An ‘Inheritance’ Deferred

MATTHEW LOPEZ STILL REMEMBERS IT AS “without question one of the most influential and impactful days of my life.” It was a Sunday afternoon in 1992, when Lopez, then 15, went with his mother after church to see the 1992 film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, set in turn-of-the-century Edwardian England, at the local cinema in Panama City, Fla.

“I was about as innocent and ignorant an audience member as you could be, and I just fell deeply into it,” recalls Lopez, author of the plays The Whipping Man, The Legend of Georgia McBride, Somewhere, and Reverberation. “I cared so much about the characters, and my imagination was really sparked by it. It is so specifically about the time and the place that it is written, but Forster has this tremendous ability to really dissect his society in a way that dissects humanity. I could feel its contemporariness, its immediacy, even at the remove of a hundred years in time.”

The film, as did Forster’s book, chronicles the stories of three early 20th-century families—the wealthy Wilcoxes, the bourgeois Schlegels, and lower-middle-class Leonard Bast and his wife—as they clash and connect with one another over several years, against the backdrop of England’s rigid class system. At the beating heart of the tale is Ruth Wilcox’s beloved, idyllic country home, Howards End, which