Yes, it is long – and yes, it is worth it.
A two-part, six-hour, multi-award-winning work by American playwright Matthew López, written and set after Trump’s first election to presidency, The Inheritance is a sweeping, turbulent, and eloquently searching epic that builds a panoramic portrait of New York’s modern gay community. Having its acclaimed Sydney premiere at the Seymour Centre (Nov 7–Dec 8) with a stellar cast of thirteen, set in the shadow of AIDs and following centuries of repression, it asks how these men are learning to love and live in a world which has only very recently begun to accept that they have the right to exist without shame – or the right to exist at all.
López loosely adapted the story from Howards End, the 1910 classic novel about social conventions and relationships by E.M. Forster (a gay man who came out of the closet only once he had been shut inside his coffin in 1970). The ghost of Forster himself appears as a lead in Part One, portrayed by local legend Simon Burke as an avuncular mythic elder to help this new generation of openly gay men begin to tell their stories – until, wisdom imparted, it is clear they must become their own authors. The world they live in is very different, after all.
Under Shane Anthony’s virtuosic direction (Anatomy of a Suicide, Ulster American) the story expands in a world of fragile but unmistakable social privilege amongst an urbane group of male friends and lovers. It begins in an Upper West Side apartment, with Eric Glass (an unassuming Teale Howie) and his writer boyfriend Toby Darling (a magnetic Ryan Panizza, resembling an Iron-Man-like cousin of Don Draper); who is as egotistical, muscular, wounded and destructive as Glass is mild, idealistic and generous. This haven, where Glass hosts plush dinner parties for his friends, is only temporary – inherited from his grandmother, and rent-controlled for only a year after her death. The eviction is the catalyst for a sequence of conflicts, reconciliations, reconfigurations and new encounters; propelled by kindness, moral conviction, self-interest, self-protection, desire, pragmatism and love.
...a towering achievement, one of the most critically acclaimed plays to be staged in Sydney in 2024.
In a deliberately disruptive meta device, López gives his characters agency over their own story, as they narrate themselves and each other – sometimes comically, sometimes tragically arguing against their predestined fate. They include Adam McDowell, a young actor endowed with family wealth, a six-pack twink aesthetic and natural talent; and his doppelganger inverse Leo, a homeless sex worker, who has a hunger for books, a problem with addiction, and a history of abuse. Both are played flawlessly by a totally ripped Tom Rodgers.
Simon Burke doubles as Leo, an older man who builds a special kinship with Eric. In a bucolic house in the country – bought by his billionaire real-estate developer partner, Henry Wilcox (a sharp, dry and sympathetic John Adam) – we learn of how Leo gave sanctuary to infected and dying men with nowhere to go (Vanessa Downing has a small cameo as a penitent mother). Leo’s passing on of this memory to Eric is the heart of this play, and Burke delivers it beautifully, and with tears.
Other roles, less major but still pivotal, are performed by Jack Richardson (hilarious in a brief part as a Burning Man artist boyfriend); Elijah Williams (returning to the Seymour Centre for a second time this year after appearing as a dual lead in A Case for the Existence of God), who plays a proud black HIV-positive healthcare worker; Zoran Jevtic and Quinton Rofail Rich as new parents “the two Jasons”; Matthew McDonald and Jack Mitsch as Wilcox’s sons; and Bayley Prendergast as a mildly insufferable, holier-than-thou progressive.
Always absorbing, sometimes explosive, we are swept along Toby and Eric’s overlapping fates, taking us to Broadway, Fire Island, opulent apartments, and Leo’s fabled home. Kate Beere’s set is spare, a minimal glowing frame; and with so many bodies on stage, anything more would be distracting to the point of overwhelming. Only in the closing scenes does this world gracefully open up.
In keeping with much of the Seymour Centre’s recent programming (Consent in 2023, Heroes of the Fourth Turning in 2022), the stage becomes a space for some of the most heated social and political debates of our times to play out, with powerful fluency in the language of opposing ideas, yet without pat conclusions of ideological superiority. When one character compares Trump to the HIV virus, Republican Henry Wilcox commends the imagination of the metaphor, and offers him a job. Nothing, it seems, is more important than to express oneself with clarity, and listen without judgement.
By the end, we come to realise the multifaceted nature of the play’s title and the heavy freight it carries. Themes of class and property develop and entangle with the inheritance of trauma; the impossibility of inheritance when one generation is invisible to the next; and the terrible chasm in gay lineage that came from the inheritance of death by HIV.
In one of many shattering scenes, the normally composed, hawk-like Henry Wilcox rises shakily from his chair to cry out in strangled rebuttal: “There Are. No. Men. My. Age.”
Though occasionally a touch sentimental (the morally pure Eric Glass was my least favourite formulation), The Inheritance asks important and globally resonant questions about responsibility, intergenerational care, community, and identity. The production – an independent collaboration presented by multiple backers, including its director – is a towering achievement, one of the most critically acclaimed plays to be staged in Sydney in 2024. I wish everyone I knew had been sitting in that theatre with me, gay, straight, and the rest. You can see its two parts back-to-back, or on different days. My only parting advice would be to bring a cushion.
The Inheritance (Parts One & Two) is presented by Shane Anthony, Daniel Cottier Productions, Sugary Rum Productions and Seymour Centre and produced by Shane Anthony, Daniel Cottier and Gus Murray.