Matthew López’s <i>The Inheritance</i> : Putting Ambitious and Innovative Conservative Ideas about Homosexuality on Stage

Abstract Matthew López’s widely acclaimed play The Inheritance (2018) is a monumental theatre event that is profoundly intertextual, connected to the corpus of 1980 s AIDS plays, to E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910), and his homosexual coming-of-age novel Maurice (1971). The play draws together homosexual men from three different generations to put on stage an intergenerational dialogue about homosexuality, gay metropolitan cultures, practices, and memories. Written as two three-and-a-half-hour parts, the durational marathon play implies hours of exposure and involvement, which, in turn, allow for nuance and variation: while The Inheritance is ambitious and original, it falls short of realising its full critical and utopian potential. The narrow focus on white, privileged, affluent, cisgender, able-bodied homosexual men runs the risk of promoting a socially homogenous and economically privileged version of gay life. Upholding bourgeois norms of domesticity, characterised by ideals of married life, family, home, and privacy, the play presents innovative conservative ideas about homosexuality, in line with Lisa Duggan’s concept of homonormativity. Still, The Inheritance explores larger networks and legacies of support, care, and guidance within and across generations of homosexual men.