The Inheritance is one of the most essential plays of the past decade — and it has arrived in Toronto

Queeries is a column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. 

Towards the end of The Inheritance, the character Eric Glass asks a question that is at the heart of the monumental play he exists in: "What do I owe to the generations of gay men who come before and after me?"

It's a question not enough of us gay men ask of ourselves, though The Inheritance certainly has been doing its part to change that. Written by Matthew Lopez, the play takes a deep dive into what it means to be a gay man, and asks its audiences to do the same. It also asks them for their undivided attention like few things dare to these days: over 2 parts, it runs a staggering 6 and a half hours (with intermissions, of course). But as someone who has watched the entire thing in one day, I can assure you that the internal reckoning The Inheritance ultimately offers is well worth this uncommon journey for your patience (and honestly: it goes by way faster than you'd think).

That journey is also essentially a reimagining of E.M. Forster's book Howards End as a portrait of a group of gay men in present-day New York City. As these characters explore relationships across age and social class, the play delves into how much the devastating initial years of the AIDS crisis still looms over them decades later. 

It was first staged at the Young Vic in London, England in 2018 before transferring to Broadway and becoming a Tony Award-winning sensation a year later. Now, it's in the midst of making its highly anticipated Canadian debut at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto. 

At the helm of the Toronto production is a titan of Canadian queer theatre, Brendan Healy. Currently the Artistic Director at Canadian Stage (the company putting on this production), Healy was previously the Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times, the largest and longest-running queer theatre company in the world.

Healy fell in love with The Inheritance the first time he read it as a script, and said that when the possibility of directing a Toronto staging came along, he jumped at it.

"First of all, our gay stories often tend to be very, generationally segregated, much like the community itself," he says. "So that's a feature of the play that I love. All generations of gay men really feel seen inside the play. Whether you're a survivor of the AIDS crisis, whether you're someone like myself, who kind of came of age as the crisis was subsiding, or whether you're like a younger person who really had no real direct link to the crisis, your experience is told and validated and represented through the story. And that's so rare in gay theater."

What was also very appealing to Healy was the idea of assembling a cast of some of Canada's greatest queer theatre actors, which in this case would include Qasim Khan, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Antoine Yared, Salvatore Antonio and the legend that is Daniel MacIvor.

"They're amazing," Healy says. "I really wanted to make sure that the group assembled felt representative of what the community looks like in Toronto. And I also wanted to work with really nice people. It's a long show, it's an intense process and it's an emotional show. So I just wanted to put together a group of people who I felt would create beautiful energy. And that's definitely what's happening."

What's also happening is a bit of a meta narrative within that casting.

"Daniel MacIvor is kind of a real pioneer in gay theater in Toronto, which adds another layer to the story," Healy says. "And then there's someone like Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, who is really the future of queer theater in our country. So there's just a nice interplay between the two of them." 

Healy says the kind of "gay heritage" that The Inheritance presents is really something that we as a community are just starting to really consider.

"The play goes right to the heart of that, asking what is our shared heritage," he says. "And then also with that is the question of what is our responsibility to one another as gay men, across generations and across identities? What do we owe each other? It's an idea that's still kind of percolating in the community, and we're trying to understand and define it."

I can personally attest that a good start for your own journey in coming to understand and define those ideas is going and seeing The Inheritance, which runs through April 14th at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto.