74 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
THETHEATRE
FINDING FORSTER
“The Inheritance” transports “Howards End ” to millennial New York.
BYALEXANDRASCHWARTZ
ILLUSTRATION BY PIETER VAN EENOGE
I
t’s rare for good fiction to come with
a credo, rarer still for that credo to be
worth remembering, but “Only connect,”
the maxim at the heart of E. M. For-
ster’s masterpiece “Howards End,” lodged
long ago in the cultural mainstream. It
sounds like a political slogan, something
to print on a T-shirt; its true meaning,
though, is personal. The phrase occurs
to Margaret Schlegel, Forster’s icono-
clastic, oddball heroine, as she reflects
on Henry Wilcox, the widowed busi-
nessman she has decided to marry. Wil-
cox is orderly and good-humored, but
he has cultivated a worldly persona while
neglecting his soul. Like Freud, Marga-
ret can see that sex—or its repression—
is at the root of the problem: Wilcox
fears the dark, disruptive power that
“bodily passion” might unleash. His self
is split; her goal is to help him unify it.
Forster, an orthodox Edwardian styl-
ist among the modernist Bloomsbury
wrecking crew, was a gay man who wrote
five of his six novels before he allowed
himself to pursue his own bodily pas-
sion, late in his thirties. One of those
books, “Maurice,” told the story of two
men in love, but Forster refused to let it
be published until after his death, in
- With that in mind, you could read
“Only connect” as the writer’s plaintive
command to himself, tragically unful-
filled. Or, with the winds of modern mo-
rality at your back, you could lambaste
Forster as a hypocrite and a coward who
charged his characters with doing what
he himself could not. That is what hap-
pens during a seething moment in “The
Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s auda-
cious and highly entertaining, if not en-
tirely successful, play in two parts (di-
rected by Stephen Daldry, at the Ethel
Barrymore), which is based on “How-
ards End.” The accuser is Toby Darling
(Andrew Burnap), a gay millennial
writer; Forster, here called Morgan (Paul
Hilton), the name used by his intimates,
is present as a kind of spiritual godfa-
ther made flesh. “Just imagine what
would have happened if you had pub-
lished a gay novel in your lifetime!” Toby
rages. “You might have toppled moun-
tains. You might even have saved lives.”
Morgan concedes the point but knows
that Toby still needs his blessing. “Tell
your story bravely,” he says, and is gone.
Lopez, who is forty-two, was smart
to see in Forster’s tale of two maverick
sisters living in London at the start of
the last century a template for the one
he wants to tell about gay men in New
York today. Though “Howards End” was
published in 1910, it feels bracingly con-
temporary, in part because it deals so
frankly with things that are still central
to our lives: money, class, desire, and, as
the ideal manifestation of all of the above,
real estate. As “The Inheritance” begins,
Toby is partying at a glamorous Hamp-
tons house owned by an older couple,
Henry Wilcox ( John Benjamin Hickey)
and Walter Poole (Hilton again, doing
double duty in a wide-legged brown
suit). Drunk on Martinis and on this
glimpse of the high life, Toby leaves a
series of ecstatic voice mails for his boy-
friend, Eric Glass (Kyle Soller).
Where Toby is impulsive and wild,
nursing wounds from a past that he
keeps secret, Eric is a stable, openhearted
homebody. Employed at a friend’s social-
justice-advocacy firm, he’s “terminally
middle class,” with impeccable creden-
tials—Westchester, Fieldston, Yale—and,
miraculously, a roomy, rent-stabilized
apartment on the Upper West Side, in-
herited from his beloved grandmother.
Eric sentimentalizes family, and badly
wants one of his own. During an ath-
letic bout of sex, ingeniously staged by
Daldry, using contact-improvisation-
style moves as physical metaphor, Eric
asks Toby to marry him. He has spent
seven years supporting Toby, who has
been writing an autobiographical novel,
“Loved Boy,” and who is now trying to
