What Generations of Gay Men Hand Down in ‘The Inheritance’

“I can’t imagine what those years were like,” says a young gay man named Eric, contemplating the worst of the AIDS crisis. “I can understand what it was. But I cannot possibly feel what it was.”

In an extreme exercise of empathy, his 50-something friend Walter asks Eric to name his closest companions and one by one deals out their hypothetical fates: dead, infected, ostracized. But mostly dead.

“That,” Walter says in the first act of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” “is what it was.”

“The Inheritance,” which opens on Broadway next month, is about a lot of things. (With a running time of nearly seven hours over two parts, it’s bound to be.) As an update of the E.M. Forster novel “Howards End,” it is a story about haves and have-nots and the soul of a society in the age of Trump. As a gay update of “Howards End,” it becomes about what is handed down, both literally and symbolically, from one generation of the community to the next.

And, Lopez said, a play about generations of gay men “couldn’t not be about AIDS.”

Yet the youngest men in the cast have known only a life of declining H.I.V. infection rates. The crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, and the public’s blind eye to countless deaths, may have colored their childhoods with fear, but it is all still imagined from a distance. They are all, in a way, just like Eric.

“The Inheritance,” though, offers its characters — and inevitably its cast, especially the gay men in the company — a communion with the victims and survivors of the AIDS generation. And, like Eric, they have found themselves newly immersed in the past, thinking about how the epidemic has echoed into the present and questioning their relationship with, and responsibility to, their gay elders.

Elders like Edmund White — the 79-year-old author and brazen pioneer of gay literature — who was invited to sit in on a rehearsal last month. Preparations were underway for the play’s first preview in New York, after a widely lauded premiere in London that fetched four Olivier Awards (the British equivalent of the Tonys).

The author Edmund White speaking with the cast during a rehearsal in September.

Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times

Holding court over catered sandwiches and bagged chips during a break, White spoke with the cast — most of whom are new to the production — about New York City’s gay culture in the days of liberation and the emergence of AIDS. He told bawdy stories about cruising in the standing room section of the Metropolitan Opera, and writing “The Joy of Gay Sex” with his former therapist.

He was also more solemn, recalling how in the early days of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which he helped found, he and dozens of others frightened by the emerging AIDS epidemic gathered in Larry Kramer’s apartment, where a doctor told them they should all stop having sex. “We were like, what?” White said. “For us, gay liberation was sexual liberation.”

While he spoke, the actors in the room listened attentively, reacting with laughs but almost never interrupting. Jordan Barbour, a gay member of the cast, said later, “I’m normally a very vocal person, but that day I was silent.”

They did ask, though, about what it was like when homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — which White said suddenly made gay men a minority group, no longer sufferers of a psychological illness.

“It’s a minority where you don’t grow up with your parents belonging to the same minority,” White explained. “And with AIDS, there was such a rupture. There wasn’t much of a culture passing from one generation to another.”

This disconnect, of a gay lineage severed, is in many ways at the heart of “The Inheritance.” Kyle Soller — he isn’t gay but grew up friendly with older gay men in local theater and says he now feels he has been brought “deeper within the community that has always been kind to me” — plays Eric, who wonders “what his life would be like if he had not been robbed of a generation of mentors, of poets, of friends and, perhaps, even lovers.”

There is a personal dimension to the yearning for Lopez himself: 42 years old, he bore witness to the AIDS crisis while not truly being part of it. Unlike Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” his play was not written from the front lines of the epidemic. (Nevertheless, it will probably be compared to “Angels” because of its length and subject matter.)

It’s personal, too, for several members of the cast. Some of them lived through the history “The Inheritance” imagines. The director, Stephen Daldry, is 59; John Benjamin Hickey, 56, who plays Henry Wilcox (the least subtle tip of the hat to “Howards End”), moved to Manhattan in the early 1980s; and Lois Smith, the only woman in the cast and by far its oldest member at 88, lost dear friends to AIDS.

A scene from the play featuring the young men and John Benjamin Hickey, center.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But the youngest actors have the haziest relationship with AIDS, informed by the mass media of their childhood. Barbour, 36, remembered not knowing much about H.I.V. other than that he should be very afraid of it. “The people who died, it was such an abstract thing,” he said. “You could put them in a box. But now I’m reminded that every person who died had a story. They were just people; they could so easily have been us.”

One stairwell in the Barrymore Theater, where “The Inheritance” is now in previews, is decorated with portraits of men lost to AIDS. Carson McCalley, a 23-year-old gay member of the company, said that many of them were actors, adding, “What they would give to have the opportunity to be onstage here — and now I have that opportunity.”

“We have sort of a responsibility to do what they could not, to live with joy and passion, and continue the legacy of queer people,” McCalley said. “They opened doors for us to run. Some in the generation below me are the most outspoken political activists I know. But a lot of that has come from, for good or bad, not having to deal with what the past generation has had to deal with.”

Arturo Luís Soria, 32, inspired by the play, has also found himself thinking “a lot” about what he owes his predecessors. He quoted a line — “The only way to heal heartache is to risk more” — and said it had made him wonder: “In which ways am I still holding myself back from loving the way I want to love and being the person I want to be because of this fear from growing up queer?”

“Am I being of service to those who passed, who didn’t have the opportunity to be their fullest selves, if I’m not being open?” he continued. “If I’m not, then I’m doing a disservice.”

One way of being more open, Soria has found, is by speaking up at rehearsals — where conversations among generations have been integral to the process. “I’ll bring my Latinoness to it,” he said; Lopez has rewritten his character, who was played by someone of a different ethnicity in London, to reflect his Latin American identity.

“He wrote a line that said, ‘Hello maricón, you’re gay!” Soria said, adding that he cried out of happiness seeing Spanish slang — and thus himself — throughout the script.

“The people who died, it was such an abstract thing,” said Barbour, top row center, with his castmates. “But now I’m reminded that every person who died had a story.”

Erik Tanner for The New York Times

Talks with Barbour prompted a new scene about Truvada, a drug that reduces the risk of H.I.V. infection. And a roll call of bygone gay bars now includes additions from his own life.

“With something like this that is so much about identity, it’s incumbent upon the people represented to speak up,” Barbour said. “There are so many meta things happening in this play, and this is one of them. It’s been clear that there are queer people in the cast who have something to say.”

It’s difficult to maintain professional composure when meeting people at the stage door after each performance. Many audience members — gay or not — leave the theater misty-eyed, and some meet the actors, eager to share their own stories.

Soller recalled a conversation with one man who had lost his entire friend group to AIDS. McCalley — who himself is repeatedly emotional at the line “I think your lives are beautiful” because, he recalled, “No adult had really ever said that to me” — heard from another person who lost someone close, who said, “Thank you for bringing him back to me, for one night.”

And a woman in her 80s told him she was inspired by queer people his age, claiming that it was her generation that had a lot to learn from his.

There are tears onstage, as well, at the end of the first part, in a moment that brings a flesh-and-blood immediacy to the memory of those lost. Watching that scene from the wings, Hickey for example thinks of a brilliant Juilliard classmate who was a year out of school when he died. Barbour thinks about the mentors he’ll never have, but also the beauty of honoring them now.

“This is a requiem,” he said. “Giving all praise to our forebears, this is an opportunity to put some of those ghosts to rest.”