Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is a massive, nearly 7-hour work, performed in two parts, which we saw over two consecutive nights. It’s an intriguing re-working of Forster’s Howards End, imagined as a story of gay life in 21stcentury New York. Forster himself (“Morgan” in the play) appears as well, helping the young men of the play tell their story. It’s a clever device: the young men are both narrators of their story and actors within it. They do not yet know where they are going and what they have to discover. For that matter, just like the rest of us, they don’t really know who they are. Forster stands in as an imperfect mentor: a writer, a gay man, a closeted gay man who refused to publish his novel of homosexual love until after
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