This and Slave Play were hyped so incredibly, each competing for play of the decade, play of the century, play that changes what plays are and what plays mean forever. I'm going on and on, but the importance draped around these plays was so........forced. If the producers know they've got good shit, they market it intriguingly and lure audiences into those seats.

With Slave Play, you're racist if you don't go, you're racist. If you respond to it (laughter, chortles, etc.), you're scrutinized. If you oppose a black American woman calling her white BRITISH husband a virus before manipulating him to rape her as she would be raped on an Antebellum plantation, you're not woke to "listening." In their reviews, the critics did everything they possibly could to dance around actually reviewing the play (dissertations about their own whiteness and how the play made them look within and all that rubbish) because if any of them condemned the play: racist. Slave Play is a trap. A stunt. Literally. 135 minutes of being imprisoned in a theatre, where a decision to walk out would be noticed by everyone.

The Inheritance. Well, you don't care about AIDS victims if you skip The Inheritance. You don't care about human legacies and you have no heart if you disregard it. To love it means the summary of a handful of brief moments has tricked you into thinking it's something more than it is. To dislike, feel apathy, hell, even hate it, means you don't see all the burbling subtext beneath the very well to do characters who have no problems. Eric Glass is evicted, seconds later Henry Wilcox sets him up in a splendid apartment for $900/month. Some must see the entire iceberg of subtext moving beneath the water's surface. I'd love to know what it is they see. I see a gold digging otter with no personality being set up by Daddy. That's one example of so many flaccid moments, so, so many. But if you don't weep for the extras coming down the aisles, there is something psychologically wrong with you. Right? Are they homages, the rip offs like that? Is Lopez accepting his inheritance from the many dramatists before him and throwing in mountain sized Easter eggs as tribute? Or is he hoping many in 2019 won't be familiar with the plays he's borrowed from? Or others who don't recall them clearly enough? This has been called the play of the century by a legitimate critic. And it's so important. It's so important. And it wants you to know it's SO IMPORTANT!

As does Slave Play, the play where white people are a virus, in contrast to The Inheritance, the play where white people need not worry about viruses. Unless one of the old ones bursts into an uninvited 25 minute monologue about all the dead people in the middle of a dinner party. Or, you know, you visit a bathhouse in Prague.

Even with this diatribe just now, I think the play is talked out. There are no revelations you gradually come to terms with hours or days after seeing it that invite you to join Matthew Lopez in his profound cave. Where portraits of Meryl unevenly hang from the stone walls. And the sea is coming closer and closer.

I wanted it to be at least good, you know? Truly good with a powerful voice. Instead, I get a ghost cliffhanger addressed only in Part Two as a possible dream. Talk about the playwright giving up.