DAS VERMÄCHTNIS (THE INHERITANCE) – PART 1
By Matthew Lopez.
German language premiere
Premiere 30. January 2022
Residenztheater
3 Hours 10 Minutes
1 Break
Recommended for ages 16 and above

Duration of production

Part 1: about 3 hours, 10 minutes (including one break)

Long break: about 50 minutes

Part 2: about 3 hours, 15 minutes (including one break)

The production is shown in two parts: part 1 and part 2

 


Part 1 and Part 2 are shown both as a double performance and individually on consecutive days.

For both performances you can buy tickets individually or in a package.

Listen to the stage music on Spotify!

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s. Walter’s stories repeatedly mention a picturesque old house in the country.

Eric cannot suspect the role that this place played for Walter and his partner Henry Wilcox. In the autumn of 2016 Eric’s friends incredulously follow Hillary Clinton’s election defeat to the Republican Donald Trump. America is changing. Suddenly the freedoms that previous generations of activists had fought for can no longer be taken for granted. Eric is forced to ask who he is and who he wants to be.

In his multi-award-winning play «The Inheritance», the internationally acclaimed playwright Matthew Lopez has created a masterpiece of storytelling: a stage epic in two parts, a social and relationship drama with a wealth of characters, a portrait of manners that is both comic and tragic. It takes motifs from E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel «Howards End» and transposes them to the New York of the 2010s, telling the moving story of an elective family and gay community that is faced with the question of whether it is prepared to accept the inheritance of recent history. Lopez’s play bows before the fate of the past and constructs a utopian image of collective responsibility and mutual respect. Here it stands in the tradition of Tony Kushner’s «Angels in America», that can also be seen at the Residenztheater this season.

DIGITAL BOOKSHELF

IN COLLABORATION WITH BÜCHER LENTNER

Recommended reading from our dramaturgs

 

«Wiedersehen in Howards End»

von E. M. Forster

Aus dem Englischen von Egon Pöllinger.

(Kartoniert. S. Fischer Verlag, 2005)


«Grundlagen eines kritischen Denkens»

von Didier Eribon

Aus dem Französischen von Oliver Precht.

Darin besonders das Kapitel: «Heimgesuchtes Leben. Subjektivität, Sexualität, Kreativität»

(Kartoniert. Verlag Turia + Kant, 2018)


«Betrachtungen zur Schwulenfrage»

von Didier Eribon

Aus dem Französischen von Achim Russer und Bernd Schwibs.

(Gebunden. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019)


«Dem Freund, der mir das Leben nicht gerettet hat»

von Hervé Guibert

Aus dem Französischen von Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel.

(Gebunden. August Verlag, 2021)


 

English-speaking:

 

«When We Rise. My Life in the Movement»

von Cleve Jones

(E-Book. Constable, 2017)


«Out of the Shadows. Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives»

von Walt Odets

(E-Book. Allen Lane, 2019)

Trailer

Artistic Direction

Direction und Stage Design Philipp Stölzl
Costume Design Kathi Maurer
Composition Ingo Ludwig Frenzel
Lighting Gerrit Jurda
Associate Stage Design Franziska Harm
Dramaturgy Ewald Palmetshofer