‘The Inheritance’: Theater Review

But even when the playwright’s hand becomes too visible, the talk too diffuse and the monologues a little too much like showpieces, the depth of feeling in Lopez’s drama is frequently ravishing and the writing utterly gorgeous. The grounding humanism has its roots in Forster, but the humor, empathy and insightful observation of contemporary gay Manhattanites in their 20s and 30s — a generation that came out when the devastating plague years of the AIDS crisis already were being archived away as history — are very much Lopez’s own.

The play is both wonderfully funny and exquisitely poignant, but its real achievement is the deft hand with which it connects multiple generations of gay men, underscoring the importance of sharing stories and keeping the past alive. That binding tissue forms a dialogue between today’s young gay men — who have embraced their sexual identities during an era of gay marriage and wide cultural representation, when HIV has become a more treatable illness — with older men who fought for gay rights and endured the scourge of AIDS. Or didn’t.