From Boston: The Inheritance Hands Gay History Over to Regional Theater, Triumphantly

When a renowned play makes its way into the world—I don’t mean authorized national tours, but rather homegrown regional restagings—what audiences will encounter becomes something of a crapshoot. Often it’s a stiff, would-be carbon-copy of a Broadway or West End original, or it’s hobbled by an outlandish concept from some self-styled visionary. With luck, however, patrons are rewarded with the ideal: a well-thought-through take on the script that allows for a new space and local tastes and talent, while reflecting respect for authorial intent.

The SpeakEasy Stage Co. production of The Inheritance, the first stateside since the New York engagement, achieves that “golden mean.” Still 6½ hours in two parts, still an ambitious, intergenerational story with an enormous cast, Matthew López’s contemporary gloss on Howards End has been retrofitted, by director Paul Daigneault, to intimate theater scale. Peopled with some of the strongest actors Boston has to offer, its authoritative delivery offers new insights along with familiar emotional impact. The 2019 Olivier and 2020 Tony Awards for Best Play were no fluke, as this production attests.

The seating capacity is 222 (as opposed to 1,058 at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore), and the production has been shaped accordingly. Daigneault follows original director Stephen Daldry’s lead in having his cast sit, when offstage, on the floor around a black-slab acting area, sometimes covered with a white groundcloth. But since the slab is a deep three-quarter thrust, each spectator is between six and 16 feet away from it, bringing increased awareness of the ensemble’s reactions to the onstage action.

We are one with them, in other words, even as the proximity encourages the onstage (on-slab?) performers to eschew stagy delivery and make, instead, plain emotional sense. With entrances and exits occurring in our midst at all four corners, this is about as immersive an Inheritance as one is going to get. Short, that is, of allowing random audience members to literally join in with Eric (Eddie Shields, a splendidly sensitive soul), Toby Darling (Jared Reinfeldt, as seductive as the narcissistic role requires), and the rest of their Manhattan coterie as they learn the lessons of the past century of gay life, and how the future must be shaped by them.

The play has been cast on the young side, which helps to establish the through-line of change and growth that 6½ hours of play, and 5+ years of action, demand. I particularly appreciated Mishka Yarovoy’s assured, complementary turns as aspiring actor Adam—Eric and Toby’s obscure object of desire—and troubled rentboy Leo, whose resemblance to Adam almost destroys him. Their eventual meeting is a one-man tour de force that Yarovoy pulls off effortlessly.

But the older generation is well represented here as well, beginning with Mark H. Dold, who understudied the role of E.M. Forster in New York and here anchors the play in humor and poignancy. Dennis Trainor Jr. excels in the complex role of the billionaire whose emergence from the closet has left him with severe collateral damage, and Paula Plum—maybe the Boston area’s most revered performer, and rightly so—superbly captures an AIDS mother with understated grief.

This production should reassure Mr. López, and anyone else who esteems this remarkable work, that handing it along to other artists in other venues need not diminish it. It can shine as brightly, if not brighter.