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comparisons have been drawn with
Tony Kushner’s game-changing 1991
epic, Angels in America. (Lopez and
his designer, Bob Crowley, even give
one of their characters prop-house
wings in the London production.)
But it is Forster’s novel that primarily
informs Lopez’s new work. “Whenev-
er we hit a roadblock in a workshop,”
he says, “the answer was very often to
be found in Howards End.”
Lopez makes Forster himself—he
goes by “Morgan”—a central charac-
ter. A donnish, avuncular figure in
buttoned-up tweeds, Morgan, at the
play’s inception, is instructing a group
of young men on the art of transfer-
ring life experience to paper. This
circle of friends, serving as a kind of
Greek chorus, questions Morgan
about the seemingly effortless elegance
of his book’s opening line—“One
may as well begin with Helen’s letters
to her sister”—so “dashed off, as if to
suggest it doesn’t really matter how
you start,” one of them comments.
“One may as well begin with Toby’s
voicemails . . . to his boyfriend,” they
conclude. And so it begins.
A closeted man from an age that
criminalized homosexuality, Morgan
(played by Paul Hilton) is filled with
wonder at this younger generation, a
tribe of unencumbered men able to
live their individual truths buoyed
by preternatural self-awareness,
PrEP (the daily preventative HIV
medication), and pop-culture droll-
ery. What they are often less aware of,
as they navigate the travails of Man-
hattan real estate, Hamptons house
parties, and nightclub dark rooms,
are the struggles of a preceding gen-
eration that fought for liberation and
was decimated by the early years of
the AIDS holocaust in the 1980s.
“How can we learn from the past to
forge a greater future together?” que-
ries actor Kyle Soller, who plays Eric
Glass, an earnest activist. “It’s just
such a universal, human story about
how we need to recognize our
collective history: There’s a message
I think we really need right now.”
At the outset of the play’s action,
Toby Darling (a lost-boy playwright,
electrifyingly played by Andrew
Burnap) is living in a spacious,
rent-controlled Upper West Side
apartment, the childhood home of his
fiancé, Eric. Forster’s novel revolves
around an inheritance, the romantic
country house (Howards End)
bequeathed by the mystical Ruth
Wilcox to the freethinking Margaret
Schlegel, a mere acquaintance whom
she nevertheless recognizes as a kin-
dred spirit. In The Inheritance, it is a
house upstate that decades earlier the
young lovers Henry and Walter
intended as a refuge from the disease
that was ravaging their circle of
friends and that is destined to become
a sanctuary of a different sort.
Lopez had a “thwarted inheri-
tance” of his own. Raised in Panama
City, “a small town in the part of the
Florida panhandle known,” he says,
“as the ‘Redneck Riviera,’ ” he
yearned for the Brooklyn of his par-
ents’ childhoods. “I think they must
have seen in it a kind of paradise,” he
continues. “My dad was raised in
housing projects; now they’re able to
own a home and land.” Their son,
however, did not see northwestern
Florida as a paradise. “It was baffling
to me.” (He has now reclaimed his
parents’ urban roots, living in Brook-
lyn with his husband of four years,
Brandon Clarke.) “The solace I
had—besides my parents, who were
loving and caring—was the movies
and theater and reading,” he recalls.
“The local community theater was
my salvation.”
The teenage Lopez saw Ismail Mer-
chant and James Ivory’s powerful
1992 adaptation of Howards End. “I
knew nothing about E. M. Forster.
I knew nothing about Howards End,”
he remembers, “but seeing that movie
absolutely changed my life. It was the
first thing that really struck a chord
with me as a writer. I was just so
enamored of the film and then later
the book—and the love affair has not
abated.” The 1987 movie adaptation
of Forster’s homoerotic Maurice,
published only after the writer’s death
in 1970, was to prove a further reve-
lation, although Lopez had to seek
O
nly connect!” Edward
Morgan Forster writes in
Howards End, his endur-
ingly powerful 1910 novel
about class, morality, and love in
Edwardian England; “only connect
the prose and the passion, and both
will be exalted, and human love will
be seen at its height.” In this line, the
humanist Forster suggests the impor-
tance of linking what he describes as
the “Inner life” and the “Outer life”:
surface and depth, public image and
private self. His book’s complex and
vividly drawn characters are defined
by their abilities to make these
bridges, by their respective levels of
hypocrisy, empathy, or compassion.
But in playwright Matthew Lopez’s
eviscerating and entirely absorbing
new work, The Inheritance, the iconic
line takes on an additional layer of
meaning. The two-part, seven-hour
play deftly connects Forster’s novel to
a pan-generational queer milieu in
contemporary New York, effectively
proving the timelessness of the nov-
elist’s themes.
The play shattered audiences in a
sold-out run at London’s Young Vic
when it premiered in March 2018; The
Guardian’s Michael Billington praised
director Stephen Daldry’s “crystalline
production” and noted that the play
“pierces your emotional defenses,
raises any number of political issues
and enfolds you in its narrative.”
Before its transfer to the West End’s
Noël Coward Theatre, it was lauded
by The Telegraph’s Dominic Caven-
dish as “perhaps the most important
American play of the century so far.”
It was subsequently garlanded with
awards (the Evening Standard’s Best
Play, the Olivier for Best Director).
Now The Inheritance, command-
ingly directed by Daldry and with
several of the principal actors from the
London production, arrives this fall
on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore
Theatre. With AIDS as a haunting
presence, inevitable and favorable
“Whenever we hit a roadblock in a
workshop, the answer was very often to
be found in Howards End ”
