing the humanity behind the rhetoric and the uncertainty is a good thing. Arbery’s play has some fat that could’ve been trimmed and some of the perplexing bits removed (like the alarming and unexplained noises that pop up several times in Justin’s backyard), but under Thompson’s direction with this excellent cast, it’s a worthy entrant to the Curious canon and a thought-provoking night at the theatre.
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