Review: Yes, 'The Inheritance' on Broadway will have you sobbing. But the play aims for more

"Only connect!" E.M. Forster preached in his irreplaceable 1910 novel "Howards End." More than a century later, Matthew Lopez - an American playwright whose magnum opus, "The Inheritance," has arrived on Broadway after conquering London - has found inspiration in this simple gospel.

Borrowing the framework of Forster's tale, Lopez relocates the action to contemporary New York to explore the lives of an intergenerational group of gay men. A two-part drama that runs 6 1/2 hours, "The Inheritance," which had its official opening Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, can't help being compared to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America."

The similarities are as unmistakable as the differences. While Kushner's epic is set in the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, Lopez's drama takes place in that fuzzier period closer to the present, a time when AIDS drugs and PrEP have made sex no longer synonymous with death. The plague days are recounted by those whose survived them, but