Is this theatre’s next great playwright?
Matthew Lopez’s play, ‘The Inheritance’, has been hailed as a modern classic. As it begins a new run, he talks to Ben Lawrence
When the reviews of the best play of 2018 start to circulate near Christmas, it is certain that Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance will be frequently mentioned. The two-part, six-anda-half-hour epic has been hailed as a modern classic, “perhaps the most important American play of the 21st century so far”, according to the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish.
Directed by Stephen Daldry and starring a largely unknown cast of young actors (plus Vanessa Redgrave in a cameo), The Inheritance is sharply funny, rigorously complex and unutterably poignant. (The climax to Part One is so powerful that the New York Times’s critic reported “audible sobbing” in the audience.)
It is ostensibly about the terrible way America treated its “gay sons” during the Aids crisis in the Eighties, and the psychological effect that has on gay people today. But it transcends this subject to deliver one of the most powerful arguments for tolerance seen on the stage for years.
Lopez has had some success as a playwright in America but The Inheritance (which will hopefully transfer to New York in 2019) has propelled him into a different league. When I meet him backstage at the Noël Coward Theatre, where he is in rehearsals for the play’s West End transfer from the Young Vic,
I find someone courteous, smart, quietly humorous with a hint that his emotions bubble close to the surface. He is 41, and therefore old enough to remember the panic that spread across America when Aids first entered the nation’s consciousness and to recall the stories of taxi drivers refusing to take Aids patients to hospital, undertakers refusing to handle victims’ corpses and millions of people scared to use the same toilet as a person with Aids.
“I had to hide in plain sight and make myself invisible,” says Lopez, who discovered he was gay at the age of about 13, and grew up in Panama City in the Florida Panhandle. “I knew the more visible I was, the more ostracised I would be because I was a pretty effeminate little kid. I avoided words with ‘s’s in them and then avoided words altogether if I could help it. I had to pretend I was something else or pretend I was nothing at all, which is even worse.
“I knew from an early age I was f----. Then I realised it wasn’t me who was f----- but the society I lived in and that I didn’t have to accept that. I was then healed and that allowed me to sit down and write plays.”
He is also Puerto Rican, so I wonder if he experienced a double whammy of prejudice. Not in Panama City, he says, but an encounter as a student while studying at the University of South Florida was the first time “my surname was used against me”.
He adds: “I was pulled over by a cop for the most anodyne traffic violation. Then, once my name came out, five police cars swarmed around my car.
The play transcends its subject – the Aids crisis of the Eighties
– to deliver a powerful argument for tolerance
I was afraid I was going to jail but I realise now that I was lucky that I could produce a college ID. That got me out of trouble.”
Lopez’s original desire was to act (“I would have been pretty crap”) before moving to New York to pursue a writing career where, he says, “there was a feeling that I had to write about the Latino experience and that my career wasn’t gaining traction because I wouldn’t write about it. There’s this desire to put people in creative boxes but I just didn’t fit.” However, the gay experience has proved to be a rich seam for Lopez. As well as commemorating the men who died of Aids in the Eighties, The Inheritance unflinchingly considers gay culture today and asks whether certain self-destructive, self-loathing behaviours are the legacy of those years when the gay community was cruelly stigmatised. One character is a rent boy who takes drugs and puts himself in danger by having sex with strangers. Lopez seems to suggest, in the play, that such behaviour is a consequence of the buried trauma of those dark years.
“Kids I have met are aware of their right to a place in the world, their right to dignity,” he says. “Yet there is also a sense of loss for something that they can’t articulate, a loss that’s due to earlier generations being in the closet and then a huge section of the community dying of Aids in the Eighties and early Nineties. If I had a goal for this play, it was to foster a conversation between generations.”
One of the surprising facts about The Inheritance is that Lopez actually based the play on EM Forster’s Howards End, which, on the face of it, has little in common with the newer work. But actually their main theme is the same: the importance that we “connect” with people who are different from us. And, of course, Forster himself was a gay man living in an intolerant society.
“[Howards End] is a wicked social commentary but it is also timeless,” says Lopez. “As Forster said in a lecture to the Working Men’s College, society changes but people stay the same. As a gay man he was unable to write freely about his feelings, but he could sit on the outside and observe.” This, Lopez concludes, is why the character of Margaret Schlegel (played by Emma Thompson in the 1992 Merchant Ivory film) is so beautifully drawn; a clever woman who is both frustrated by and acquiescent to the limitations which society imposes on her.
Thanks to the success of The Inheritance, Lopez is very busy. He is writing the book for the Broadway musical version of Some Like It Hot and has several films in development including Dr Q, about a 19-year-old Mexican who scales the border fence and becomes one of America’s most successful brain surgeons.
Currently, Lopez lives in New York with his husband of three years who works in education, although his relationship with the city is difficult.
“I much prefer London. New York is not lovable any more unless you are wealthy. It is an impossible city to navigate and the subways are terrible.”
The playwright is, of course, thrilled at the way his career has taken off. But he is also acutely aware of how his hero EM Forster’s career was circumscribed by the society of his day.
“Forster stopped writing novels after he had sex because he couldn’t write falsely any more,” says Lopez. “Society insisted that he wasn’t truthful about himself, that he must hide who he was. And so he wrote Maurice in secret [his posthumously published novel about gay love in Edwardian England] and sat on it for 56 years. He wrote a note on top of the manuscript: ‘Publishable, but worth it?’”
Forster, of course, knew that publication could ruin his reputation. If only he could have been as bracingly truthful as Matthew Lopez.