‘I was barricading myself with alcohol’: Matthew López on the play that was too scary to stage

He has done frothy romcoms and weighty epics such as Tony-winning The Inheritance. Now the US playwright is revisiting the drink-fuelled drama that terrified him as he wrote it

In 2008, the playwright Matthew López had a bright idea: to examine the lives of gay male New Yorkers one generation after the advent of Aids by using Howards End as the scaffolding with which to build a new drama. Perhaps EM Forster himself could even be a character wandering through it. A decade later, the two-part, six-hour-plus epic The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic in London before transferring to Broadway, vacuuming up prizes along the way including a Tony for best play, which made López the first Latiné writer (his preferred non-gendered term for people of Latin American heritage) to win that award. The consensus was that he had written the greatest theatrical account of gay life since Angels in America.

When the concept of The Inheritance first occurred to him, however, López wasn’t equipped to write it. He had already had a play produced: The Whipping Man, set at the end of the American civil war. Any doubts he harboured about his talent had been partly assuaged by Terrence McNally (playwright of Love! Valour! Compassion!), who read one of his early plays and declared: “You’re a writer.” But López was struggling with alcoholism in 2008, and was still more than a year shy of getting sober. The Inheritance would have to wait. “I knew I wasn’t ready,” he says. “So I wrote Reverberation instead. It’s the last thing I wrote drinking. My last ‘using’ play, so to speak.”

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