How The Inheritance's Writer Made a Six-Hour-Long Broadway Play Feel So Urgent
A handful of boisterous and barefoot young men settle onto a broad white surface that looks like a massive blank page. Another man, one with a more professorial air about him, shows up and starts lecturing them on the art of storytelling. He’s an author, we come to understand, a very British one. His admirers ask how he achieved such artful indifference in the opening line of his most famous book, quoting: ”One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister...” Those words are quickly seized upon and transformed into the first line of a new story that’s about to unfold. “One may as well begin with Toby’s voicemails to his boyfriend…”
With this, they’re off. The Greek chorus of Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is gleefully inviting you to watch as they write (and rewrite) a show before you in realtime.
The Inheritance, which opened on Sunday night on Broadway after a sold-out, award-winning run in London, was heralded by hype long before it arrived in New York. A sweeping and intimate six-and-a-half-hour epic, it’s presented in two parts by two-time Tony Award winning director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours, and a little Netflix smash, The Crown). The play retells Howards End, E.M. Forster’s beloved tale of class conflict in Edwardian England, using a group of thirty-something gay men. Instead of the Schlegel sisters, The Inheritance follows Eric Glass (played by Kyle Soller, who won the Olivier for his performance in London), a sensitive liberal activist with a diverse circle of literary friends who argue onstage about everything from PrEP to camp to cultural appropriation, and his impetuous playwright boyfriend Toby Darling (a dazzling Andrew Burnap, making his Broadway debut). Their relationship forms the play’s core: Toby chases sex, fame and affirmation in increasingly self-destructive ways, while Eric befriends an elderly neighbor named Walter Poole (British actor Paul Hilton). As the play gradually shifts its focus towards Walter’s enigmatic billionaire partner Henry Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey) and a house in upstate New York that was once used as a hospice for AIDS patients, it ambitiously attempts to tackle the reverberations of the epidemic.
One can’t help but admire the way that Lopez unapologetically centers gay history. Using one community's past, he tests lofty ideas about how generations communicate through stories of love and loss, why Trump’s deadly brand of politics spreads like a disease, and the kind of secrets that can kill you. The Inheritance certainly boasts more than a few electrifying performances—especially Hilton’s. But 42-year-old playwright Lopez could emerge as the real star. What he set out to do with The Inheritance seems at times breathtakingly big. His characters are soapy, charming, complex and literary in equal measure, and the moments that he creates onstage might leave you in tears long after the curtain falls, even though the show sometimes strains the limits of its own ambition—it’s faced criticism in New York for using its gay sex scenes to play for shock value, or laughs, and for making characters of color sometimes literally watch from the sidelines of its big, open white stage.
In a wide-ranging conversation backstage with GQ, Lopez addressed his critics, comparisons, and his purpose in setting out to create what's become one of the hottest tickets in town. Now’s your chance to get to know the writer who, if our hunch is right, you’ll be seeing everywhere soon.
