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Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of Outward Slate's LGBTQ podcast.

I'm Brian Louder, editor of Outward.

Instead of our usual look at the month's queer news and culture, today we're going to be

devoting a whole hour to The Inheritance, a two-part play by Matthew Lopez that won like

all the awards and a recent run in London and is currently dominating discussions on

Broadway.

I'm going to say it up front.

In this conversation, there will be spoilers. So stop listening if you don't want them.

While its length, ambition, and engagement with the AIDS crisis have invited comparisons to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the inheritance's drive and concern is a bit more contained,

if no less daunting.

I'm going to try to put it this way. If gay men think of ourselves as a community spanning generations, what happens when a huge swath of that community is lost to plague? The survivors

deeply traumatized and younger cohorts must therefore come of age and figure out what it means

to be gay in the wake

of a tragedy that shapes everything around us, but that many of us may not fully understand.

Barring a line from E.M. Forster's Howard's end, on which play is base, the inheritance desperately

wants gay men to connect across age and loss, but is that kind of connection really possible?

It's a big question, but before we dive in, I'd like to introduce our esteemed panel,

who have graciously agreed to join us in the studio today for Inheritance Chatter,

even after sitting through seven hours of theater.

First up, we've got Alex Beres, Slateate alum, and member of the New Yorker's editorial staff

and writer on culture, science, and LGBTQ issues.

...