Howards End Comes Out

I consider this the ultimate in fan-fiction, basically,” Matthew Lopez says of his play The Inheritance, a two-part, nearly seven-hour gay drama set in New York circa 2016 that came here from London, where it won numerous awards.

Considering the whole epic, two-part gay-drama thing, people have been quick to compare it to Angels in America, though the impulse behind The Inheritance really lay in Lopez’s desire to take his favorite novel, Howards End, and “queer it.” Or possibly, given that the author, E. M. Forster, was gay, make it come out of the closet. Lopez updates the 1910 novel, which you may also know from the Oscar-winning 1992 Merchant Ivory movie with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, to accommodate a story about three generations of gay men in New York. The class dynamics of Edwardian Londoners who attend Beethoven concerts and vacation in the countryside and care oh so much about real estate have been transformed into the class divisions of gay New Yorkers who spend their time at the Strand and go to Fire Island and, yes, care very much about real estate. (One character unveils a key to Gramercy Park like it’s a holy relic.) Lopez wanted to know, he says, “How faithful can you be to the novel while simultaneously blowing it up?” For those who know Howards End well and need an intro to the gay New York of The Inheritance (or vice versa), the playwright walks a few key lines of comparison between the two.