'Only connect': An LGBTQ 'Inheritance' at Zach Theatre in Austin

Gary Cooper did not live long enough to see the opening night of "The Inheritance" at Zach Theatre.

Which is a profound shame. The Austin mentor, activist and arts backer is listed in the play's printed program alongside his surviving husband, Richard Hartgrove, as a "presenting producer."

That is not all: The larger questions woven into Matthew Lopez's two-part play, inspired by E.M. Foster's "Howards End," harmonize with the themes of Cooper's and Hartgrove's public lives: How do we know who we are? How do we transmit wisdom from one generation to another, especially in the LGBTQ community? What part do places and things — especially property — play in the formation of our identities?

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With the possible exception of "A Passage to India," Foster's 1910 novel is his strongest work of fiction. It served as the basis for a Merchant-Ivory movie, as did Forster's slighter novels, "A Room with a View" and "Maurice." Screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala compressed and dramatized "A Room with a View" and "Howards End" superbly. In fact, it seemed for a long time improbable that any writer could improve on the movie that starred Emma Thompson as the uncannily kind Meg; Helena Bonham Carter as her impulsive sister, Helen; Vanessa Redgrave as Meg's dying friend, Ruth; and Anthony Hopkins as Ruth's surviving husband, Henry Wilcox, a wealthy but publicly undemonstrative man who appears to be diametrically unlike these three emotionally fluent women.

Lopez's play does not seek to improve on the novel or the movie, but rather to expand it boundlessly into an epic 6-plus-hour epic about the LGBTQ community, its shifting identities and consciousness, as well as its history since the Stonewall Riots in 1969. The winner of the Tony and Olivier awards for best play, "The Inheritance" seems equal parts Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and Terrence McNally's "Love! Valour! Compassion!" One critic called it the “perhaps the most important American play of this century."

That's a tough case to prove, but from the evidence taken from director Dave Steakley's exceedingly empathetic staging of Part 1 — a little over three hours with two intermissions — at Zach Theatre, an excellent case could be made for that assessment.

In Lopez's making, Forster appears as a character who leads a group a young gay men through a symposium dedicated to writing about their lives. The Edwardian author, who in life remained mostly closeted until his death in 1970 — gay-themed "Maurice" was published posthumously — sticks around as the play's narrator, sometimes encouraging the characters, at other times recoiling from the messiness of their lives.

Lopez is not shy about combining characters, or splitting them into different roles, or eliminating them altogether. One can quickly identify the kindhearted Eric as Meg, and his self-centered, promiscuous boyfriend, Toby, as a sort of Helen. The actor who plays Forster also doubles as Walter, a stand-in for the original Ruth. For whatever reason, inscrutable billionaire Henry Wilcox retains his name.

The 11-member cast at Zach glide atop designer Josafath Reynoso's bold scenery: two perpendicular, slate-colored slabs that the actors use to illustrate the drama — discreetly — in chalk. The costumes by Aaron Kubacak and lighting by Austin Brown remain subtle but decisive servants of the action. A word of praise should be reserved for Cate Tucker, identified in the program as intimacy consultant, and Cassie Abate, as movement director, who creatively make it possible to stage various aspects of male affection, nudity and sex without calling attention to the obvious.

For this enormous theatrical project — Part 2 opens Sept. 14 after Part 1 ends Sept. 4 — Steakley assembled a sterling cast. One caveat: Some of the younger actors must learn to modulate their voices, or they won't make it to the end of the double run.

Heralding Part 1 is Peter Frechette — a nominee for Tony and Emmy awards and familiar to anyone who owns a TV set and pays attention to such things — who plays Forster with a playful gentility. As for his turn as dying Walter, he rages through a brilliant monologue about the AIDS era that replaces the original Howards End estate with an American house in the country where Walter nurtured ill friends and strangers until their ends.

Frechette is unforgettable in the role.

As lovers Eric and Toby, Christopher Joel Onken and Jake Roberson are well-matched. They stay scrupulously silent on their characters' gaping lack of self-perception, a key device in all three major versions of this tale. Onken also commands two other dramatic peaks after Frechette's monologue — a long, discursive argument about the gay politics at one of Eric's generous salons, then, at the end of Part 1, a completely unexpected scene at the country house that is both unsettling and moving.

To be fair, the political discourse gives the supporting actors plenty of room to sculpt their identities while airing Lopez's equitable reading of social history. Not much on gender identity to be found here, but not even a two-part epic can, or must, cover everything.

What about Henry Wilcox, who exists at the very heart of the novel and movie? Scott Galbreath plays him with appealing density and brevity. I suspect we'll see a lot more of him in Part 2.

In perhaps his most ambitious project, Lopez attempts to portray the roles that class and poverty play in the New York gay community. He repeatedly asks, for instance, questions left unasked in previous versions of the story, such as, how does Meg/Eric afford such a large, beautiful apartment?

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To illustrate his sometimes strained points on class, Lopez splits Forster's lower-middle-class clerk, Leonard Bast, into two characters, one privileged, the other not, both played with admirable reserve by Brenden Kyle MacDonald. It's not an easy task, but MacDonald manages to give both characters the necessary specificity and sincerity.

"The Inheritance" is an important and essential play that also happens to be entertaining and absorbing from beginning to end. Austin is lucky to see it before almost any other city in the country, now that the expansive play is available to regional theaters after the early days of the pandemic.

Back to Cooper. He died on Aug. 11 in Austin.

A witness to — and participant in — extraordinary social change, he was on the scene in New York City during the weeks of grassroots organizing after Stonewall; then, testing positive for HIV in 1985, he pioneered AIDS activism. His career in publishing allowed him to travel widely and adventurously. His years in Austin were spent helping others.

Besides backing Zach Theatre, Cooper and Hartgrove led significant elements of the city's philanthropic community. Among Cooper's final heartfelt projects was the Austin LBGT Coalition on Aging, which, ahead of its time, lobbied for the welfare of elders, many of whom are left behind by youth-obsessed gay culture.

Here's what Cooper and Hartgrove's friend Richard MacKinnon posted on social media soon after Cooper's death, quoted here with permission.

"Richard, you and Gary raised a generation of us to be elder gay statesmen," he wrote, "patrons of the arts, supporters of charitable causes, politically conscious, board members and leaders, good hosts and welcomed guests, connoisseurs and adventurers, to be patient and playful.

"You were our gay fathers, mentors and compassionate friends. You generously provided introductions to connect us deeper, money for our ambitions or bellies, and time to learn from our mistakes. You are both so loved and now it's our turn to pour love into you."

Although I wrote a long profile of Cooper and Hartgrove in 2015 on the occasion of their Bettie Naylor Visibility Award, handed out during the Human Rights Campaign gala, I could not have said it better than MacKinnon did.

Not just producers of Lopez's play in Austin, Cooper and Hartgrove embodied the very insights that Lopez draws from his fictional characters. The couple lived out loud Forster's famous line from the novel: "Only connect."

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@statesman.com.

If you go

'The Inheritance: Part 1'

Where: Zach Theatre, 202 S. Lamar Blvd.

When: Running select dates through Sept. 4

Tickets and information: zachtheatre.org

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 'Only connect': An LGBTQ 'Inheritance' at Zach Theatre in Austin