In 2019, Will Arbery scored an unlikely hit with “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” his darkly comic, boundary-pushing play about young Catholic conservatives debating God, love, friendship and Donald Trump at a late-night party in a Wyoming backyard. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, it won praise both from the heavily liberal New York theater world and from traditionalist Christians who often feel caricatured by it, if they are depicted at all.
“Heroes” was a play that, for all the idiosyncrasies of its characters, was hailed as being very much About Something. But on a recent morning, Arbery, 32, was sitting outside a cafe near his apartment in Brooklyn, alternately wrestling with and resisting the question of just what his new play, “Corsicana,” was about.
Most simply, “Corsicana,” which runs until July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is about four people in that small city in Texas, including a young woman with Down syndrome, her aspiring filmmaker brother and a reclusive self-taught artist who comes into their orbit. Inspired by Arbery’s relationship with his older sister Julia, it’s the rare play to feature both a lead character — and a lead actor — with Down syndrome.
But it’s also, Arbery said, a play that “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”
“When you first walk in, you might say oh, this is a couch play, or an artist-on-the-edge-of-town play, or a Down syndrome play,” he said. “But it’s more of an accumulation. It’s not like any of those things are false — they’re all there — but something else is operating that can’t be named.”
The goal, he said, was a “widening complexity.” If audiences could “categorize the play too easily, then they could categorize Julia too easily,” he said. “And that’s the opposite of what I want to do.”
“Corsicana,” directed by Sam Gold at the same theater that first staged “Heroes,” is something of a homecoming for Arbery, who since 2019 has been living the life of a hot young playwright. There have been multiple productions around the world of “Heroes” and his previous play, “Plano,” also inspired by his family. Another play, “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” from 2018, will have its New York premiere in the fall with the New Group.
And Hollywood has been calling. In February 2020, he spent a month in London consulting on HBO’s “Succession,” immersing himself in the acid-bath dynamics of a very different clan.
“I just sat there and made a vow to myself to say at least one thing a day,” he said of the writers room. “It was an intimidatingly brilliant and funny group of people.” (Evidently, he passed muster. He recently wrapped work on Season 4, on which he’s credited as a co-producer.)
“Corsicana,” which Arbery started before the pandemic, was inspired in part by an artists residency in the same small Texas city as the play is set. But it’s also, as he puts it, a play he has been writing his whole life.
Arbery, who grew up in Dallas with seven sisters in a conservative Catholic milieu similar to that of “Heroes,” had always wanted to write a play about his relationship with Julia, who is three years older (as she likes to remind him). But he didn’t want to write, as he puts it, an “issue play.”
“I wanted to do it in the way it felt like growing up,” he said, where Julia “was just part of the fabric of daily life, a member of the family and the team.”
In “Corsicana,” the young filmmaker, Christopher (Will Daggett), has put aside his own ambitions to come home and live with his sister Ginny (Jamie Brewer) after their mother’s death. Through their mother’s best friend (Deirdre O’Connell, a 2022 Tony winner for “Dana H”), Christopher arranges for Ginny to spend time with Lot (Harold Surratt), a reclusive self-taught artist who makes kaleidoscopic sculptures out of junk, and who bristles at the idea that people might see him, like Ginny, as “special.”
Lot also makes tapes of his strange, homespun songs (reminiscent of the “outsider” Texas songwriter Daniel Johnston). The hope is that he and Ginny — whose tastes run more to Whitney Houston, Hilary Duff and the Chicks — will write a song together, to pull her out of her funk.
“Corsicana” explores art, grief, privacy, gifts, family and community, and how the meanings of creative acts change depending on who witnesses them — and whether some things should have an audience at all. There are pop-culture one-liners and bigger philosophical talk, along with surreal riffs on dinosaurs, ghosts, history and books that never get read.
Arbery described Julia, an ardent music fan who sings with a choir, as “a natural performer.” But like Lot in the play (whose work we never see), he said, she does much of her creation in her room, for “an audience of no one.”
“If you’re lucky to walk by and the door’s ajar and you see her busting these moves that are just unbelievable,” he said. “I felt like that’s the most honest place to write from, outside that door, and having the audience outside too, but with the terms clearly set — you’re not allowed to look back there.”
If Ginny mostly sings behind closed doors, Jamie Brewer, the actress who plays her, is a seasoned professional. Brewer, who has performed since she was a child, has appeared in several seasons of “American Horror Story.” In 2018, she became what is believed to be the first actor with Down syndrome to play the lead in a Broadway or Off Broadway play, in Lindsey Ferrentino’s “Amy and the Orphans.”
“Amy” was about a group of siblings learning the fuller story of their sister, who had been institutionalized as a child and neglected by the family. “Corsicana,” which Brewer described as much “wordier” than “Amy,” offers a different window on the experience of living with Down syndrome, depicting Christopher and Ginny’s relationship as emotionally equal and ordinary, down to their private jokes and fights.
“I love being part of a play that shows everyone who we are,” Brewer, 37, said in a video interview. “We’re all the same as everyone — we have the same wants and needs, the drive, the desire, the individual sense of self.”
Julia Arbery, who turns 35 in July, lives with her parents in Wyoming, and works in the dining hall at Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative liberal arts institution where their father, Glenn, is president, and their mother, Virginia, teaches political science.
In a joint video interview with Will, Julia described him as “my favorite brother,” which wasn’t the only time they cracked each other up. (He’s her only brother.) She said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”
Julia was about to make her first trip to New York, to see “Corsicana” — the first time she’s seen a professional production of one of his plays. Julia, a country music fan who used to sing in a choir, doesn’t know many details of the play. But she said she was especially excited to hear Ginny and Lot’s song (co-written by Arbery and the indie musician and artist Joanna Sternberg).
There’s a scene in the play where Christopher, the would-be hipster auteur, asks Ginny (a “High School Musical” fan) if she wants to be in one of his movies. “Is it going to be good?” she shoots back. (So much of “Corsicana,” Arbery said, “is a tug of war about taste.”)
In real life, Julia has acted in some of her brother’s short films, including the sci-fi-tinged “Your Resources,” shot in 2016 at their parents’ ranch-like home, starring Julia as a young woman who enters a contest to win a brain implant developed by a sinister futuristic corporation, so she can be “different” and help her ailing father (played by Glenn Arbery).
“The short film is a little embarrassing,” Will said later by email. But “Julia is really good.”
They have also been talking about making a hybrid documentary-feature, about Will filming Julia directing a mash-up of “The Princess Bride” (one of their favorites) and Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”
Julia, he said, inspired not just this play, but his approach to writing.
“From a very young age, she keyed me into this idea that a way a person uses language is a fingerprint,” he said. “It always felt very clear to me that she was the reason I was doing some of this.”
