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, not just a gay man but 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 becomes quite maudlin. The comparisons to Kushner may have prepared me for something more dramatically powerful than what I saw. The premise is a powerful one–exploring how the next generation of gay men navigate their depopulated world–but the play itself doesn’t live up to the premise.
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, with a clear narrative … but 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.
That’s a sharp and true observation about Rockwell—a superb storyteller, but he doesn’t leave enough for us, the viewer, to do.
Some further thoughts–
I’ve spent my adult life helping clients plan for inheritance by their children and grandchildren, even beyond, or other heirs and then assisting in the distribution outright and in trust to and for them.
But that, of course , isn’t what Lisa means by inheritance here.
I am brought back years ago to a man in Palm Beach who survived his wife a marriage of convenience for both, and inherited some money. He was closeted, and fearful, witty, literally gay, and then got sick and died of AIDS, quite alone in the best, most expensive wing of the local hospital. His estate went to distaff relatives who never visited him.
And another client, English by birth to a prominent family, some members who married royal. He had a small trust income but was essentially penniless, trying to live a Palm Beach lifestyle. And he was abused by a younger man who thought he was or should have been richer. He once tried to pay me for legal advice with family silver. His English family descended like carrion when he died. Not much left for them to pick over.
These old men—-I am now their age when I was first their lawyer—-lived in a time best put behind us, when gay men and women, could not live openly, or without fear of exploitation. Alas, not much to guide the new generation.