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.
GQ: I heard that the show originally clocked in during workshops at 10 hours.
Matthew Lopez: That’s gotten inflated over the years, a bit. The script is close to 400 pages and has always been a moving target. But Part 1 stayed relatively consistent. When we did that first workshop, Part 1 was three and a half hours long and it’s now three hours and 15 minutes, including intermissions.
Were you always thinking about it in a two-part structure?
No, the play started really humbly. All I really wanted to do was take this novel and put a contemporary queer spin on it. I really didn’t think it would have this kind of life. When it was originally commissioned, I figured nobody would ever see it. Maybe 7,000 people, if we sell every ticket—which we won’t, but dream big—and it’ll run two and a half hours and I’ll have scratched the itch and we can move on. Instead, it became this thing, which is also very exciting. I much prefer this outcome.
How does a Florida teen in the 90s become enraptured with a classic novel about English people arguing over country real estate?
It started that first time I saw Howards End in the movie theater, but it was really the spirit of the novel and the characters. Ruth Wilcox reminded me so much of my Puerto Rican grandmother even though they were worlds apart. I found so much to latch onto even though it didn’t reflect my life at all. Reading the novels, being given a glimpse of Forster’s mind through his writing, I felt like I was meeting a kindred spirit. I feel really close to him, I always have.
You bring Forster into the show, too, as an avatar of the authorial voice. And the way it’s staged, the actors seem as though they’re writing the show as it happens.
The play is about the writing of the play, without hopefully ever being too twee or obnoxious about it. The idea of storytelling is so pervasive throughout. It’s about asking: how do we tell stories, and why? As Eric says in one scene, it’s through stories that history is conveyed and culture survives. At the end of the day, everyone just wants to be understood. What binds us is that we all have stories to tell each other and our willingness to tell them or unwillingness to tell them determines our relationships. Legacy is so important to the characters, whether it’s the legacy of the bequeathed house or a bequeathed piece of writing or the legacy of not wanting to be forgotten after you’re dead.
That famous phrase from Howards End—"Only connect!"—didn’t make it into the play, but the spirit of it is very much alive. One character encourages another to get over a breakup by saying, “The way to heal heartbreak is to risk more.” And the play ends with a similar invocation.
The only way to survive life is to live it. For the most part, unless you’re Eric Trump and had a very protected or privileged life, no one gets through life unscathed. If you’re lucky, it’s an easy sort of hurt that you go through. If you’re not lucky, it’s a hard hurt. Sometimes it’s a hurt of your own making, or the skin you’re born in, or the people you’re attracted to, or a genetic predisposition for addiction. But there is some great solace in allowing people to say, “This was done to me and this is what I’ve done to others.” Naming your personal trauma but also taking responsibility for your role in other people’s trauma or in your own... I’ve learned that secrets will kill you. Even if it isn’t, “I’m cheating on my husband,” or, “I had a child out of wedlock that nobody knows about,” even if it isn’t an enormous secret but just the secret of, “This is how I feel and I never told anyone how I feel,” that can kill you sometimes. And it’s important to acknowledge that some people don’t make it. That’s certainly one of the heartbreaking lessons of the epidemic. So many people didn’t get a chance to finish their stories.
Is that why one character calls out Forster for not coming out while he was alive?
Our lives are the result of the choices that we make. And often our lives are outside our control. One of the questions I wanted to explore with this play is: what does it mean to live honestly? To live true to your values, to live true to your feelings of responsibility? The great failing of Forster is that he had countless opportunities to be honest and he didn’t take them. By the time he died, the world had changed and he did not publicly allow himself to change with the world. I do think that if Forster had come out during his life, if he had merely allowed [Maurice] to be published, it would have changed the world.
People have said that the play’s main theme is the responsibilities that generations of gay men have to each other. But it also really interrogates the responsibilities that all people have to each other, to successive generations and to forgotten subsets of society.
I decided to write this play from the perspective of a gay man because that’s who I am. I’ve written from the perspective of a Puerto Rican before, I’ve written as an American but I’ve never really written from the perspective of a gay man. That said, I knew there were bigger and more universal applications that could be applied to this play. You don’t have to be a gay man to appreciate this play. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to live a moral life? I want to answer those questions without it ever feeling like a Sunday school lesson. I’m not trying to write a moralistic play. I’m not doing George Bernard Shaw.
Still, that perspective seems particularly important in our political climate. You’ve said you wrote a draft before the 2016 election.
The whole play had been written before the election.
But that version wouldn’t have been the same play, I imagine. It wouldn’t have had the same things to say.
I realized that I couldn’t ignore what was happening in the country. A play about our response to history could not be ahistorical to its own time. So I had to go back and rewrite so much of it in order to reflect what was going on. I started working on it just as Barack Obama got reelected. I certainly didn’t write it expecting Donald Trump to win the election. But once it happened, I knew I couldn’t ignore it or the play would be worthless.
You make us relive the night of the 2016 election onstage.
I’m sorry! That’s one of the big differences between the London production and the New York production, the reaction [to that moment].
You write Henry Wilcox—the rich, heartless capitalist of Forster’s novel, rendered in The Inheritance as a miserly gay conservative billionaire—with a lot of empathy and understanding, even though he’s a baby boomer and a Trump supporter.
I didn’t really understand that generation and I realized that was a huge loss for me. My distance from them felt like a tremendous hole in my life and my understanding of how I came to be the person that I am. And being a young gay man of color, I had in particular no understanding and no desire to understand older white gay men. They didn’t seem to care much about me and I just returned the favor. And then growing up, marrying a white man my age, I began to think in terms of my husband. What would his life had been like? How would he have reacted?
I really made a conscious decision to stay as close to the novel as I could while also simultaneously blowing it up. I realized that with Henry in particular. I kept his name because he’s so similar to the character in the book. I wanted to let the audience know that if you are a fan of the novel, this is the character that you will most recognize. My goal was never to apologize for Henry, to allow Henry to dig his own hole, to not sugar coat him, to let him stand on his own two feet in front of a contemporary New York City audience. Never pulling his punches, never going too easy on him. But also never simultaneously using him as a punching bag. I wanted to create a character that cannot be easily dismissed, emotionally and intellectually. You may not agree with Henry—I don’t—but the act of having to argue for him, in his voice, was one of the most challenging and ultimately rewarding pieces of compassion I’ve ever asked myself to engage in.
We’re coming up on that time of year when a lot of people will be going home to see their Trump-supporting relatives. Do you think writing him has changed the way you might interact with someone who shares his views?
It’s a little different because at the end of the day, Henry is just a good Republican. Henry just did what was asked of him. Henry just held his nose. We actually never say whether he voted for Trump or not. If you asked my Henry Wilcox, he would have said no, I didn’t vote. He didn’t need to vote, though; he gave him tons of money. He voted with his pocketbook. He didn’t need to go to his polling station—in New York City of all places, where Trump was going to lose. I didn’t do something like Heroes of the Fourth Turning with this play, I didn’t try to understand the Trump supporter that comes from a much more passionate place. Henry Wilcox is not a passionate Trump supporter. He’s a libertarian.
Because this play is so political, people love to compare it to Angels in America.
I haven’t heard that, really?! That’s news to me.
Is there an alternate canon that you’d suggest? What are the other ancestors of The Inheritance onstage?
Angels in America is the seminal text of my generation. I’m 42 years old. I studied it in every class in college, even in my math class. There’s no part of my artistic life that is untouched by that play. But the play that was most directly influential was Gatz. The use of unapologetically literary writing to create theatrical language was so exciting to me—to take a book and turn it into a play without changing a single word. The use of what we call self-narration, when actors start to tell their own stories—that’s all Gatz. I took all my cues and encouragement from that play.
The other one was Long Day’s Journey Into Night. That play, with Glass Menagerie, are my two favorite plays. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is so much about memory and personal history and how secrets will kill you. It’s about addiction and shame. And as we move into our play’s sixth hour, Jon Clark’s gorgeous lighting design gets dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. The play starts so brightly, flooded with light, and by the end of the play, it’s gone. This play is, because of the lighting design, almost literally Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Both acts of this play end at a house in upstate New York that was once used as a hospice for AIDS patients. Was there a real house?
There’s a house upstate that my then boyfriend—now husband—started renting years ago up in the Catskills. There’s nothing special about it. You drive past it and you’d never notice it’s there because it’s hidden behind the trees. We rented it one summer, and we were both in a bad place in our lives and our relationship. We went to this house not knowing why we rented it and during the course of this summer, the two of us healed. We left that house at Labor Day feeling so completely renewed and restored—and not just from a month outside the city. That house did something magical to us and we kept returning to it.
The house in the play is not the house in the Catskills—Walter’s house is farther upstate, north of Albany. But I wanted to capture that feeling of a house being restorative, and not just rest and relaxation but spiritual restoration. It was at that house in the Catskills that I actually started to outline the play. And then Steven Daldry used to tell me stories about the apartment he once lived in. Back during the Civil War it was a field hospital for Union soldiers. Walt Whitman used to tend to soldiers in this building—it’s the triangle building across from Soho House in the Meatpacking district in New York where Dos Caminos is. $575 a month, which is the rent that Eric pays in the play for his rent-controlled apartment, a fact that always elicits an angry reaction from New Yorkers, is the rent he actually paid there.
I love that idea of a place being restorative, of a place having creative parentage.
Places for me are much more powerful, in some cases, than people. That makes me sound like such a misanthrope, but this play is about places. Places are haunted, whether there are ghosts there or not. I’m very fortunate that my parents are alive and married and living in the house that I was raised in. But I walk in that house and there’s nothing but ghosts there, nothing but memories. Houses are haunted whether or not they have ghosts. Cities are too. Theaters.
Gay bars.
Gay bars! New York City is a giant graveyard.
The play has an episodic quality, with both parts split into three acts. It’s like you’re binge-watching a Netflix show. Are there plans for TV or movies in the future?
Plans? No. Interest? Probably! On our end, we’d love to do it one day. But we’d love to take a vacation first. There’s a lot that’s been cut out of the play that could fill an episodic whatever, but that’s so far outside of our plans right now. The first plan is to take a nap.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
