The Inheritance

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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 21^stcentury 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 his death.



The play has drawn comparisons not only to its obvious model, Howards End, but also to Kushner’s Angels in America because of its two-part structure and its attempt to provide a sweeping look at the emotional terrain of gay life in contemporary America.



Where Kushner’s masterpiece explores life and death in the gay community in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, this play asks what becomes of this community in the next generation. Eric Glass, the most sensitive of the characters, is trying to negotiate a landscape of loss. He yearns for the guidance of an older generation of gay men, those who were wiped out by the AIDS epidemic.



It’s a good play, and an undeniably moving story. Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed, increasingly so during Part II (which became quite maudlin), and the comparisons to Kushner may have prepared me for something more dramatically powerful than what I saw.



Going back to read some of the reviews, I see references to the play as “compulsive as a soap opera.” This feels right to me, and it is easy to imagine it as a mini-series on television. But for the play of the year I was expecting more than a compulsive soap opera. Kushner’s work, for example, is filled with mystery and as an audience we’re given significant interpretive work to do. (What the hell is that angel doing in there anyway?)



Dare I say that Lopez’s work is a bit like a finely executed Norman Rockwell painting? Beautifully drawn, clear narrative … didactic and sentimental. As with Rockwell, I admire the execution while wishing that he would just stop lecturing me about how I ought to feel.

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