Like HBO’s The Young Pope, Arbery’s play explores a world unfamiliar and alien to most of its audience, doesn’t shy away from controversy, and takes its subject on its own terms. If you’ve never lived in a world in which conservative principles are simply taken for granted, where the revelation somebody had had sex might be genuinely scandalous, or if you just don’t know anybody who voted for Trump, then I imagine that the play might be usefully disorienting to you. But a good play isn’t a didactic documentary, and Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a very good play.

There’s just enough ideological and attitudinal space between these characters to make for revealing arguments in each direction—for example: Can one be pro-choice and, in any meaningful way, also be a good person?—and to reveal the despair lurking behind their rhetorical and emotional poses. To catch the nuances in their differences—and to imagine what these nuances might mean for the future of people like these, and therefore for the future of our country—is a bit like the corneal adjustment required in the first moment of the play: you’ve got to distinguish dark from dark, and perceive a thousand darknesses in between.

The sneaky, simple brilliance of Heroes of the Fourth Turning is that it’s not actually about its characters’ talking points at all. It’s about them. It’s not shouting; it’s listening. That’s how it sidesteps the empathy headache while remaining exquisitely humane.