Matthew Lopez, "The Inheritance"

My goodness!

A couple is splitting in half. One man goes to parties and pukes on Meryl Streep; turns a facile lie about his childhood into a blockbuster play; begins doing meth during orgies on Fire Island.

The other half wants something more conservative, a nice little family; he ends up in a marriage of convenience with an older Trump supporter; he struggles to find his true calling, which is to be a kind of domestic saint, cooking for guests and speaking in gentle tones and being a source of emotional support for troubled youth into his nineties, when he finally dies.

As all of this unfolds, there are digressions. An acquaintance of the couple, a gay doctor, melodramatically announces he is moving to Canada, because Trump's America "no longer deserves me." Another character talks--and talks--about having been gang-banged in Europe, and about how the experience was briefly euphoric, but then it created an AIDS scare. There are weird interludes with the ghost of E.M. Forster, who tells us he regrets not having had the courage to publish "Maurice" when the book could have made more of a difference. Or something like this.

It really bothers me that this play has been construed as an achievement, if not in NYC, then in London. It especially bothers me that a tacky choice at the end of Part One has been hailed as a major theatrical masterstroke. The one saintly character has traveled upstate to a mansion, where another saintly character (now-dead) once comforted 1980s AIDS victims as they died. These victims then emerge--from somewhere beyond the grave!--and they all have basically wordless beatific moments with the protagonist, and then the lights go out.

Everyone in the audience weeps--everyone but the person typing right now--but it seems to me that the AIDS victims are used as furniture, or props, and that the playwright has recognized that a lazy gesture toward tragedy can score him some points with ticket-buyers. It's especially offensive that Lopez seems to feel he ought to be compared with Tony Kushner, who did actually devote some time and thought to imagining the experiences of AIDS victims, and who dared to suggest that some were not simply Jared Leto-esque hollow angel-martyr-props.

Somewhere in the middle of Lois Smith's endless, trite monologue, I yawned loudly, and the weepy man in front of me hissed and demanded silence. I empathized. I wouldn't want someone yawning loudly. But I also thought: This is bad writing. I have a child at home, and I devoted seven hours to this nonsense. Maybe the only way I can signal a response is through an involuntary yawn.

Oh well.

It's alarming that an entire house of ticket-buyers jumped to their feet at the end of the show. But people want to feel that their time and money and choices are valuable; people want to congratulate themselves for having had "an experience."

This is the worst play I've seen on Broadway. Part One was better than Part Two. But there's no need to book an evening at the Barrymore--anytime soon.

P.S. I do admire the playwright's ambition and chutzpah. I should have led with that.

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