Das Vermächtnis (The Inheritance) – Part 1

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.