What can gay men learn from their elders? To Matthew Lopez, that’s ‘The Inheritance’
Everybody’s life is the result of another person’s life,” says playwright Matthew Lopez.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
The voice calls across generations.
Matthew Lopez first heard it at 16 while watching a movie in his Florida Panhandle hometown. Years would pass before he fully understood the subtext he was picking up from the British period drama “Howards End,” but the message embedded itself and grew into a two-part, 6½-hour play, “The Inheritance,” one of the most buzzed-about shows of Broadway’s fall season.
“What I was responding to was a connection with another gay man through his writing.”
Somehow, he had sensed E.M. Forster in the story — perhaps in its social conscience or its humor, for there is nothing overtly gay about the movie or Forster’s 1910 novel on which it is based. Regardless, “I saw a version of myself that I could recognize even at 16.
“E.M. Forster taught me that I was not alone.”
Hard as it might be to discern, “Howards End,” with its disorderly, class-crossing romances in Edwardian England, is Lopez’s blueprint for “The Inheritance.”
“I wanted to queer it and write something that Forster himself might have wanted to write, had he been allowed to,” Lopez, 42, said by phone from his apartment in Brooklyn before rushing off to a rehearsal.
Characters and plot points have equivalents in the play, but he has stretched into new themes in a wholly different milieu: a circle of glitteringly witty, chummily affectionate, gay New Yorkers. As friendships and romances begin to cross generational lines, millennials find themselves mentoring Gen Z’ers, and the post-Stonewall/AIDS generation bestows its hard-won knowledge on both.
Within this framework, Lopez shares his life story.
“I am telling my experience as a gay man born in 1977: the life that I’ve lived, the men I have known, the friends I have lost, the hopes that I have, the fears that I’ve grappled with, the shame that I’ve grappled with.”
