The Connecticut Connection To Broadway's 'The Inheritance'
“The play and the project began very humbly,” says Matthew Lopez from his Brooklyn loft, munching lunch and looking back at his now-not-so-humble play’s early development.
He’s talking about “The Inheritance,” the two-part, nearly seven-hour work, which was a sensation in London and is a major event of the current Broadway season, sure to earn an armful of awards and prizes this spring.
Though it ends its run March 15 due to ticket sales, it remains a theatrical piece that is audacious, ambitious, theatrically thrilling, and deeply emotional – the end of Part One leaves many in the audience sobbing. The work touches on themes as sweeping as what it means to be a gay man through several generations, and as intimate as asking, “How do you discover your authentic self?”
When Lopez was selected eight years ago to be the next Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage, which included commissioning and development of a new work, he pitched to artistic director Darko Tresnjak and associate artistic director Elizabeth Williamson an unusual idea for a play.
“Matthew said he was always obsessed with E.M. Forster’s ‘Howards End,’” says Williamson, “but it wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that he realized Forster was a closeted gay man. He said he had an idea for some time to go back and really ‘queer up’ the book, setting it in New York now and involving three generations of gay men.”
The 1910 novel dealt with class and social differences in turn-of-the-last-century Edwardian England. Lopez wanted to see it through a gay spectrum of Manhattan men he had known a century later. But where to begin?
In June of 2013, Williamson helped organize a forum of Hartford-area gay men of different generations so the playwright could tap into their personal experiences about coming out, the gay rights movement, and the impact of AIDS on their lives.
“I had no intention at first of speaking for a generation or writing a grand statement,” says Lopez. “Honestly, it was as simple as taking my favorite novel and re-examining it – and it grew from there. As it turned out, I had a lot on my mind.”
Lopez began working on “The Inheritance” in earnest during the 2013-14 season, when his play “Somewhere” was presented at the theater. But by the time his play “Reverberation” premiered at Hartford Stage in 2015, “The Inheritance” had become the beginnings of a two-part play.
“It grew to fit the dimensions that it clearly wanted to fit,” says Lopez.