INHERITANCE TAX
TIM HEAP GOES BEHIND THE SCENES TO FIND OUT ABOUT A NEW TWO-PART PLAY, DIRECTED BY STEPHEN DALDRY, WHICH LOOKS AT THE LEGACY OF THE HIV/AIDS CRISIS IN NEW YORK CITY
TERRIFIED: Playwright Matthew, left, had a frightening introduction to gay life, while Andrew Burnap plays a writer with no first-hand knowledge of the Aids crisis
PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON ANNAND
THEATRE
Playwright Matthew Lopez’s first lessons about being gay were grim ones. “My introduction was as a 10-yearold boy in the American South, watching the news and learning about the Aids epidemic,” he says. “That’s how I discovered what being gay was; by simultaneously being taught that it also meant dying of HIV/Aids.”
Attitude meets the 40-year-old awardwinner in the middle of rehearsals for his new play, The Inheritance, at Jerwood Space in Southwark. We’re here to learn more about his intriguing new six-act, two-part period piece that offers a look at gay life in New York City over three generations.
“To become a sexually active gay man in the early 1990s, as I did, was terrifying,” explains Matthew, when I ask about what inspired him to create such a mammoth piece of theatre. “We watched what had happened to the generation before ours with horror. It didn’t stop us from fucking each other, but it took me so many years to [separate] the act of sex from this lingering feeling in the back of my mind that I was going to be punished for it,” he explains.