Zoetic Stage’s upcoming production, “The Inheritance Part 1,” is a play set in contemporary New York City that explores love, loss, and legacy across three generations of gay men coming to terms with the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.
BACKGROUND
“The Inheritance Part 1” is the first half of Matthew Lopez’s reimagining of E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel, “Howards End.” The Broadway production, which opened in 2019 and closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic, won four Tony Awards, including Best Play, with Lopez making history as the first Latino playwright to win that award.
( Justin Namon)
Michael McKeever and Tom Wahl
“Part 1 focuses on a romantic relationship between two men who ultimately wind up getting engaged,” said Stuart Meltzer, director of the Zoetic Stage production. “And they go through the journey of going down the paths of what they perceived to be their version of an American Dream. It’s really important that this play starts at a time when gay marriage becomes legal. And it’s really important that the generations before that are generations that survived the AIDS crisis. And it's really important that the generations, the young men now, be educated and/or know that, and they live a life where they can take, for example, a PrEP pill, and the risk of transmission of HIV is miraculously different. So, the generations of the hard work of the gay men prior are what is passed through really in real time in this story.”
Lopez also wrote “The Inheritance Part 2,” and while both parts were meant to be seen in tandem, Meltzer said the first part stands on its own as a fully realized play.
“What people talk about is this ending,” said Meltzer. “It is so powerful, so spiritual, so holy. It is a magnificent moment that takes a village to put together quickly. People get it after seeing “The Inheritance Part 1.”
(Michael Kushner)
Alex Weisman
Both plays ran back-to-back in London and on Broadway, treating audiences to a seven-hour theatrical experience. According to Meltzer, Zoetic is one of a few companies licensed to produce Part 1 on its own.
“Hopefully we’ll get a chance to produce Part 2 next year, but both plays stand on their own, very much like, ‘Millennium Approaches’ and ‘Perestroika,’” Meltzer said, referring to the two parts of Tony Kushner’s epic play, “Angels in America.”
HEIRS TO TRAUMA
Much like “Angels in America,” “The Inheritance Part 1” deals with the tragedy of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the aftermath of losing so many people to a ravaging, misunderstood disease. And although medical research has developed drugs that have kept those with HIV surviving and thriving for decades, and new medications offer a preventative option, AIDS cases are on the rise. According to the Center for Disease Control, Florida ranks as one of the top four states in the country for new HIV diagnoses, with Miami-Dade being the Florida county with the most cases, followed closely by Broward County. Within Miami-Dade, hotspots for infection are Allapattah, Brownsville, and West Little River. Black and Hispanic men are the two groups with the most new infections.
( Justin Namon)
Sam Lantz
“There's so much thematically about the AIDS crisis, and everything that happened during then and the trauma that was passed down. There's so much in that history,” said Randall Swinton, who plays Tristan in “The Inheritance Part 1.”
Swinton recalled a show he did at Island City Stage in Wilton Manors in 2022, called “One in Two.”
“The reason it's called ‘One in Two’ is because statistically, around 2012 or 2016, they did a study and one in every two gay Black men were contracted with the HIV virus,” Swinton said. “Now, I think it's maybe one in every four or one in every five, so it's gotten better. For a long time, Miami was the number one spot in all of the United States of America where new cases of HIV were most prevalent, so now we're doing this show in Miami, in an area where most gay Black men can relate to, or have experienced that trauma. Inheritance is the idea of something being passed down. If you don’t learn from history, you repeat it.”
( Justin Namon)
Angel Dominguez
But Swinton believes that even those audiences largely unaffected by AIDS can relate to “The Inheritance Part 1.”
“Younger audience members are probably going to come see this show and maybe they didn't experience that specific trauma, but maybe they can remember the trauma of quarantining during Covid and what it was like when all of those bodies started to drop and feeling the fear of not understanding what was going on,” said Swinton. “There's so much relatable, even if it's not the exact.”
Imran Hylton, who plays Jason 2 – there are two characters named Jason – in “The Inheritance Part 1,” said that too many young people now don’t know as much as they should about the AIDS crisis.
“It's very, very, very strange, completely strange, and there are some situations where I've met a couple people recently – I want to say a couple years back – that they kind of fetishized this idea of getting the disease,” said Hylton. “Then when you talk to them, they’re like, it’s because you have this drug and you have this to maintain it. I think it's such a privilege for someone to even say things like (that). It's insane.
(Michael Kushner)
Anthony Michael Martinez and Alex Weisman
“The fact that we can say that we have things now, like things like PrEP to prevent the disease, it's very interesting to me that people are saying that they're looking back for this disease that kills so many people that in and of itself is a luxury to even say because we've come so far in terms of what we've done to control this unfortunate illness,” said Hylton.
THE LEGACY OF GAY CULTURE
“The Inheritance Part 1” explores the legacy of gay culture, and what modern gay men owe their gay forebears who fought for the rights they have today, which raises questions about how much young gay people now understand the history of the gay rights movements and the people who fought so they can have the rights they do today.
Swinton said that Zoetic Stage immersed its cast and crew in gay history by turning their rehearsal space into an exhibition of gay culture.
( Justin Namon)
Imran Hylton
“There are so many pictures of gay playwrights and gay icons and pivotal moments in gay history in music and literature and art and stories just posted all over the walls for us,” said Swinton. “And as we're going through these pictures, we were looking at the gay icon wall at the time, and I was mentioning Princess Diana, and how there was a moment in history where she was being recorded shaking hands of these individuals and there was a sick individual, who had HIV. And it was a handshake that shook the world, because she sees this person. She knows his history at the fear-mongering that all the world was doing at the time, and for all of the public to see someone like Princess Diana shake the hand of someone who was sick. I thought it was like it cracked a barrier for people.”
Hylton, who teaches musical theater at New World School of the Arts in Miami, believes that young people don’t know as much gay history as they should.
(Justin Namon)
Randall Swinton
“I think the young people say they do, but they don't know what they're saying, that they respect it and stuff,” said Hylton. “They don't know it. They really don't. I mean, even reading this play – and I’m young, in my late 20s – but there were some references and some things in this play that I had to look up. But I teach high schoolers, and there are some high schoolers who identify within the gay community, and I'll say things to them, and they will have no idea. Absolutely no idea, which is, in a weird way. You want people of the LGBT community to just live and exist and to be, quote unquote, normal. But for me, as a Black person as well, I definitely know the history that I come from. I don't let it necessarily define who I am as a person, but it's very important to know why I'm able to live this life that I have now.”
IF YOU GO
“The Inheritance Part 1”
Zoetic Stage, January 5-25
The Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd.