From a lovely profile of Will Arbery by Chloé Cooper Jones:
One of the first stories Arbery ever told me was how, even as a child, he longed to protect [his sister] Julia’s nuanced way of speaking. When he was away at camp, and then later, as a young adult in college, he would receive letters and emails from Julia and could tell when they had been edited, her language standardized by someone else. But Arbery loved the particular cadence, rhythms and arrangements of her sentences and did not want them changed.
In the program note for “Corsicana,” Arbery says that he wrote the play thinking about the dances Julia makes up, the songs she sings in private, the art she makes that belongs only to her. “I’ve been thinking about the way Julia sings ‘O Holy Night,’ making everyone shut up and listen and watch her, and then getting too nervous to start. So we all have to sing it together, trudging through the notes until we reach the time-to-shine part — ‘fall on your knees, oh hear the angels’ voices’ — and that’s when her voice rises unmistakably above all of ours, and she finishes the song, and suddenly there’s a new thing in the air above our heads and we all get quiet.”
I have some thoughts on Arbery’s play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” in this essay.