When it comes to dramas on the scale of “The Inheritance,” the question becomes not why to stage them — because they’re there, as the fellow supposedly said of Mount Everest — but how. At Round House Theatre, where Matthew López’s titanic two-parter docks seven years after its launch at London’s Young Vic, a handsome production that stretches to nearly seven hours and sprawls to encompass some two-dozen bodies offers the only workable answer for a chronicle so huge and so fraught: with endless heart.
You may have heard one thing or another about “The Inheritance,” an epic chronicle about love and struggle among gay men a generation after the AIDS crisis. That it echoes “Angels in America” in its scope and subject matter; that it takes the bones of E.M. Forster’s “Howard’s End” for its dramatic framework, complete with a beloved country house and a clash of varyingly genteel subcultures and political outlooks; that it feels like Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” in the humanity of its portrait of privileged, artsy New York City queers; even that it approaches the dimensions of Greek tragedy (much like Eugene O’Neill) as it contemplates the weight of a gruesome past on those navigating a tumultuous present. And yes, López pays homage to all those influences and more. There’s even a tiny “Rent”-related Easter egg tucked into Part 2 — a pretentious Alphabet City artist who moos provocatively at a crowd.
You may also have heard that the playwright’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. A few exchanges of brunch table dialogue feel like overly rehearsed political talking points. Not every “Game of Thrones” reference in “the most important American play of this century” has aged handsomely now that we’re a quarter of the way into it. And has anyone ever successfully dramatized the squalor and sublimity of an orgy?
Never mind. At its finest, López’s writing sparkles with an easy, well-read intelligence, peppered with pleasingly erudite references ranging from novelist Zadie Smith to memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn and all-too-resonant scenarios, such as the laconic billionaire (Robert Gant) who dryly traps a self-righteous leftist (Hunter Ringsmith) into championing a market-libertarian approach to social change.
Structurally, “The Inheritance” is both wildly ambitious and practically bulletproof. Leaps in time are accomplished with easy grace; Forster is not just a source but a character — a muse, really, who steps onstage to coach the play’s chorus of youngish gay creatives as they try to imagine dramatizing their still-unfolding lives. Together, they occasionally revise the text of “The Inheritance” midsentence, clarifying and course-correcting and insisting on airing the painful truths that one important character attempts to skate past. The conceit could make for a dreadful, self-indulgent mess. López, with the eloquent help of the director Tom Story and his confident Round House cast, makes it a delight.
That cast is anchored by the impossibly assured newcomer Jordi Bertrán Ramírez, the puppyish and charming David Gow, and the invaluable veteran Robert Sella. Gow’s character, a stand-in for Forster’s Margaret Schlegel (Emma Thompson in the Merchant Ivory film), provides the gravitational center for the swirling currents of memory, event, philosophy and ideology López asks his characters to navigate. Bertrán Ramírez — playing two young men with an uncanny physical resemblance but little else beyond literary curiosity in common — delivers portraits of such clarity and confidence that I was astonished to learn he’s only just graduated from drama school.
As for Sella: He’s among a select class of actors — others include Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, Cherry Jones and the young Leonardo DiCaprio — who through some combination of craft and conviction can generate an almost visible glow of good nature and grace. There’s an extended monologue in Part 1 of “The Inheritance” where the simple radiance of Sella’s presence seems to reach well beyond the stage to pierce each individual heart in the house.
That this exquisite moment — which I’ll never shake from memory — is only one of many heart-stoppers in “The Inheritance” is more than enough answer to the question of why theaters should take on such an outsize and risky exercise: for the good of the human spirit.
