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Ardent aspiration glows in every moment of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. That is, to be sure, a whole lot of moments.
This two-part, novelistic doorstop of a play, a portrait of 21st-century gay men in search of their collective past, occupies more than six hours of stage time. And everything about it — its themes, its form, its frame of reference and the desires of its characters — is of a scale with its length.
Consider, to begin with, that Lopez — whose earlier, respectfully received plays (“The Whipping Man,” “The Legend of Georgia McBride”) scarcely anticipated a blockbuster like this one — is making his Broadway debut with a work that courts direct comparison with two daunting predecessors. They would be“Howards End,” E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of England at a moral crossroads, and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama from the early 1990s about the beleaguered soul of gay America (which was spectacularly revived only last year).
The young New Yorkers who populate “The Inheritance,” directed with a forward-charging breathlessness by Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”), all dream big as well. At their noblest, they’re searching to summon the gay pioneers of the past who made their present lives possible.
And whom should they enlist as their spirit guide in this endeavor but Forster himself? Portrayed with wide-eyed curiosity and a diffident mien by the British actor Paul Hilton, Forster steps out of the past and into the play’s opening scene like a tutelary don strolling through a campus quad, where clean-cut acolytes sprawl and frolic like models for a J. Crew back-to-college catalog.
Forster generously gives the boys of “The Inheritance” his blessing to use “Howards End” as the template for the story they’re telling. He even lets them construct a variation on its opening line for their starting point, so that “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” becomes, “One may as well begin with Toby’s voice mails to his boyfriend.”
That tale is set in a Darwinian New York City where “every summer, waves of college graduates wash up on its shores to begin the struggle toward success and achievement.” The description is delivered early by one of the show’s narrators (and in this play, everybody’s a third-person narrator as well as a first-person character). At that point, you may be tempted to think “The Inheritance” has as much in common with the vintage naïfs-in-the-big-city potboilers of Rona Jaffe and Jacqueline Susann as it does with “Howards End.”
The combination of skyscraping reach and soap opera-ish pulp makes “The Inheritance” both easy to make fun of and hard to dislike. First staged in London, where it won the Olivier Award for best new play, the script merges the self-consciousness and avidity of its creator, Lopez, with that of its dramatis personae, who are in effect making up the work in which they appear as they go along.
You can’t just give Lopez patronizing points for attempting to write a significant piece of literature, because he cleverly makes this attempting the very dynamic of his play. It opens — on Bob Crowley’s blank white platform of a set — with most of its cast in an orgy of creative stasis, peering into laptop screens and scribbling on note pads.
How can they possibly say what they want — no, need — to say about who and what they are in a moment when gay rights in America feel both more of a given than ever before and newly under siege? Or as the avuncular Forster puts it, “All your ideas are at the starting post, ready to run. And yet they must all pass through a keyhole in order to begin the race.”
One person in particular emerges as the leader of this race. First identified as Young Man 1, and played by Samuel H. Levine in a wow of a Broadway debut, he will go on to embody two of the show’s main characters, an actor on the rise and a hustler on the decline, who happen to look nearly identical.
What? You don’t remember anyone like that from “Howards End”? Well, the hustler, Leo, serves the function of two Forster characters — a married couple, as it happens. But before we go down that labyrinthine byway, let’s establish some rudiments of the plot.
At the show’s center — standing in for Forster’s temperamentally opposite sisters, Margaret and Helen Schlegel — are the serious, self-doubting social activist Eric Glass (Kyle Soller, a poignant anchoring presence) and his flamboyant playwright boyfriend, Toby Darling, who has a Hidden Past he pretends never happened (an electrically vivid Andrew Burnap).
While the self-destructive Toby pursues fame and endless sex, the nurturing Eric makes friends with the older man upstairs, Walter Poole (Hilton again), the physically frail, unexpectedly heroic partner of the strapping billionaire businessman Henry Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey).
Yes, Henry Wilcox is an important figure in “Howards End.” And, yes, like that Henry, this one has a country house that becomes the moral nucleus of the work he belongs to. Lopez’s use of that house — as a window into the generation of gay men lost to AIDS — packs the play’s most devastating emotional punch.
I challenge any theatergoer with a heart not to cry during the sun-saturated scene that concludes the first half of “The Inheritance.” Never mind that it’s partly borrowed from the 1989 movie “Longtime Companion.” This bravura sequence is a vibrant and essential reminder of the terrifying years when a diagnosis of H.I.V. was a death sentence.
That effort to conjure a nightmare era in danger of being forgotten by many young people today captures what’s best in “The Inheritance.” It yearns, with an almost physical intensity, to realize the much-quoted dictum from “Howards End”: “Only connect.”
For Lopez, that means forging bonds not only with a previous, decimated generation of gay men in New York but also between the rich and the poor, the right and the left, the prosaically minded and the poets. That’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover, even with six hours as a playing field, especially if you’re trying to establish point-by-point parallels with events in “Howards End.”
The show features a bright assortment of political and cultural debates, given spirited life by the baker’s dozen of male cast members and replete with of-the-moment name dropping. There’s even an amusing conversation about the enduring value of camp as a part of the gay sensibility.
That last discussion acquires unintended relevance during scenes of heavy-breathing confrontation. (“I once loved you, Toby, but I am cured of that. Everything you touch you destroy.”)
Such vignettes, and those that portray the heart-smashing theater world in which Toby operates, had me thinking of the Douglas Sirk weepie “Imitation of Life” and wondering if camp clichés are now so genetically encoded into gay culture that they’re recycled without reference to (or even awareness of) their original contexts. Yet there’s rarely anything arch about Lopez’s highly explicit descriptions of erotic encounters (rendered with nonexplicit, metaphoric choreography). And the rapturous monologue by Adam (the young actor played by Levine) about a long session in a gay bathhouse in Prague is notable for its haunted ambivalence about transcendent, dangerous sex.
Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate in “The Inheritance.” Its breadth doesn’t always translate into depth. As fine as the acting is throughout — and quietly brilliant when the extraordinary veteran Lois Smith takes the stage, toward the very end, as the show’s sole female character — none of the characters here have the textured completeness of those created by Forster and Kushner.
Ultimately, the play twists itself into ungainly pretzels as it tries to join all the thematic dots on its immense canvas. Yet even by the end of the overwrought second half of “The Inheritance,” you’re likely to feel the abiding, welcome buzz of energy that comes from an unflagging will to question, to create, to contextualize, to — oh, why not? — only connect.
The Inheritance
Tickets At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, theinheritanceplay.com. Running time of Part I: 3 hours 15 minutes. Running time of Part II: 3 hours and 10 minutes.
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