2019 - Coming to Broadway "Epic Gay Play"

[edjames]

‘The Inheritance,’ an Epic Gay Play, is Coming to Broadway

Matthew Lopez’s drama, inspired by the novel “Howards End” and presented in two parts, won this year’s Olivier Award for best new play.

“The Inheritance,” an ambitious and award-winning two-part play that explores contemporary gay male lives against the backdrop of recent history, is coming to Broadway this fall.

Although written by an American and set in New York, the play began its life in London, where it was staged last spring at the Young Vic, and then transferred to the West End. It was a commercial hit and a critical success, honored with this year’s Olivier Award for best new play.

Written by Matthew Lopez (“The Legend of Georgia McBride”), “The Inheritance” is inspired by E. M. Forster’s novel “Howards End.” Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”) will direct the production, which runs more than six hours over two separately sold sections.

Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the play“capaciously moving.” Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Telegraph, described it as “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far” and said, “Star ratings are almost beside the point when confronted by work of this magnitude but hell, yeah, five.”

The Broadway staging will be produced by Tom Kirdahy, Sonia Friedman Productions, and Hunter Arnold. It is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 27 and to open Nov. 17 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

John Benjamin Hickey and Vanessa Redgrave were part of a London cast made up mostly of young actors. The Broadway ensemble has not been announced.

[edjames]

Forgot to mention - 2 Parts, 7 hours, so be prepared for a marathon, however the reviews were very good....

 

If you're interested, here are some London reviews:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/mar/29/the-inheritance-review-stephen-daldry

https://variety.com/2018/legit/reviews/the-inheritance-review-play-1202739184/

inheritance-young-vic-reviewperhaps-important-american-play

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/the-inheritance-noel-coward-review-a3961826.html

[+ nycman]

Can’t we make a queer play...that isn't 7 fucking hours long for Christ’s sake?

 

I don’t want to sit through 7 hours of ANYTHING....even an amazing 7 hour blow job....is too long!

[MscleLovr]

Oddly enough @edjames my boyfriend and I were discussing this play over dinner last night.

 

We saw it at the Young Vic in London....twice, because we enjoyed it so much. Each time, we saw the 2 parts on separate evenings a couple of weeks apart. FWIW we both found Part 1 to be more compelling than Part 2.

 

I strongly recommend you see the play.

[edjames]

Thank you for your recommendation.

Yes, it's on my list and I'll look Ito getting tickets soon as I have enough free time to search dates and prices.

 

Thank you, again.

.

[+ beethoven]

I just got good seats for December. (I didn't ask for earlier dates, so they may be available also.) You can call Telecharge or go to theinheritanceplay.com They have an ad on the back cover of the most recent New Yorker.

[foxy]

A friend who lives in London saw this a while ago and thought it brilliant. I went to the box office the other day but it wasn’t open so had to get tickets through the website. I hate those extra fees they tag on but bit the bullet. I’m seeing it November 13, row C in the orchestra. Tickets were $195 each and I’m seeing both parts in one day. If a play is really good I don’t mind sitting that long. Now that I’ve paid full price I’m wondering if discount tickets will be available? We shall see. Wondering if Vanessa Redgrave is coming with the rest of the cast. She can be pretty astounding.

[MscleLovr]

Wondering if Vanessa Redgrave is coming with the rest of the cast.

 

IIRC she only appears in the second part of the play. Her part is not large but, of course, her presence on the stage lends a certain iconic quality to the production.

[bostonman]

Every time I see this thread title I want to think that the name of the play being discussed here is Epic Gay Play. I suppose kind of like [Title Of Show] if it weren't a musical - and if it were much longer.

 

Or, maybe, The Play That Goes Gay?

[edjames]

Michael Reidel in today's NYPost reports Vannessa Redgrave will not be appearing in the Broadway production:

 

Here’s hoping Vanessa Redgrave isn’t done with Broadway

Let’s hear it for the great Lois Smith, who rode to the rescue this week when “The Inheritance,” coming in from London, was missing a key cast member: Vanessa Redgrave.

She won raves for her performance as a mother trying to make sense of her son’s homosexuality, and producers Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy had their fingers crossed she’d reprise it here. But they didn’t press the 82-year-old, who, at the last minute, decided she just wasn’t up to reproducing what one critic called an “achingly frail” performance.

The scramble was on to find an actress of her caliber. Director Stephen Daldry met with Smith, and knew he had found the right replacement. The 88-year-old Obie award winner returns to Broadway for the first time since the 1996 revival of “Buried Child.”

Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” is loosely based on E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” with a lot of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” thrown in. Gay men fight over real estate against the backdrop of the lingering AIDS epidemic. Politics, sex, death and debates about the mainstreaming of gay culture swirl throughout this meaty epic. One New York theater producer who saw it says it’s the most brilliant, gay-themed play since “Angels.” Another says: “It has 2 ¹/₂ hours of brilliant writing, but it should have been cut. Why does every ‘important’ play have to be in two parts?”

Wherever you come down on it, “The Inheritance,” which starts previews Sept. 27, is shaping up to be a cultural event of the new season.

I hope we see Redgrave at least one more time here. She was rhapsodic as Vita Sackville-West in “Vita and Virginia” in 1994. She held audiences rapt as Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking” in 2007. And she broke our hearts as Mary Tyrone in the 2003 revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Brian Dennehy, who played James Tyrone in that production, has a great story about Redgrave. He had done the play in Chicago and thought the Broadway run would be fairly easygoing. After all, he knew the lines, the role and the play. But at the first table reading with Redgrave, he told me, “She was doing so many astonishing things, I realized I had to throw out everything I thought I knew and start all over again.”

Sometimes she’d make her first entrance from the porch, sometimes from the dark at the top of the stairs. Dennehy and co-stars Robert Sean Leonard and Philip Seymour Hoffman were never sure what she was going to be like each night — which made the production all that much more brilliant, since the Tyrones never know what to expect from Mary, a morphine addict.

Redgrave was not playing Mary Tyrone. She was Mary Tyrone. It was a remarkable performance for which she won the Tony.

Speaking of great Dames, another we may never see in New York again is Maggie Smith. Last spring, the 84-year-old returned to the London stage in a one-woman show about the secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Christopher Hampton’s “A German Life” sold out in about 20 minutes. Smith received raves and offers to bring the play to New York. But, like Redgrave, she apparently decided a run in the Big Apple was a bit much at this point in her life. That’s a pity: She hasn’t been here since 1990, when she starred in “Lettice and Lovage” — another performance that, if you saw it, you’ll never forget it.

“A German Life” is a very good play, by the way. I’m not sure Lois Smith is quite right for the part of Goebbels’ secretary, but there are other actresses of a certain age who could do it. I think one of our nonprofit theaters should look into it.

One Dame you will be able to see on Broadway is Eileen Atkins. The 85-year-old Emmy, Obie and Olivier award winner stars opposite Jonathan Pryce in “The Height of the Storm,” previewing Sept. 10.

A generation of great British actresses is receding. Atkins may be the last of that generation we see here. Don’t miss her.

[MscleLovr]

I wouldn’t worry, @edjames. In truth, Vanessa Redgrave contributes little to the play. Of course as a person, she had had a long career in the theatre but I felt her role in this wonderful play was more of a “walk-on role”.

[edjames]

I saw Part 1 last night and all I can say..."it's fu*kin' unbelieveable!" And that's in a good sense.

This is a magnificent production.

Dramatic, emotional, and funny. The cast is superb.

Despite it' length, at 3+ hours, it goes by remarkably fast.

As a gay, NYC man, I was completely involved with the story and characters. The play has some interesting references to being gay in NYC,, for example, Musical Mondays at Splash(!) and there is a brief scene set in Peter Luger's Brooklyn Steakhouse where Eric, when asked what he'll be having, says "I think I'll have the sole." The audience roared at the NYTimes review reference.

I had tears in my eyes at the final Part 1 scene.

Can't wait for Part 2 on Friday night.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[MscleLovr]

I’m so glad you enjoyed it @edjames. Have the reviews been published yet?

[edjames]

Opening night is Sunday, November 17.

Reviews shouldd be available on Monday, November 18.

[foxy]

I’m seeing parts 1 & 2 this Wednesday, November 13. Wondering how I’d spend the gap between performances I went and booked a hotel for the night despite an easy commute into the city. So it will be a long (and expensive) day but I expect it will be worth it from friends who’ve seen and loved the play.

[edjames]

Part 2 was every bit as dramatic, and emotional as Part 1.

A truly great evening of theater.

I enjoyed it very much, and once again, left the theater with a tear in my eye.

One observation, for a Friday evening performance there were a number of empty rows in the back of the orchestra.

I wonder if this play will resonate with a straight audience?

The audiences at the performances I saw were primarily gay men, of a "certain age".

[MscleLovr]

I wonder if this play will resonate with a straight audience?

The audiences at the performances I saw were primarily gay men, of a "certain age".

 

That’s interesting. When we saw it in London, the audience was very diverse; I was one of the few of a “certain age” (aka old men) and my guess is that no more than 20-25% of the theatregoers were gay.

 

I wonder if this is due to the relatively high cost of theatre tickets in Manhattan.

[MscleLovr]

I wonder if this play will resonate with a straight audience?

The audiences at the performances I saw were primarily gay men, of a "certain age".

 

That’s interesting. When we saw it in London, the audience was very diverse; I was one of the few of a “certain age” (aka old men) and my guess is that no more than 20-25% of the theatregoers were gay.

 

I wonder if this is due to the relatively high cost of theatre tickets in Manhattan.

[edjames]

4 reasons, off the top of my old head...

 

1, London theater tickets are cheaper than NYC. I paid a small fortune for my center orchestra seats. $200 a pop, total $400 plus service fee, etc. They should have let me sleep with the cast for that price! (LOL), but I was in row D center and could see and hear everything. BTW, there is a bit of male nudity in this show. Otherwise, a lot of underwear and speedos.

2. Theater size. NYC production is at the Barrymore theater which has 917 seats, the Young Vic in London has about 420 seats.

3. Membership tickets? The Young Vic offers a "Become A Friend" program for advanced/preferred seating. On Broadway your at the mercy of Ticketmaster or Telecharge, unless you want to shlep to the box office. Some websites such as Playbill or BroadwayBox are offering discounted seats. TDF has tickets, too, sometime it pops up on the online site for advanced tickets.

4. Here in NYC, Friday evening was the coldest night thus far. The west side of Manhattan is much colder than the rest of the borough, due to the westerly winds off the Hudson River. It was "freezing" (low 30'sF) and very windy when we exited the theater! Normally I would have walked to the train or taken the bus home, but I jumped in the first taxi I saw, Brrrrr....

 

Anyway, I'm pulling for the show and hope the critics rave about it as much as they did in London and sweeps the 2019/20 Tonys1

[foxy]

I saw parts 1 & 2 last Wednesday. The play is so good that time passed quickly. Having lived in the city from 1973 to 1985 it was like stepping into a time machine. I was there, I saw it happening. A lot of the play was very funny. But a lot will hurt so be prepared. As for tickets I paid full price for row C of the orchestra and was glad to be sitting close to the action. But it’s been listed at TKTS for half price almost every day and occasionally on tdf. I’m tempted to see it again. Also I’ve rewatched the film Howard’s End to see how it inspired the play. I should read the book next.

[edjames]

NYPost review:

 

‘The Inheritance’ is a touching call to action on Broadway

While some ignorant millennials snipe “OK boomer”at anyone with a gray hair, a new play is clapping back. Its powerful take-away: Instead of saying “OK boomer” to a gay New Yorker who survived the AIDS epidemic, try “thank you.”

But “The Inheritance,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night after an acclaimed run in London, isn’t interested in starting a Twitter war. Matthew Lopez’s empathetic drama is simply — well, not so simply — a moving call for an intergenerational conversation, using a tale of modern-day, young gay men whose lives collide with that of their older peers. It’s also a very long one, with two separate parts, each running more than three hours. Luckily, there are three nearby Starbucks you can reach during intermissions.

In a show that’s as lengthly as a flight to Europe, there’s going to be a lot of plot. But thanks to director Stephen Daldry’s sprint of a staging, which sets the play on an elegant, bright wooden platform, “The Inheritance” clips along.

What unfolds (and unfolds, and unfolds) is the story of 30-somethings Toby (Andrew Burnap), a high-energy playwright on the verge of Broadway success, and Eric (Kyle Soller), his more grounded, kinder boyfriend of eight years.

While Toby clings to booze and sex, Eric befriends their much older neighbor, Walter (Paul Hilton), who leaves his home in upstate New York to Eric in his will. It was on that serene property where, in decades past, Walter selflessly cared for young men dying of AIDS.

But Walter’s conservative widower, Henry (John Benjamin Hickey), keeps the inheritance a secret from Eric, wanting the estate for his own sons from a previous marriage. By now, Eric has split from Toby, and he and Henry form a relationship of their own, adding a political edge to the play as liberal Eric dates a seasoned, wealthy Republican.

The first part takes a while to click in. The use of author E.M. Forster as a narrator, the ensemble chirpily finishing each others’ sentences and the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying. The play finds its soul near the end of the first portion, which is a well-earned tearjerker.

To reveal much of Part 2 would rob the drama of its suspense. As the story moves forward, the 15 actors embody a clown car of different characters. The most heart-wrenching are Adam, an actor Toby falls in love with, and Leo, a male escort who’s a dead ringer for Adam. Both men are played by Samuel Levine, who, as Leo, gives a moving and truthful performance of someone in immense pain.

Burnap makes a memorably eccentric Toby, an artist who falls apart and could have been ripped from one of Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers. Think of him as the Talented Mr. Toby.

The better half is Part 2, which finally brings the heat and anguish. In the show’s gutsiest moment, Henry is eloquent arguing in favor of his Republican politics in a room full of wine-glugging millennials, when a young man goes, “But other gay men your age . . .” Without taking a breath, a ferocious Henry yells, “THERE ARE NO GAY MEN MY AGE.” Shattering.

So is a touching speech from the wonderful Lois Smith. In one devastating passage, she describes reuniting with her gay son on his deathbed, and how, in the years since, she’s tried to make amends. It’s in this part that the second meaning of the title comes into view: the learned responsibility these men inherit to care for each other in their greatest time of need.

Sure, “The Inheritance” has its flaws. Plenty of them. But it’s promising to see, during a glut of overly academic plays, something that’s written totally from the heart.

 

https://nypost.com/2019/11/17/the-inheritance-is-a-touching-call-to-action-on-broadway/

[edjames]

Ben Brantley in NYTimes:

 

‘The Inheritance’ Review: So Many Men, So Much Time

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/theater/the-inheritance-review-broadway-matthew-lopez.html

 

Breadth doesn’t always equal depth in Matthew Lopez’s supersize, vividly painted portrait of gay life in the 21st century, featuring E.M. Forster as a spirit guide.

Ardent aspiration glows in every moment of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. That is, to be sure, a whole lot of moments.

This two-part, novelistic doorstop of a play, a portrait of 21st-century gay men in search of their collective past, occupies more than six hours of stage time. And everything about it — its themes, its form, its frame of reference and the desires of its characters — is of a scale with its length.

Consider, to begin with, that Lopez — whose earlier, respectfully received plays (“The Whipping Man,” “The Legend of Georgia McBride”) scarcely anticipated a blockbuster like this one — is making his Broadway debut with a work that courts direct comparison with two daunting predecessors. They would be“Howards End,” E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of England at a moral crossroads, and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama from the early 1990s about the beleaguered soul of gay America (which was spectacularly revived only last year).

The young New Yorkers who populate “The Inheritance,” directed with a forward-charging breathlessness by Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”), all dream big as well. At their noblest, they’re searching to summon the gay pioneers of the past who made their present lives possible.

And who should they enlist as their spirit guide in this endeavor but Forster himself? Portrayed with wide-eyed curiosity and a diffident mien by the British actor Paul Hilton, Forster steps out of the past and into the play’s opening scene like a tutelary don strolling through a campus quad, where clean-cut acolytes sprawl and frolic like models for a J. Crew back-to-college catalog.

Forster generously gives the boys of “The Inheritance” his blessing to use “Howards End” as the template for the story they’re telling. He even lets them construct a variation on its opening line for their starting point, so that “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” becomes, “One may as well begin with Toby’s voice mails to his boyfriend.”

That tale is set in a Darwinian New York City where “every summer, waves of college graduates wash up on its shores to begin the struggle toward success and achievement.” The description is delivered early by one of the show’s narrators (and in this play, everybody’s a third-person narrator as well as a first-person character). At that point, you may be tempted to think “The Inheritance” has as much in common with the vintage naïfs-in-the-big-city potboilers of Rona Jaffe and Jacqueline Susann as it does with “Howards End.”

The combination of skyscraping reach and soap opera-ish pulp makes “The Inheritance” both easy to make fun of and hard to dislike. First staged in London, where it won the Olivier Award for best new play, the script merges the self-consciousness and avidity of its creator, Lopez, with that of its dramatis personae, who are in effect making up the work in which they appear as they go along.

You can’t just give Lopez patronizing points for attempting to write a significant piece of literature, because he cleverly makes this attempting the very dynamic of his play. It opens — on Bob Crowley’s blank white platform of a set — with most of its cast in an orgy of creative stasis, peering into laptop screens and scribbling on note pads.

How can they possibly say what they want — no, need — to say about who and what they are in a moment when gay rights in America feel both more of a given than ever before and newly under siege? Or as the avuncular Forster puts it, “All your ideas are at the starting post, ready to run. And yet they must all pass through a keyhole in order to begin the race.”

One person in particular emerges as the leader of this race. First identified as Young Man 1, and played by Samuel H. Levine in a wow of a Broadway debut, he will go on to embody two of the show’s main characters, an actor on the rise and a hustler on the decline, who happen to look nearly identical.

What? You don’t remember anyone like that from “Howards End”? Well, the hustler, Leo, serves the function of two Forster characters — a married couple, as it happens. But before we go down that labyrinthine byway, let’s establish some rudiments of the plot.

At the show’s center — standing in for Forster’s temperamentally opposite sisters, Margaret and Helen Schlegel — are the serious, self-doubting social activist Eric Glass (Kyle Soller, a poignant anchoring presence) and his flamboyant playwright boyfriend, Toby Darling, who has a Hidden Past he pretends never happened (an electrically vivid Andrew Burnap).

While the self-destructive Toby pursues fame and endless sex, the nurturing Eric makes friends with the older man upstairs, Walter Poole (Hilton again), the physically frail, unexpectedly heroic partner of the strapping billionaire businessman Henry Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey).

Yes, Henry Wilcox is an important figure in “Howards End.” And, yes, like that Henry, this one has a country house that becomes the moral nucleus of the work he belongs to. Lopez’s use of that house — as a window into the generation of gay men lost to AIDS — packs the play’s most devastating emotional punch.

I challenge any theatergoer with a heart not to cry during the sun-saturated scene that concludes the first half of “The Inheritance.” Never mind that it’s partly borrowed from

This bravura sequence is a vibrant and essential reminder of the terrifying years when a diagnosis of H.I.V. was a death sentence.

That effort to conjure a nightmare era in danger of being forgotten by many young people today captures what’s best in “The Inheritance.” It yearns, with an almost physical intensity, to realize the much-quoted dictum from “Howards End”: “Only connect.”

For Lopez, that means forging bonds not only with a previous, decimated generation of gay men in New York but also between the rich and the poor, the right and the left, the prosaically minded and the poets. That’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover, even with six hours as a playing field, especially if you’re trying to establish point-by-point parallels with events in “Howards End.”

The show features a bright assortment of political and cultural debates, given spirited life by the baker’s dozen of male cast members and replete with of-the-moment name dropping. There’s even an amusing conversation about the enduring value of camp as a part of the gay sensibility.

That last discussion acquires unintended relevance during scenes of heavy-breathing confrontation. (“I once loved you, Toby, but I am cured of that. Everything you touch you destroy.”)

Such vignettes, and those that portray the heart-smashing theater world in which Toby operates, had me thinking of the Douglas Sirk weepie

and wondering if camp clichés are now so genetically encoded into gay culture that they’re recycled without reference to (or even awareness of) their original contexts. Yet there’s rarely anything arch about Lopez’s highly explicit descriptions of erotic encounters (rendered with nonexplicit, metaphoric choreography). And the rapturous monologue by Adam (the young actor played by Levine) about a long session in a gay bathhouse in Prague is notable for its haunted ambivalence about transcendent, dangerous sex.

Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate in “The Inheritance.” Its breadth doesn’t always translate into depth. As fine as the acting is throughout — and quietly brilliant when the extraordinary veteran Lois Smith takes the stage, toward the very end, as the show’s sole female character — none of the charactershere have the textured completeness of those created by Forster and Kushner.

Ultimately, the play twists itself into ungainly pretzels as it tries to join all the thematic dots on its immense canvas. Yet even by the end of the overwrought second half of “The Inheritance,” you’re likely to feel the abiding, welcome buzz of energy that comes from an unflagging will to question, to create, to contextualize, to — oh, why not? — only connect.

[+ WilliamM]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/11/everything-you-need-know-about-next-democratic-debate/?arc404=true

Theater & Dance Washington Post

Review

‘The Inheritance’ is epic in length, but not always in satisfaction

 

 

)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/peter-marks/

By

Peter Marks

Theater critic

November 17, 2019 at 10:00 p.m. EST

 

NEW YORK — Deep, deep, deep into “The Inheritance” — Matthew Lopez’s elegiac reckoning for gay men in the era after the AIDS plague — a woman finally appears on the stage. She’s a mom played by extraordinary 89-year-old Lois Smith and, in a lengthy monologue fully six hours into this marathon, she recounts the wrenching details of her alienation from her homosexual son, who died of AIDS three decades earlier.

 

Smith’s delivery percolates with theatrical know-how. A lesser actor would think welling up would be called for. But Smith remains dry-eyed. She opens up the emotional space for an audience to savor her words and performance — and explore the boundaries of its own empathy and feelings of loss.

 

It takes all afternoon and evening to get to Smith’s tender soliloquy in the Barrymore Theatre, where the two-part play, astonishingly well-handled by director Stephen Daldry, marked its official opening Sunday. Moved to perhaps the greatest degree you’ll experience all day — and there are other reach-for-the-tissues milestones in this big Broadway epic — you do at this point ask yourself: Was there enough to this exhausting trip to make it worth it?

 

 

 

Well, ultimately, I’d say yes, but with some caveats. Because the playwright has created as his central character a contemporary young gay man of comfortable means for whom the epidemic is only a history chapter, the present-day suffering detailed in “The Inheritance” can feel manufactured and minor. (If deciding whether to marry a chilly billionaire played by John Benjamin Hickey is your most pressing problem, I know a lot of people who want your agony.) The memory of pain isn’t nostalgic, it’s a return to hell. So in the interludes when the drama most directly references the disease’s ravages — a riveting speech by an older gay man played by Paul Hilton; that touching requiem at the end of Part One — you’ll sense in the audible reactions of some of the people seated around you the firing-up of old, private hells.

 

That’s why “The Inheritance” feels powerful only by its associations with an earlier tragedy. And maybe why the best way to approach the well-acted production is to test-drive it, by investing only in Part One. Lopez’s literary inspirations — “Howards End” and “Maurice” by E.M. Forster, who’s also a character here — are reflected in the novelistic infrastructure of the piece. It’s not built as a cliffhanger, so returning immediately to Part Two doesn’t feel urgent. At the end of Part One, featuring a gathering I won’t describe but that recalls other sprawling eulogies for mass death, such as “Schindler’s List,” you’ll feel sufficiently filled with the themes Lopez adheres to all through both parts.

 

“If we can’t have a conversation with the past, what will be our future?” asks the play’s polestar, one pure-hearted Eric Glass, portrayed by moony-eyed Kyle Soller as sincerity incarnate. He’s an Upper West Side Jew in the Manhattan of 2015, a social activist living with Toby Darling (Andrew Burnap), a writer best described as hot trouble. Like Louis and Prior of Tony Kushner’s two-part “Angels in America” — which “The Inheritance” aspires to emulate — Eric and Toby reflect the mores, joys and sorrows of gay partnership of their era. With disease a receding worry and same-sex marriage a reality, Eric’s concerns are raising a family and passing on to the next generation an understanding of the struggle of the men who died needlessly and horribly before the virus could be contained.

 

 

 

Toby, in Burnap’s impressive, spasmodic bursts of nervous energy, loves Eric some but himself more. He is inexorably drawn to life’s heat, embodied by Adam (Samuel H. Levine), a younger man and budding Broadway star. Toby is the hedonistic yin to Eric’s conscientious yang, a pivotal tension in “The Inheritance” that doesn’t always feel like a big enough problem to hold you through 6½ hours.

 

The supplemental characters do help provide absorbing embroidery. Daldry’s mise-en-scene, executed by noted stage designer Bob Crowley, consists of a pale floor with a hydraulic platform and a set of black walls upstage that part to reveal simple, emblematic images: a house, a tree. Around the platform, the actors, in contemporary dress but mostly barefoot, sit or lounge, watching the play and divvying the narration among them. Hilton, who also portrays the late Forster (and is referred to as “Morgan”), speaks to the other characters; sometimes characters narrate their own actions, adding another layer of novelistic conceit.

 

Lopez’s supporting mainstays are the friends in Eric’s life, all trying to hold on to their gains as the Obama era flickers out and a more hostile America takes shape. Jordan Barbour excels as a doctor who as a black gay man no longer sees a future for himself in his own country, and Arturo Luís Soria wrings all the rewarding sunniness out of a man who both wants to settle down and keep the party going. The bigger featured roles are inhabited with soulful intensity by Hickey, Hilton and Levine, the last of these actors doubling as a traumatized prostitute with a brain of gold.

AD

 

 

The complex question at the heart of “The Inheritance” seems aimed squarely at gay men Lopez’s age (he’s 42) and younger: How do they remain true to the sacrifices of their forebears, find fulfillment in spiritual and material achievement, and maintain solidarity through a common identity? It could take a whole book to work that out. And sometimes, this voluminous drama is too much like one.

Edited November 18, 2019 by WilliamM

[MscleLovr]

Thanknyou @edjames and @WilliamM for putting the reviews on here. I enjoyed reading them. They made me think about the play again. I still find the play hugely ambitious and by-and-large successful.

[Rod Hagen]

I have some friends with mostly good taste who also saw both parts in London. I'm ambivalent. I want to see it, however, I chafe against theater prices lately. When I saw Wolf Hall, Parts one and two, when it was playing in London, the total, for both tickets and two nights, was nearly $1200 total (@ $300 x2 each both nights).

 

I look forward to hearing the thoughts of other board members (thank you MscleLovr) who see The Inheritance as I make up my mind

 

There's no guarantee it will come to LA, it's not a musical, so I'll have the additional expense of travel to New York, a city I do not love any longer, or at least not deeply, not any more.

 

p.s. Last Year I made the mistake of seeing King Lear, and had the pleasure of seeing the mostly enjoyable Network with Brian Cranston.