The Inheritance: links in a chain echoing through generations
1 Apr 2024 - Photos by Dahlia Katz

He has a story to tell. Banging around inside him. Aching to get out.

The Inheritance is packed with stories. Six and a half hours worth of stories over two nights. Stories of consequence, stories that are debates, stories that are gossip. Stories that are metaphors. Gay stories. And, despite the length and several gags referring to the length, not a single story is less that riveting.

We begin in what seems to be a writing workshop. A young man, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (Richard II, Fifteen Dogs, Every Little Nookie, Trout Stanley, Towards Youth, Erased: Billy & Bayard, Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, Black Boys), somehow conjures up EM Forster, Daniel MacIvor (Here Lies Henry, Monster, Let's Run Away, New Magic Valley Fun Town, Who Killed Spalding Gray?, Cake and Dirt, The Best Brothers, A Beautiful View, Arigato, Tokyo, His Greatness) for advice. Forster eagerly joins in the group job of narration, while also adding pointers and insisting on truth in dialogue. The Inheritance is performed frequently in the third person, with the characters telling their or someone else's story. It is a self-conscious device but a brilliant one. The play becomes an outrageously detailed, funny and moving novel, or audiobook, deliberately evoking Forster's Howards End. The joy and mesmerisation of being absorbed in a compelling, page turning story is created on the stage, sweeping the audience up and into it. 

Playwright Matthew Lopez has a lot to convey about the many topics that concern gay men. There are witty and lively debates about camp, appropriation versus representation, responsibility and politics. And love. From the bitter comment that "To fall in love means making an appointment with heartbreak," through multiple examples of variable shading from transactional to romantic, Lopez's characters demonstrate, and discuss, that gay men received "No education in how to live," in how to love. He asks, "What is the responsibility between generations of gay men?" and "If we can't have a conversation about the past, how will we face the future?" Or, in an explicitly sexual context, "How could an experience so transcendent end up so terrifying?" Because yes, all generations of gay men have been scarred by AIDS and the plague that decimated us. But The Inheritance is not an AIDS play or an ideological diatribe, Lopez wraps everything in an exuberant soapy plot with enough storylines to populate entire seasons of The Bold and the Beautiful, or the entirety of Dynasty performed by The Boys in the Band but with glee instead of bitterness. In only six and a half hours.

The effectiveness of this is readily apparent. The nights I attended, the audience hung on every word of the debates, and laughed when Lopez inevitably stood a truism on its head or lampooned a cherished queer stereotype before enshrining it. Yet the plot with its romantic and sexual couplings and uncouplings—Jane Austen at the Meat Rack—earned repeated gasps of emotional empathy and shock, horror or disbelief. The characters may by necessity be quickly sketched, but they ring so emotionally true, and the performances are so engaging, that they feel like old friends. Or maybe remind us of actual old friends. Or friends we have just yet to meet. Very few gay clichés are left unexplored. Everyone is witty (and if they are not, Forster will prompt them) and, with one exception, well educated. They attend, with one exception, the most au courant of all art forms and enjoy the experience. Which makes sense for stage characters who are creating themselves in a novelistic style. As MacIvor as Foster, says of the relevance of classic literature, "Hearts still love, don’t they? And break. Hope, fear, jealousy, desire. Your lives may be different. But the feelings are the same. The difference is merely setting, context, costumes. But those are just details." But what sumptuous details.

While the words are crucially important, director Brendan Healy (Other People, How to Fail as a Popstar, Acha Bacha, The 20th of November, Pig, Arigato, Tokyo, The Silicone Diaries) adds subtle visual pizzazz. Gay men know lighting and ambience, and our eyes are constantly drawn to where we need to be. And once there, we are treated to subtle visual creations of environments, or physical bits that not only illustrate but also often illuminate character. These characters are struggling to create the connections between each other, their emotions and their history, but their environment shifts with them with the addition of a few enhancing bits of stagecraft magic. Not that the monologues need help. Almost every character gets a moment in the spotlight and holds it with a fierce understated magnetism. Louise Pitre (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) turns up towards the end in a star turn that shatters every heart in the building, only to have it quietly brought into question why gay men still need the approval or benediction of straight society. Lopez wants our own love and self-love to be strong enough.

Breton Lalama (King Lear, Queen Goneril) fires off deadpan quip after deadpan quip as half of a married and adopting couple with Aldrin Bundoc (I Cook, He Does the Dishes). The gay clown who earns relentless laughter that turns from him to with him. Salvatore Antonio (Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom) and Hollywood Jade are the political firebrand friends who flaunt their empathy but dispense their anger with humour or righteous venom. Qasim Khan (Hamlet) is Eric Glass, whose legendary meals in his legendary rent-controlled apartment, is the gathering place for the group. It is a tricky role as he is upheld as a voice of reason, as the somewhat blank center around which the others revolve, but Khan adds enough shade and grit to avoid being an ingenue. And when he does explode, the audience gasps turn into to applause. Jim Mezon (Knives in Hens, Lear, Red) is a real estate developer (The Inheritance, like any play set in New York, is also real estate porn) who resembles, deliberately as The Inheritance is set in 2016, a certain orange blight, right down to the sycophantic comic relief sons, Antonio and  Gregory Prest (De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, A Streetcar Named Desire, Little Menace, Rose, Bed and Breakfast, La Bete). Mezon makes a full meal out of a contradictory character, full of bluster, rough charm and an almost erotic euphoria as he makes an intellectual argument that is contrary.

The central plot quadrangle involves Eric Glass and Antoine Yared (Fall On Your Knees, Lear) as Toby Darling.  We are told, "Toby likes to be wanted, hates to be needed." Darling is a writer and his struggle with honesty is on the page as well as in life. Yared is certainly wanted, he exudes a dangerous sexuality, and while he may be a cad in many ways, his presence is felt even when offstage. Two other corners of the quadrangle are played by Jackman-Torkoff as both Adam and his lookalike Leo. The characters echo each other, and Jackman-Torkoff takes each through a journey of innocence through eager knowledge, intellectual and sexual, and into contrasting fates. He is masterful and magnetic, culminating in a dialogue between the two that is technically astounding, emotionally riveting and, in context of this production, incredibly moving. 

In the first act MacIvor has an outrageously hilarious scene where, as EM Forster, he narrates, horrified and titillated, rambunctious anal sex between Eric and Toby. We are reminded of just what a theatrical treasure MacIvor is as he astonishes us yet again. Jackman-Torkoff is also proving to be astonishing, stirring up memories of MacIvor's solo spectaculars. When the two have a tete-a-tete, seated side by side over the stage, it is as if MacIvor is welcoming Jackman-Torkoff to a club, to a secret society visible to the public but very exclusive. Very gay. Lopez's themes of generations of gay men being "links in a chain" could not be better illustrated. Or in the closing moments before the first intermission or the climax of the first half. Both were brazenly, theatrically, gaily manipulative and both reduced the audience, and myself, to ugly crying. In a play or production less powerful, it would have been unbalanced. In this The Inheritance, they were moments of emphasis, hard underlines under a symphony of themes and stories that weave into emotional truths.