Surviving the Wastelands: Ghostly Presences and Resilient Tactics in Matthew López’s The Inheritance

Matthew López’s epic play The Inheritance (2018) has been hailed as the new Angels in America (1991/1993) but also criticized for failing to live up to its political agenda. Joining an intertextual feat of commemorating and updating E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) with the chronicle of a multi-generational New York-based set of gay men ridden by AIDS, love, guilt, and betrayal, López’s play strives to bridge the British legacy of a famous and famously closeted writer and his signature Edwardian novel Howards End and the US-American post-Stonewall era up to the first Trump presidency. While being an elegy especially for AIDS victims in many ways, the play’s transtemporal and translocal perspectives offer readings that move beyond its specific setting and into a quasi-mythic realm of probing universal issues. The article addresses questions such as: how does a feeling of nostalgia/regret for a purposeful/spoiled past correlate to the enduring vulnerability caused by the AIDS pandemic? Did the verdict of the play on the psychic continuity of the AIDS pandemic and on the wasteland of Trump’s presidency offer resilient LGBTQIA+ strategies to cope with COVID-19? How can we understand López’s treatment of death as a model – both on a personal and national level – for offering hopeful spaces of resilience and sustainable solace?