Das Vermächtnis

A panorama of the present day on such a grand scale as Matthew Lopez’s “The inheritance” is something of a rarity in contemporary drama. Through the sum of its episodes, characters and their stories, the play reveals an atmospheric and moving portrait of the 2010s and 2020s, making it an intensely told theatrical experience for a large ensemble.
Schauspiel Leipzig intensifies this experience further, presenting the two-part play as a single, approximately seven-hour performance on one day. “The inheritance”, a truly grand ode to the present, opens the 2026/27 season “Songs of We” on the Main Stage.

An inheritance is primarily a provision in inheritance law whereby specific assets from one’s own estate can be bequeathed to a particular person, separate from the rest of the estate. One such bequest is the remote farmhouse that Walter grants to the young Eric.
The two meet rather by chance; both are alone in their own way: Walter is used to his husband Henry travelling the world for business negotiations; Eric’s boyfriend Toby has been immersed for weeks in rehearsals for the play currently being adapted from his best-selling novel “Loved Boy”. The new friendship between Walter and Eric, however, comes to an abrupt end when Walter dies suddenly. Suddenly, at least for everyone else, as he hadn’t told anyone about his cancer. But he has opened up an unknown world to Eric.

Beginning in New York in 2015, the characters’ paths cross, and two couples are at the centre of the episodes, Walter and Henry, and Eric and Toby. Many other characters complete the “inheritance”.
Through scenes and monologues, flashbacks and dream sequences, we follow them all over the years – their hopes, their longings and fears, their very different views and life plans. Success or security, the personal or the political –do these exist only separately, or can they coexist?
The characters’ life paths are shaped by individual decisions, but even more so by circumstances and conditions that came into play long before they were born. Inheritances, so to speak.

With Walter in his mid-60s and Eric in his early 30s, we also encounter two generations of a life plan that could scarcely be more different. The openness and matter-of-factness with which Eric, Toby, and their circle of friends live their lives was something Walter could never have imagined. Silence and concealment were a survival strategy for him in his youth, as a gay man in provincial America. New York was his refuge. When he met his future husband Henry there, Henry was still living with his wife and children.
Furthermore, a major turning point separates Walter’s and Eric’s generations: HIV, with the AIDS virus having claimed countless lives since the late 1980s. The panic and ostracism with which society reacted to this pandemic shaped the lives of Walter and Henry. Nevertheless, Walter made the farmhouse available to all those who were ill and looked after them, as they had nowhere else to stay or die. It was a time when love always meant fear as well. Walter and Henry survived, but the price was high.

Eric, Toby, and their friends are searching for their place in life. They believe the world is wide open to them, and they make the most of their freedom. In their world, HIV is manageable. It hasn’t disappeared, and in the worst of all cases, it remains a legacy passed down through generations that shapes a person’s life, like the life of young Leo, for instance.
Whilst political certainties are abruptly shattered by the election of President Trump in 2016, private certainties are most profoundly altered by the behaviour of each individual themselves: Eric and Toby’s life together is overshadowed by the career Toby hopes to build on the success of the theatre. His greatest adversary in this is himself, whilst Henry begins to develop an interest in Eric. And standing between them all is the young Leo, connected to several of them in unexpected ways. The novel he will eventually write about his life is titled “The Inheritance”.

Winner of the 2021 Tony Award for Best Broadway Drama, “The Inheritance” unfolds in its two parts a social panorama that extends far beyond the time it depicts.Those experiences of collective vulnerability also prove to be a legacy for us all, when differences in status, desire, or life plans dissolve in times of illness, fear, or loss. And yet the play never gives up. It believes that people can connect, that care is possible, that community is possible. “The Inheritance” reminds us that community is not proven through self-image, but through how we deal with our own vulnerability. We all live within a legacy. We are not the first. And we will not be the last.

With this production, Enrico Lübbe opens the final season of his directorship at Schauspiel Leipzig. The creative team includes set designer Katrin Nottrodt, who returns to Schauspiel Leipzig following “Luna Luna”, as well as costume designer Sabine Blickenstorfer and Bert Wrede for the music – both of whom most recently worked on Shakespeare’s “Richard III”.