The play has been cast on the young side, which helps to establish the through-line of change and growth that 6½ hours of play, and 5+ years of action, demand. Short, that is, of allowing random audience members to literally join in with Eric (Eddie Shields, a splendidly sensitive soul), Toby Darling (Jared Reinfeldt, as seductive as the narcissistic role requires), and the rest of their Manhattan coterie as they learn the lessons of the past century of gay life, and how the future must be shaped by them. With entrances and exits occurring in our midst at all four corners, this is about as immersive an Inheritance as one is going to get. We are one with them, in other words, even as the proximity encourages the onstage (on-slab?) performers to eschew stagy delivery and make, instead, plain emotional sense.
But since the slab is a deep three-quarter thrust, each spectator is between six and 16 feet away from it, bringing increased awareness of the ensemble’s reactions to the onstage action.
Daigneault follows original director Stephen Daldry’s lead in having his cast sit, when offstage, on the floor around a black-slab acting area, sometimes covered with a white groundcloth. The seating capacity is 222 (as opposed to 1,058 at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore), and the production has been shaped accordingly. The 2019 Olivier and 2020 Tony Awards for Best Play were no fluke, as this production attests. Peopled with some of the strongest actors Boston has to offer, its authoritative delivery offers new insights along with familiar emotional impact. production of The Inheritance, the first stateside since the New York engagement, achieves that “golden mean.” Still 6½ hours in two parts, still an ambitious, intergenerational story with an enormous cast, Matthew López’s contemporary gloss on Howards End has been retrofitted, by director Paul Daigneault, to intimate theater scale. With luck, however, patrons are rewarded with the ideal: a well-thought-through take on the script that allows for a new space and local tastes and talent, while reflecting respect for authorial intent. Often it’s a stiff, would-be carbon-copy of a Broadway or West End original, or it’s hobbled by an outlandish concept from some self-styled visionary. When a renowned play makes its way into the world-I don’t mean authorized national tours, but rather homegrown regional restagings-what audiences will encounter becomes something of a crapshoot.