Theater Review: A Leaden Epic on Modern Gay (Male) Life Hits Broadway

The Inheritance

Written by Matthew Lopez

Directed by Bob Crawley

Starring Samuel H. Levine, Andrew Burnap, and Kyle Soller

Ethyl Barrymore Theater, Manhattan

January 8 and 12, 2019

The Inheritance, a six hour play (split in two segments) about gay men of this era and their inheritance from past gay men, took London by storm last year, praised as a worthy follow up to Angels in America, another six hour play about gay life. Angels premiered almost thirty years ago, just after the worst of the AIDS epidemic. Much has changed since then, including gay marriage, AIDS’ transformation into just another chronic disease with better prevention options, and the millennial and GenZ’s generations’ lack of fear and hatred towards GLBTQ people, now approaching bored indifference (e.g. Pete Buttigieg is one of the least-favored of the current Democratic presidential candidates among young people). So is there enough material to make another epic gay play focusing on only men? No, especially not this play. It was mostly a tedious chore for me to sit through.

When you think about it, what does it take to make an epically long novel, play, or movie? One strategy is dividing the epic into many scenes or character studies, as in Lanzmann’s Shoah, where we see dozens of real people testify about their experience in the Holocaust, or Michener’s early novels which follow many characters through time across a given geography setting (Hawaii, The Source).  Innovative structure can work, such as in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace  where superimposed plots and multiple characters allow us to compare and contrast. Special effects and variety, like Kushner’s angels and transcontinental journeys in Angels in America can mask some less than inspired writing but still fill the time. Only the bravest writers try to do a long work based on just a few characters. The best of these includes Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Going epic with just a few characters requires a master of writing, and each character needs to be interesting enough that we are excited when they return, perhaps an hour after their last exit. O’Neill can do this, but, sadly, Matthew Lopez, the writer of The Inheritance, did not show this talent in The Inheritance. Mr. Lopez’ mostly young male characters do not sufficiently grab our attention to make us want to live with them for six hours.

The plot of this play is rather thin. It follows a group of young NYC gay men who provide a mix of support, betrayal, sexually mixing, and bitchiness, all well-trodden in older plays like The Boys in the Band (1968). The play is a loose reworking of Howard’s End, a novel by gay novelist/icon E.M. Forster, and Mr. Lopez cleverly has Mr. Forster appear as a sort of recurring coach, writing teacher, and inspiration to this young crowd—the play actually begins as Forster tries to help them come up with a suitable writing topic, and the conceit here is that one of the authors then wrote the play we are now seeing-- a bit of a postmodern touch. The problem with the play is that it veers mostly between overly familiar grounds including the bitchy gay guys and a soap opera plot about one of the relationships, very similar to the US/UK gay TV series Queer as Folk (2000-2005). Here we see the timeless gay male themes about obsession with youth and beauty vs. yearning for connection. These are good topics, but Mr. Lopez brought nothing new to them. Was he honoring gay literature of the past? If so, its best to do it innovatively or well, not just trudging along the well-worn paths.

There was one transcendent moment (10 minutes out of six hours) when a tortured character travels to a rural house and is greeted by the ghosts of young gay men who died there in the 1980s, when the house served as a hospice. Young men “ghosts” came onto the stage from the aisles, in a very moving moment that ended part I of the play. Yet Part 2 did very little to really follow up on this great idea. We had to wait until the end of the play to hear an explication of that sad era (done by the only female actor here, the wonderful 87 year-old Lois Smith (seen below) who I raved about in a play last year). Her recounting of the dying men of that era was touching and emotional, some of the best writing in the play.

Mr. Lopez’ writing too often slipped into third person narration by the characters themselves—not really addressing us soliloquy style, but just wandering around the stage saying what happened next to each person. There were several long essays on modern gay issues, but these felt non-dramatic, as if the characters were reading a treatise or novel to us, rather than acting in a play. I grew very weary of this style after a while. If much of this had been cut, a more focused one-evening play might have resulted, especially if it focused more on the ghosts of the dead young men.

The play was very well acted, all on a basic set that mostly was a large elevated platform, giving the proceedings a Greek tragedy feel. There was no fancy lighting, special effects, or, outrageous cameos that writers of such plays often use to liven things up (although one young artist-boyfriend character did do a bit of dishy camp in a minor role). A standout was Samuel H. Levine (seen above), who played both an aspiring actor (pompous, vain) and a teenage callboy at the mercy of society; he did a great job of negotiating the two roles.

I am quite surprised that the play has not faced more critique over its gay white male point of view. While there are several non-white characters, they bring no real discussion of ethnicity to the play. I thought that equating queerness with gay white maleness was a thing of the past. Women were absent from the play except for the "grandma" that provided nurture—this is an uneasy reminder of how lesbians were marginalized for years, then served as the nurturing supporters of dying gay men. Do we really need such dated stereotypes in 2019? Where are the political correctness police when we need them? While the play’s conceit of an “inheritance” of sexuality, gay rebellion, and politics from an earlier generation of gay men is good, it was a bit queasy for HIV itself to be mentioned, not so negatively, as part of that inheritance.  Overall, the politics seemed muddled and largely dated. I actually found it a bit depressing to see the same overeducated young gay men acting as if they were silly adolescents as I saw in plays in the 1980's. If we have not progressed in 30 years, we are in trouble.

Taken together, I am mystified by the raves for this play in London (NYC reviews have been mixed). It does not justify its length, and the dated portrayal of a narcissistic gay male-centric universe was odd at best, annoying at worst.  For a long six hours, I have not been more unengaged at the theater for some time.