Arbery, the only boy in a family of seven sisters, describes his parents as supportive of all their children following their passions. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t so nervous before showing them the script for the first time that he had to go into therapy.

“It ended up being great, but I was really scared,” he said. “I am a sort of quiet and affable presence in my family, and this felt like such a declaration of how much I’d been listening and absorbing.”

He grew up in Texas, where his parents ran a cultural organization connected with the University of Dallas, a Catholic institution. It was a home full of art and argument, he recalls, where dinner-table conversation was likely to include discussion of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and St. Augustine.

He wrote and acted in plays at an all-boys school run by Hungarian monks, and also devoured every movie he could find at the public library.

“I always felt a tension between the very rich, complex, nuanced, passionate hive of ideas and faith that was my household, and all the beauty of everything else and everyone else,” Arbery said. “I was always pulled between those two, and endlessly curious about everyone else.”

He began the process of “uncoiling,” as he puts it, at the secular Kenyon College , where he majored in English and drama, and attended Mass regularly until about halfway through his junior year.

Today, Arbery — who wears hipster-nerd glasses and described his plays as partly about “unpacking whiteness” — might blend in with any number of self-questioning, progressive-minded young artists in Brooklyn. Asked about his current relationship to Catholicism, Arbery, already given to thoughtful pauses, paused even longer.