112 newyork| november25–december8, 2019
bodied naïf becomes the apple in their
garden. When Toby writes a supposedly
autobiographical play, Adam stars, and
Toby falls narcissistically in love with his
younger, richer, less secretive reflection.
At this point, Lopez is in grand form. He
has worked out a powerful blend of third-
person description and action—he says he
was influenced by Elevator Repair Service’s
read-the-whole-novel approach in Gatz—
and has woven a complicated narrative out
of the ways that lies can heal (Forster’s
imagining a happy ending for a gay couple
in Maurice) and damage (everything Toby
ever does). With all threads firmly in hand,
Lopez turns confidently to larger things—
to generational devastation, to the plague.
Once he has been abandoned, Eric seeks
solace from his older friend Walter, who
has moved, in the kind of tidy narrative
coincidence you find in 19th-century nov-
els, into his building. Now faltering from
cancer, Walter talks about the terrible
losses he sustained during the aids crisis,
and this late-blooming kinship links Eric
deeply to Walter’s husband, the gorgeous
but withholding Henry. The first move-
ment explores personal vulnerability; now
the middle movement of the play develops
its theme: how to sense absence. “Eric won-
dered what his life would have been like,”
says Eric, “if he had not been robbed of a
generation of mentors, of poets, of friends,
and, perhaps, even lovers.” Living, contem-
porary friends orbit with their own
stories—a cross-section of the New York
gayterati—but their voices get fainter and
fainter. Eric, constantly referred to by the
narrators as a man of hidden capacity and
kindness, steps into the eye of the play.
Lopez loves plot. He loves assembling it
out of both action and narration. He loves
reflecting a moment from Howards End
and then multiplying that reflection. Per-
formances double and fragment: We see
people in flashback (Walter and Henry
running up the lane to their new country
house), or actors return as slightly different
characters. It’s this passion for story that
overwhelms Part Two, when fantasies start
to supplant the crispness, complexity, and
clarity of Part One. Adam departs to be
replaced by Leo (Levine again), a perfectly
vulnerable, conveniently brilliant hustler,
whereas Henry—who appears as a hot
Republican daddy—is pure fanfic. What
seemed monumental in the first half seems
merely ... binge-watchable. Lopez inserts
speeches about Trump and responsibility
and solidarity with trans youth, but the
play itself has heard its own siren song of
escapist romance. We’re swept past these
thorny issues and into something that
turns into bourgeois, even Benedictine,
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