REVIEW: “The Inheritance”—who are we and who will we become?
Samuel H. Levine, Kyle Soller, and Andrew Burnap in “The Inheritance”. Photo by Marc Brenner.
“He has a story to tell—it is banging around inside him, aching to come out. But how does he begin?”
To self-referentially crib from its famous opening line: one may as well begin with playwright Matthew Lopez’s abiding affection for E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel “Howards End”.
First through the 1992 film, and later by reading the book, Mr. Lopez’s young queer mind was captivated by Forster’s story of relationships between class strictures in Edwardian England.
The voice of a closeted gay writer and the foibles of his characters reached across an expanse of decades and continents to speak to a 16 year-old Polish-Russian-Puerto Rican living in Florida, entrancing him with the beauty of its author’s words, the power of his famed plea to “only connect!”, and the parallels between the sweepings shifts of change at work in their respective times and places.
That love is made manifest in Mr. Lopez’s epic, novelistic, and enjoyably consumed new play “The Inheritance”, which opened on November 17th at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre following a much-heralded debut at the Young Vic in London, and a subsequent West End transfer.
A two-part, six act affair clocking in at nearly six and a half hours, “The Inheritance” is a spiritual descendant of “Howards End”, loosely using the plot and characters of that novel to tell the story of a group of gay men living in New York today.
Apart from its own translated commentary on class and privilege in contemporary society, the play also contends with the loss of a generation of men to AIDS, and what that means as a younger cohort stands on the verge of being the first since the epidemic began to live to see an AIDS-free generation.
The play’s most urgent questions—directed at the gay community in this moment, in this time—are “who are we?” and “who will we become?”
There is no one answer. It is unfair to think there has to be. And it is not the job of a play to neatly supply one for its audience. The asking of the question is the point.
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If you are familiar with the novel—I admit I only read it for the first time in advance of seeing the play in London last year—the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, become do-good activist Eric Glass (Kyle Soller) and self-absorbed writer Toby Darling (Andrew Burnap), boyfriends living in the Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment Eric inherited from his grandmother, a Holocaust-survivor. Like Wickham Place for the Schlegels, Eric learns at the play’s start that he will soon lose his family’s prized home.
Wealthy industrialist Henry Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey)’s wife, Ruth, is transposed to become his husband, Walter Poole (Paul Hilton), a slight and sickly man who befriends Eric and, like Ruth, secretly bequeaths his beloved country home to him before passing away.
It is this home—our iteration of Howards End—that, during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, first became a private escape for a terrified Henry and Walter, and later a place of refuge and sanctuary where Walter welcomed and cared for scores of dying men in their final weeks and days.
Jordan Barbour, Daryl Gene Daughtry Jr., Kyle Soller, Arturo Luís Soria, and Kyle Harris. Photo by Matthew Murphy.
Eric and Toby are surrounded by a friend group of mostly-like-minded thirty-something gay men, who gather, brunch, dish, and delight in New York’s many cultural offerings—Mr. Lopez’s nod to the Bohemian world of the Schlegel’s, here as a portrait of a class of smart, attractive, successful, and politically-engaged gay men.
The story takes off when aspiring actor Adam McDowell (Samuel H. Levine) enters the scene and upends Eric and Toby’s life, before fading from the picture, and being replaced by a destitute, look-alike sex worker named Leo (also played by Mr. Levine).
An engagement is called off, unlikely relationships blossom, and each of the aforementioned men are forced to confront personal and moral questions of identity and responsibility to themselves and to each other.
Veteran actor Lois Smith—the only woman in the piece—appears late in part two of the play, but I won’t reveal her character or purpose. Indeed, there is a lot more plot detail I could cover, but that would ruin the fun of watching it unfold, and would also be beside the point.
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What emerges from seeing “The Inheritance” is a richly detailed reflection of a specific milieu. As strides are made for LGBTQ visibility and rights, gay culture becomes mainstream culture, and gay spaces are diluted and replaced with apps, what does it mean to be gay? Who are we? Who will we become?
A fact of being gay is that 99.9% of the time you are a minority in your own family. As such, gay men have always had to forge our own chosen families, to learn from each other—a haphazard and improvised inheritance—and to discover our own identity and place in the world without immediate familial model, and all too often in a context of social opprobrium.
When that’s no longer needed or no longer happening because of changing circumstances, what does it mean? What is lost? What is gained? And what happens to that proverbial inheritance?
It is easy to take progress for granted, to forget the sacrifices of those leaders and activists who came before, but also to overlook the lives of men and women we don’t know—those who suffered in silence, whose dreams, whose dignity were stifled. This is their story, too.
Kyle Soller, Paul Hilton (as Morgan), and John Benjamin Hickey. Photo by Matthew Murphy.
Mr. Lopez injects a key dose of history, loss, and progress into the play by the addition of E. M. Forster as a character—played by Mr. Hilton and called by his middle name, Morgan—who reflects the sweep of these myriad questions outlined above in his own struggle, but also provides a foundational sense of grace and wisdom.
It is Morgan who guides Mr. Levine as Young Man 1 in telling the story as he is writing it—witnessing a liberated gay writer in the second decade of the 21st century live a life and tell a story he could never imagine living or telling in his own time. Forster’s “Maurice”, a tender tale of gay love, was written in private, and only published in 1971, a year after his death. He never came out publicly, and lived in sexual frustration.
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Owing to its provenance, “The Inheritance” is a play that behaves like a novel—or perhaps the other way around.
To wit, I know of at least two gay book clubs in my immediate friends circle who have tackled the tome alongside contemporary reads like “Red White and Royal Blue” and “A Little Life”, and gay classics like Forster’s “Maurice” and Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”.
The impulse to treat “The Inheritance” as literature is one I share. Upon first seeing the play in London last year, I immediately purchased the script—something I rarely do (“plays are meant to be seen, not read!”)—and proceeded to read it cover-to-cover, twice.
The play begins as Young Man 1 emerges from an ensemble of barefoot men lounging on stage, and speaks the words at the top of this review—stepping forward to begin the act of writing the story he needs to tell, the story we are seeing.
In this way, “The Inheritance” is also a play about creation: the process of making art, of telling a story, which results, yes, in a lot of telling via narration as each of the lead characters addresses the audience to describe action or reveal thoughts.
However, the play would not entirely work as a radio play or book on tape. It needs to be seen, to be performed, and director Stephen Daldry does remarkable, essential work bringing Mr. Lopez’s text to life vividly and simply. In all six and a half hours, there is rarely a moment that is uninteresting to see and experience.
Bob Crowley’s strikingly ascetic production design consists of a cream-colored hydraulic platform as a central playing space that raises and lowers throughout the length of both parts, allowing the cast to sit around it as if a giant table, themselves both observers and participants. The only furniture is a single chair; the only props a handful of drinking glasses, blankets, and books.
Through the precision and focus of its staging, Mr. Daldry and Mr. Crowley allow for audience imagination to paint the picture—appropriately enough, not unlike the experience of reading a novel. This abstract approach is effective at amplifying the structure of the play while allowing for its words to be the main event for most of the time, which then permits a handful of moments—most notably a devastating coup de théâtre at the end of part one—to use imagery to powerful and memorable effect.
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“The Inheritance” is, of course, not without its faults.
The narrative convention central to the play’s form is used too liberally as a shorthand crutch for revealing the interior life of characters, as happens in a book, instead of letting scene work do the trick.
Indeed, there are several monologues of descriptive exposition that get a lot of information out and fast, but in so doing rob the play of behaving like a play and make it more like a novel. This is a frustrating and perhaps unavoidable outcome since the play ultimately is, in the end, the novel we witness being composed throughout.
Several other moments in the play can too cutely telegraph to the audience a particular viewpoint or ideology—part signaling, part didacticism—delivered with a side-eye on the verge of a wink, as if to underscore: “yes, this is important and profound; aren’t you enjoying this important and profound moment?”
Characters can—and in my estimation, should—be forgiven for being more eloquent and cogent than the experience of ordinary life would suggest, because, well, that’s one reason we make art—to proffer an ideal, but also to convey a point. No one wants to watch a character be incoherent or stutter for the sake of realism.
But when the play directly addresses social and political questions, it often does so in an atmosphere lacking antagonism—an echo chamber.
John Benjamin Hickey, Kyle Soller, Arturo Luís Soria, Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr., Dylan Frederick, and Kyle Harris. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Sure, people tend to surround themselves with those with whom they agree, so it is no surprise that Eric Glass and friends, while at his birthday brunch, engage in a round robin rally of agreement about trans rights, passing the ERA, and concern for rising rates of addiction, suicide, and homelessness among LGBTQ youth. They all support Hillary Clinton for president. Even the presence of Henry Wilcox, a billionaire gay Republican who voted for Trump, doesn’t make for much drama.
Instead, in a later scene, Henry sits at an amused distance while Eric and friends discuss and debate, triggered only by the resurfacing of his unresolved trauma and unexpressed survivor’s guilt for being alive when so many men of his generation were tragically cut down by AIDS.
In stepping back, reflecting, and assessing the play’s merit, it is Henry and Walter’s vantage point and reality, explored beautifully and powerfully, that more than makes up for less engaging exploration of other themes the play might very well have dove into. After all, a single play, even a six and a half hour one, can only do so much.
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While I am aware that this play has been the subject of copious sharp criticism, it is also true that gay art in 2019 is often held to near-impossible standards. A play too self-consciously worried about being too this or too that is not a play I’m interested in seeing, though. I much prefer one that confidently lays out what it is, and allows the audience to perceive what it is not, and render their own judgments about that. In this case, they certainly are.
“The Inheritance” arrives in a complicated moment for gay representation in media and culture, where boundaries are shifting and horizons are broadening. Gay culture is going mainstream against a backdrop of historically fast progress in recognition of rights that is coupled with a frightening tinge of violence and (hopefully) last gasp hatred. The “white gaytriarchy”, as Michael R. Jackson terms it, is also finally awakening to the need for real and meaningful allyship with communities of color and trans people.
Eric and Toby anchor the story. They are cis white men. And I don’t think that is a mistake. They are part of a strata of New York gay society, the periphery of which I have experienced: the class of white gay men in their early thirties who have comfy jobs and older gay male friends who host them upstate or in the Hamptons; the crowd that works out at Equinox, compulsively takes selfies, and has a time-share on Fire Island each summer.
Privilege, who has it, and more importantly who does not, is essential to the story and the plot of “The Inheritance” just as it is to “Howards End”, and the play’s own whiteness and cis-ness are offered up on display for the audience to interrogate. Surveying the cultural and critical response, it sounds like that interrogation is happening, and that is an unqualified good.
But just as we are living through a Democratic primary season defined by a black-and-white stridency of purity in some circles, so, too, has this play been met with a certain unfortunate strand of hostile myopia that sees failure to adhere to an ideal of inclusion as evidence of some menacing evil.
Every audience member—and critic, for that matter—brings who they are to the theatre, and experiences art, and the world, through the lens of their lived experience. That is an underlying facet of what makes arts criticism such an enjoyable and varied task. We each experience live theatre differently.
As a white, cis, gay man living in New York in his early thirties, I will not deny that a good portion of this play resonates with me on a deeply personal level. I also acknowledge that a person of color or a trans person might not feel the same connection I do when their stories are not being reflected on that stage, as is, and regrettably so, more often the case than not.
But just because something does not neatly reflect your own world view or lived experience, does not mean it is inherently wrong or dangerous as a form of representation.
Mr. Lopez, a person of color, chose to tell this story, with these characters, in this way. It is an epic and sweeping work that contains a closed circuit of characters reflecting a specific experience, but it is also through those characters that we can explore the world beyond their circle and ponder the larger, more central question of what have we to inherit from those who came before us. Who are we? Who will we become?
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A lot of ink has been spilled drawing comparisons between “The Inheritance” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”. At its most basic level, the two share a structural similarity in that they are two part plays, each part containing three acts with two intermissions. As for content, both dramatize stories involving gay New Yorkers confronting AIDS and history in America. But, that’s just about where the similarities begin and end.
“Angels in America” and “The Inheritance” are fundamentally attempting to do different things, and in different ways. To measure one by the other, especially comparing “The Inheritance” to “Angels in America”, is an unfair task. “Angels in America”, an undoubted masterpiece, is not-so-subtly subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. That right there tells you all you need to know. Mr. Kushner’s masterwork uses its story to reach beyond itself and tackle larger ideas about America, democracy, religion, history, and justice.
By contrast, “The Inheritance” has an equally ambitious but decidedly more humble mission to probe the meaning of community and, specifically, inter-generational relationships within the gay male community—by definition a far more insular universe. The fact of this insularity, particularly when it is largely white, opens the play up for a more pointed review, especially through the lens of contemporary, popular queer thought.
Poignantly, though, the ghosts of “The Inheritance” are not the ghosts of historical figures, but of ordinary, forgotten men—men whose lives were tragically cut short by a plague that was made worse through systemic homophobia and marginalization. And it is the legacy of these men that is the inheritance every gay man today is bequeathed.
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“The Inheritance” has the instant feel of being a modern classic, owing not to its length but to the intelligence of its reckoning with urgent questions facing the gay community, and its heartbreaking reminder of the loss we all carry. The weight of that loss serves as the source of the play’s final plea for its gay characters to do what its ghosts could not, and live. Only live. Only connect.
I choose to think E. M. Forster would approve.
Bottom Line: playwright Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” is a an epic, novelistic, and enjoyably consumable two-part, six act, six and half hour long play that is a loose adaptation of E. M. Forster’s “Howards End” set among a contemporary group of gay men living in New York contending with the legacy of AIDS and what it means to be gay today. Flaws are overcome by the strength of the staging, and the play is humorous, heartbreaking, and deeply memorable. A must see.
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“The Inheritance”
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
Running Time: six hours, 25 minutes (two parts, four intermissions)
Opening Day: November 17, 2019
Closing Day: March 15, 2020
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