<i>The Inheritance</i> and the Ambitions of Queer Art

The Inheritance opens with a narrative device that could be unbearable if it weren’t so charmingly done. A writer (Samuel H. Levine) has a story to tell, and for assistance he channels the spirit of his idol, the English novelist E.M. Forster. The unnamed writer explains that he wants to capture the world that he and his friends occupy as a group of gay men in contemporary New York. But he’s struggling with how to transform their experiences into drama. “Friendship? Love? Loss?” Forster (Paul Hilton) replies. “Sounds like you’re off to a very good start … Your lives may be different but the feelings are the same.”

The fictional Forster is right, and wrong. , a new, two-part, nearly seven-hour play by Matthew Lopez that premiered at London’s Young Vic theater in, transposed into a modern Manhattan setting. But it’s also a work that places itself, somewhat self-consciously, into the pantheon of great works of queer art that have emerged in the last few decades, even though the stakes of its story are drastically different. Rather than exploring questions of life or death, is an epic about cultural heritage. “If we can’t have a conversation about our past, then what will be our future?” one character asks. “Who are we? And who will we become?”