GRIEF, HOPE, MEN
There are moments when art marks a moment of change from which I can date my life — when the bigger truth I had not yet spoken could be recognized unfolding in front of me. Sometimes these truths, and these works, are so awake that they give me more life.
I think of seeing Disney’s Fantasia at 7 years old, and elevated-terrified by the scale and possibility of life itself; or reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and trusting that even the hardest circumstances can be redeemed, with healing for the survivors and mercy offered to the wrongdoers. And now there is Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance, currently on Broadway through mid-March, in which a century-old English novel (E.M. Forster’s Howards End) gently soundtracks, or perhaps orchestrates, the lives of gay men in their 30s during the period when President Obama was moving out of office, President Trump was moving in, and many of us wondered just where on earth we were.
The plot is not complicated: We’re here to watch a young man find himself. But the inner workings are vast: We’re really here to watch an entire generation learn who it really is, what its responsibilities are, its gifts, and on whose shoulders it stands.