Postcard #2 from NYC 

The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez/Stephen Daldry, Ethel Barrymore Theatre

The Inheritance is a two-part, seven-hour adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, set in contemporary New York. It deals with three generations of gay men in the wake of the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s – before the advent of anti-retroviral and pre-exposure medication reduced the impact of the disease, at least in the developed world – in the context of the current crisis of neo-liberalism and the rise of Donald Trump. 

The play was originally produced at The Young Vic in London in 2018 before transferring to the West End and now Broadway. New York playwright Matthew Lopez developed the play in collaboration with British director Stephen Daldry (An Inspector Calls, Billy Elliot, The Hours, The Crown) and an American-British cast of thirteen, the five leading actors remaining consistent from London to New York, along with the stunningly simple set and costume design by Bob Crowley. The set essentially consists of a white box with a central dais that can be raised or lowered, on which the ensemble cast lounge around languidly at the start of the show like students waiting for an acting or writing class to begin; they then gather around the dais to sit and watch or comment on the action as it unfolds. There is virtually no furniture, the actors mostly wear simple clothes in subdued colours, and most have bare feet throughout the show.

The relationship between a theatrical adaptation and a novelistic original resembles the biological phenomenon of homology (as opposed to analogy), in which the body parts of two different species share a similar structure because of their origin rather than function (the classic example being the relationship between arms and wings). In this case plot, characters and themes (most obviously, the concept of inheritance itself, which is a key motif and plot-device in Howard’s End) are transposed (sometimes in a disguised, divided, doubled or ‘queered’ form) from one narrative setting and artistic medium to another. 

The process of adaptation itself is also thematized by the incorporation of Forster (animated with spritely energy by British actor Paul Hilton) as a kind of artistic and personal mentor-figure called ‘Morgan’ (as Forster was known by his intimate friends), who interacts with the rest of the cast, encourages them to tell their stories and assists with the unfolding of the play. The other characters also refer to Howard’s End and other novels – including Forster’s only overtly gay novel, Maurice, which was withheld from publication until after his death. 

In fact, even the off-stage collaboration between playwright, director and actors is replicated onstage by the homologous relationship between Forster and the ensemble, who at least initially appear to be more or less improvising the action and storytelling, if not the actual story itself, as they go along. This is especially marked in the use of collective and self-narration in the ‘omniscient’ third person for ironic effect to introduce characters and plot-points and to report on the characters’ thoughts and feelings. There are also some early ‘improvised’ sex-scenes using acting warm-up exercises, in a hilarious Brechtian ‘baring of the device’. All of this generates an exhilarating sense of performative lightness and freedom. The use of narration in particular recalls the authorial voice employed by Forster that continually interrupts and comments on the action in the novel.

In this regard one could also point beyond Forster and Howard’s End to Jane Austen, and in particular Sense and Sensibility – a similarly ironic novel about love, marriage, money, property, inheritance and social class. The precursor novel also features two sisters with contrasting personalities, one (in her own eyes at least) more ‘sensible’, the other more given to romantic or idealistic flights of fancy (the ‘sensible’ older sisters, Margaret Schlegel and Elinor Dashwood, are memorably played by the divine Emma Thompson in the film versions of both novels). 

Lopez makes his boldest move by recasting the Schlegel sisters of Howard’s End as a gay male couple: conscientious liberal activist lawyer Eric (a deeply felt and anchored central performance by London-based American actor Kyle Soller) and narcissistic aspiring playwright Toby (a witty, mercurial and ultimately anguished Andrew Burnap), who are happily but precariously ensconced in a coveted rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side that once belonged to Eric’s Jewish refugee grandmother (paralleling the Schlegel’s similarly provisional occupancy of their father’s flat in central London). Meanwhile Forster’s pragmatic and wealthy industrialist Henry Wilcox and his more ethereal and intuitive wife Ruth are transformed into a billionaire property developer teasingly also named Henry Wilcox (and played with ebullient bluster by John Benjamin Hickey) and his life-partner Walter (also played by the versatile Hilton with touching fragility) who share an apartment in the same building. They also own a rural retreat in upstate New York, echoing the country house in Hertfordshire (itself a fictionalised version of Forster’s own childhood home at Rooks Nest) that gives its title to Howard’s End. (The 'reveal' of this house at the end of Part One, and again in the final Act of Part Two, is the only significant 'prop' in the show.)

What follows is an ingenuous set of variations on the novel which are no less brilliant, moving and salutary for being recognizable, at least to those who’ve read it (or seen the film); for those who haven’t there are complementary pleasures in terms of the plot-twists and emotional vicissitudes. Lopez and Daldry add a few twists of their own, most memorably at the end of Part One in a devastating coup de théâtre I won’t reveal, except to say that it expands the frame of the play and production (as well as the novel) in a way that had me sobbing along with most of the audience, and took me much of the next two hours’ break to recover from.

After this moment of transcendence, Part Two didn’t quite live up to the promise of Part One. Instead, the play seemed to digress from itself as well as its novel-source in form, content and spirit. The figure of Forster was literally banished from the stage, while the ensemble of other actors also became increasingly absent or marginal. Instead the story of Toby (now separated from Eric) took over, in an increasingly melodramatic spiral of self-destruction and protracted revelations about his past. The use of long backstory monologues, which had been effective earlier in the play, also struggled to hold my attention six hours later, especially when introducing new plot-points, characters and even actors, notwithstanding fine performances from Burnap as the increasingly off-the-rails Toby and Lois Smith as Margaret – the only female character or actor in the show, unfortunately tasked with a rather generic, sentimental and dramatically redundant story about a formerly homophobic mother who becomes a carer for gay men dying of AIDS. 

In short, I felt we’d shifted from the late-romantic irony of Forster to the melodrama of Tennessee Williams or Douglas Sirk, but without the former’s tortured brilliance of language, characterization and psychology, or the latter’s pointed use of Hollywood conventions for the purposes of social critique. Meanwhile the political diatribes and debates about Trump, the contradictions of neoliberalism and the mainstream assimilation of gay culture were enjoyable enough but sometimes felt more like watching a bourgeois domestic satire by Bernard Shaw or even (horribile dictu) middle-period David Williamson. The previously exquisite minimalism of Jon Clark's lighting and Paul Arditti and Christopher Reid's sound design also began to crank up and decorate or underscore scenes and speeches, and a similar element of theatricality crept into some of the lead performances.

As the result Toby’s story became pure soap opera, driven by the mechanics of plot rather than the dynamics of character or larger social forces. Here the most tenuous narrative thread for me was that involving the lookalike roles of parvenu actor Adam and desperate rent-boy Leo (respectively played with consummate charm and touching pathos by Samuel H. Levine) as the successive objects of Toby’s narcissistic obsession. The theme of ‘the double’ is of course another melodramatic convention straight out of the Gothic novel by way of Vertigo, but here it was introduced without any stylistic sense of psychological disintegration or nightmare. Indeed I couldn’t help feeling that Toby’s story might have been better served if Adam and Leo had been combined into a single character with a more complex and satisfying dramatic arc. Admittedly the corresponding figures in Howard’s End of the aspirational clerk Leonard Bast and his ‘fallen’ co-dependent partner Jackie are also the weakest link in the novel’s plot and its attempt at a comprehensive portrait of Edwardian class society. Indeed the clumsily contrived way Leonard is summarily dispatched in the novel mirrors Toby’s dramatically unconvincing end (no spoilers here, as his death is flagged throughout the play) when faced with the opportunity to finally confront his past. Personally I’d rather have seen him exercise his freedom of choice ‘to live’ (as the closing words of the play exhort us to do) rather than his fate being seemingly pre-determined by childhood trauma and parental role modelling.

In saying this, I’m not necessarily asking for a conventional happy ending. Certainly the novel closes with Margaret reconciled with her sister and husband, and living with them and Helen’s infant son at Howard’s End. Nevertheless the scene is hardly one of domestic bliss or achieved grace. Though Henry’s hypocrisy is forgiven, he is an emotionally broken man, and there’s a sense that their connection with the local countryside and community is similarly fragile. The nostalgic glow of an Edwardian sunset lingers over the novel’s closing pages, with the shadow of encroaching suburbanization – not to mention global slaughter on an industrial scale – looming on the horizon. In this context the novel’s famous injunction to ‘only connect’ feels almost plaintive. Connect with what, or whom, and for how long? The Inheritance ends with an even more tenuous ménage – Eric, his now-ex-husband Henry, and Toby’s (and Henry’s) former hired lover Leo – living on (and eventually dying of old age) in a kind of pastoral idyll at the house in upstate New York that Walter had turned into a hospice for men dying of AIDS. The medical and social catastrophe of the epidemic lies behind them, as well as the successive ravages of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism – and it is implied that they will weather the storm of Trumpism as well. 

This is the point at which the play perhaps more than the novel seems to take refuge in sentimentality, and the privileged status of the main characters (with the exception of Leo and the ups and downs of Toby’s childhood) begins to limit their perspective as well as stretching our capacity to care. As my companion at the performance commented afterwards, why not turn their rural retreat into a halfway house for LGBTQ homeless youth, or others plagued by discrimination and disadvantage? It’s worth noting in this regard that in the US the cost of PrEP treatment for HIV infection is around $US 20,000 per year, which effectively restricts its use to those who can afford to pay for it, because of big pharma monopolies and political-administrative indifference to communities most at risk (not to mention the rest of the underdeveloped world).

In a similar vein I couldn’t help wondering why Lopez (who himself has Puerto Rican heritage) and Daldry envisaged and cast all its main characters as white, limiting cultural diversity to only a few other members of the ensemble in supporting roles. Forster (like Chekhov) was writing about the vanishing world he knew, socially and culturally, but this is hardly the case for the playwright and director of The Inheritance, or its audience. A more intersectional perspective would extend a chain of equivalence back to the story of Eric’s Jewish grandmother as well as forward to other forms of injustice, and allow for a more complex legacy of oppression as well as privilege. 

This notion of equivalence (rather than identity) is also another way of thinking about adaptation, because it recognises similarity while also acknowledging difference. In the case of The Inheritance the notion of an inherited past (together with its traumas and gaps, its acts of denial and gaping wounds) underlies the play’s title, and implicitly gives it a different purview from Howard’s End. In fact, even in the novel, the eponymous house was always more than a house: it was a symbol of connection, between kindred souls, and within the soul, between sense and sensibility – or as Forster rephrases this in his 'adaptation' of Austen, between 'prose' and 'passion'.  

What does it mean, Eric movingly asks at one point in the play, to be gay now, today? Who are we – whoever ‘we’ are – if we can't connect with our history, in the form of a shared experience, knowledge, culture or sense of community, transmitted from one generation to the next? In this regard the most potent gift of The Inheritance may be its evocation of spiritual and artistic mentorship, not only between generations, but also across the river of time and forgetfulness that separates the living and the dead. Perhaps here the phrase ‘only connect’ acquires its greatest resonance.

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The Inheritance opened on Broadway at The Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 17 November, 2019.

Postcard from New York

Akhnaten, Philip Glass, Metropolitan Opera, New York 

Akhnaten is the third of Philip Glass’s early trilogy of portrait-operas, following Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha (the Sanskrit word for Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence). Where the previous two works focus on revolutionary figures and movements in twentieth-century science and politics, the third deals with an ancient and less well-known episode in the history of religion. 

Akhnaten (or Akhenaten as his name is usually spelled in English) was an Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom Pharaoh who abolished traditional Egyptian polytheism in favour of the exclusive worship of the sun-god Aten. He also challenged the authority of the priesthood and moved the centre of power and worship from Thebes to the newly built capital city of Akhetaten (now Amarna). 

The period of his reign was also marked by more fluid and naturalistic or distorted forms of artistic representation, especially regarding the Pharaoh and his family. In religious art conversely there was a move away from animal, human or hybrid images of the various deities towards the increasingly abstract symbol of the sun’s disk and rays; eventually even this image was forbidden, and the name of the Aten was spelled phonetically rather than using hieroglyphs.

Images of Akhenaten display bizarre and even androgynous features, which may or may not have been anatomically accurate. Possibly they were stylized or represented symbolic aspects of the god Aten, who was called the ‘mother and father’ of creation; in his famous ‘Great Hymn to the Aten’ (which strikingly resembles Psalm 104), Akhenaten refers to himself as ‘thine only son’. He appears to have shared royal status to an unusual degree with his famous queen Nefertiti, and there is speculation that he also shared power and had sex with his daughters as well as his sister (with whom he fathered his successor the briefly reigning child-king Tutankhamen) and even his mother Queen Tiye.

The Russian polymath and pseudo-scientist Velikovsky (with whom Glass originally intended to collaborate on the libretto) claimed that Akhenaten was the origin of the legend of Oedipus; and the late, great Dorothy Porter made him the queer, androgynous, incestuous and ultimately monomaniacal anti-hero of her eponymous verse novel Akhenaten. However a more significant influence on the composer was Freud, who argued in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian follower of Akhenaten fleeing his homeland after the latter’s death with a band of fellow renegades, who eventually turned on their leader and killed him before founding Judaic monotheism out of guilt (a theory that possibly says less about Akhenaten, Moses or monotheism than it does about Freud himself). 

For whatever reasons (most likely political and economic) the Atenist revolution in religion, art, politics and (possibly) morality was short-lived, at least in Ancient Egypt, though arguably it merely lay dormant until its next historical incarnation. Subsequent generations of Egyptian rulers erased all record of what was regarded as an aberration. The power of the traditional priesthood was restored, the names of Akhenaten and his immediate successors were removed from the official list of Pharaohs, the city of Akhetaten was abandoned, and the temples consecrated to Aten were destroyed.

Glass makes the story of Akhenaten a kind of Passion Play, as the title character is not so much the tragic author of his own downfall as the martyr-victim of external forces that destroy him: the priesthood, the military, and the threat of Hittite invasions. However he also represents a possible figure of hope or salvation in the future – or at least in the symbolic afterlife of religion and art. So at the end of the opera the Narrator/Scribe – a speaking role who in this production is also the ghost of Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III (a vocally and physically commanding performance by bass-baritone Zachary James) – becomes a present-day tour guide describing the ruins at Amarna (using words from a Fodor’s travel book); meanwhile the ghosts of Akhnaten (counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo), Nefertiti (mezzo J’Nai Bridges) and the Queen Mother Tye (Icelandic soprano Dísella Lárunsdottir) appear and sing wordlessly as the music from the opening Prelude to Act 1 is reprised. One is reminded of the importance of the afterlife and the transmigration of souls in Ancient Egyptian religion; perhaps the sun-god Aten is to be reborn as Yahweh, his son-king Akhenaten as a Messianic saviour, and even the city of Akhetaten as the New Jerusalem – or in more secular terms, a horizon of freedom and peace on earth (though in historical fact the Atenist revolution seems to have degenerated like all such programs into intolerance and tyranny).

The score and orchestration as well as the libretto and dramaturgical structure of Akhenaten are in some respects more conventional than Einstein or Satyagraha. The orchestra more or less resembles that for a typical nineteenth century romantic opera, with the addition of tubular bells and the notable absence of violins, which gives the overall sound a darker and more melancholy colour (Glass allegedly did this because of the reduced size of the orchestra pit at the Stuttgart Opera due to renovations when the work was first performed there in 1984). The composer’s signature use of relentless ostinatos –repeatedly rising and falling arpeggios, scales and two-note oscillations – and almost imperceptible shifts in tempo, time-signature or even key-signature (most of the opera is in A minor) are made more palatable by the use of soaring melodies, especially in Act 2 for the tender love duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti (which recalls the divinely erotic love poetry of the Hebrew Song of Solomon), and then later for Akhnaten’s ardent Hymn to the Sun. The last is a long solo aria which Glass specifies is to be sung in the language of the audience (most of the rest of the libretto is in Ancient Egyptian or Akkadian); it is then recapitulated by an offstage chorus, this time using the Hebrew words of Psalm 104.

The opera is thus something of a glorious mishmash (or perhaps more appropriately midrash, or Jewish scriptural commentary) in terms of musical, dramatic and theological material. British director and long-time Glass collaborator Phelim McDermott (who will be performing in his production of The Tao of Glass for Perth Festival in March 2020) previously directed Satyagraha for the English National Opera as a co-production with the Met and his theatre company Improbable in 2007–8; Akhnaten is a similar co-pro with LA Opera and Improbable which debuted at the ENO in 2016, and is the first production of the opera to be seen at the Met. 

McDermott’s staging adds another layer of dramaturgical ‘commentary’ to the score and libretto, which gives the whole work an added sense of coherence and cumulative impact. This involves the indeed improbable but nonetheless inspired use of juggling (suggested by early depictions of juggling in Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings) more or less continuously throughout the show, with twelve onstage jugglers (choreographed by Sean Gandini) in hooded and speckled Lycra bodysuits, sometimes augmented by members of the chorus and even the Narrator/Scribe, making increasingly complex patterns of movement with an escalating series of more and more numerous juggling balls in various shapes and sizes. The effect is to give a kind of visual counterpoint to the rising and falling, intricately woven and incrementally changing patterns of the score, as well as adding a heightened level of tension and focus to the music and its flawless realisation by the orchestra and singers. You really have to hear Glass performed live to appreciate the thrill of this as well as its hypnotic power – here allowed to unfold with unusual sensitivity and flexibility by the Met Opera Orchestra under the baton of Glass specialist Karen Kamensek. 

Stylized movement in extreme slow motion by the singers is also carefully choreographed, and gives the impression of hieratic figures in Ancient Egyptian art slowly coming to life and (especially in the case of Akhnaten and Nefertiti) becoming free-flowing bodies in three-dimensional space. In a New York Times interview McDermott says he used Michael Chekhov’s elemental ‘movement-qualities’ to achieve this; whatever the case, the result is an unusually liberated physicality on the part of the singers. 

Kevin Pollard’s hybrid costumes add another layer of visual complexity by referring both to Ancient Egypt and to the era of nineteenth-century European archaeology when the remains of Akhenaten and his city were uncovered. In particular the roles of Nefertiti’s father and imperial advisor Aye (bass Richard Bernstein), the High Priest of the former reigning god Amon (tenor Aaron Blake) and the military general and future Pharoah Horemhab (baritone Will Liverman) are all costumed in a way that suggests that the nature of power behind the scenes has changed little in the intervening centuries. Aye is dressed in a Victorian frock-coat and top hat (surmounted by a voodoo-like skull) like a sinister and manipulative business tycoon, and Horemhab wears a khaki jacket and culottes like an army officer poised to stage a military coup. 

In contrast, Akhnaten, Nefertiti, Tye and the Narrator/Scribe are dressed in a riot of what looks like gloriously coloured and textured bric-à-brac. Zachary James’s bald, towering Scribe resembles a Klimt painting in his long patched gold robe (later stripped back to expose his muscular arms). Akhnaten’s royal dress fans out like a Velasquez Infanta and is decorated with sewn-on doll’s faces. Later he and Nefertiti appear in matching diaphanous scarlet nightgowns, beneath which the barely visible outlines of female breasts and pubic triangles give them the appearance of twin hermaphrodites. 

The impact of the costumes is heightened by the saturated colours of Bruno Poet’s lighting and Tom Pye’s multileveled scaffolding set, crowned by a succession of huge descending gold, red and silver disc-shaped solar icons. In combination with the postmodern minimalism of Glass’s repetitive score, the overall effect is of a vaguely steam-punk sci-fi visual and aural world that is less archaic than futuristic in its vision of Ancient Egypt as a floating realm of unchanging dreams.

All this is anchored by Costanzo’s extraordinary central performance. He first appears for his coronation naked and totally shaved like a newborn baby, and the first piercing note of his clean, almost vibrato-less counter-tenor twenty minutes after his entrance is a coup de théâtre in itself. Even more effective is the delicacy with which his voice floats above and later entwines with the deeper, richer mezzo of Bridges as Nefertiti, or the protective shield of Lárunsdottir’s higher, more gilded soprano as his mother Aye hovering above them both. Beyond his musical gifts, however, Costanzo’s expressive but controlled face and body, combined with his underlying vulnerability, enable him to inhabit the role with such conviction that he appears to coincide with it – as one imagines Akhenaten himself must have done, in his sense of immanent divinity, perhaps even to the detriment of his own sanity and survival. 

Hegel wrote that Ancient Egyptian religion and art had the character of an enigma or riddle – not only for us, or for the Greeks, but for the Egyptians themselves. This was because of the sense of mystery or indifference on the part of their gods in relation to humanity; hence the use of animals as figures of divinity, because of the impenetrability of both divine and animal consciousness to human understanding. The ultimate symbol of this was the Sphinx, which unlike most Egyptian gods had the head of a human and the body of an animal (rather than the other way around). The ultimate answer to the riddle posed by the Sphinx was ‘man’ – or for Hegel, human consciousness, which remained hidden to itself, at least until Greek self-consciousness arrived in the conquering form of Oedipus. 

The historical figure of Akhenaten arguably has something of this enigmatic quality, not only because of the puzzling nature of some of the archaeological evidence, but also because of his fundamentally ambiguous theological, political and even psychosexual significance.  Was he a monotheist or monomaniac, tyrant or liberator, masculine or feminine, gay or straight, human or god? Perhaps this is one of the reasons that his revolution was resisted and finally suppressed; too much ambiguity is intolerable for any society, especially in a leader. 

Glass’s opera – at least in McDermott’s production, and especially as embodied in Costanzo’s performance – goes some way towards expressing this enigma without forcibly resolving it, making the riddle communicable if not comprehensible, by using fragments of text in various languages (living and dead), hybridized images from different eras, and sometimes even wordless singing as a form of pure sound, purged of meaning. As such, the enigma of Akhenaten comes alive for us again, and becomes something deeply exciting and beautiful.

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Akhenaten by Philip Glass, directed by Phelim McDermott and co-produced by the English National Opera and LA Opera in collaboration with Improbable, debuted at The Metropolitan Opera in New York on November 8 and closed on December 7.