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Stephen Daldry’s production is masterly, spiced with mischief and teeming with incident. It announces an intention not simply to punch home a series of significant moments but to trace the links between them: to unravel a history, and ask what one generation has passed on to the next – and whether the legacy could have been different.
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THIS IS QUITE SOMETHING. The Inheritance teems with life: Watching it is like bingewatching a box-set. It tells multiple stories. It’s a play that pierces your emotional defences, raises any number of political issues and enfolds you in its narrative.
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To watch The Inheritance is to pass into a realm of TOTAL ABSORBTION before arriving at a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe. The Inheritance instantly looks like A MODERN CLASSIC, perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT AMERICAN PLAY OF THE CENTURY so far. Star ratings are almost beside the point when confronted by work of this magnitude, but HELL, YEAH, FIVE.
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The Inheritance is A MONUMENTAL ACHIEVEMENT. The plot is GRIPPING: shimmering with excellent jokes and told at a great lick, we indubitably become wrapped up. The experience is a bit like gorging on a classy Netflix melodrama.
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AN EXTRAORDINARY, EPIC EVENT. Matthew Lopez’s rhapsodic deep dive asks how to love, how to live and how to do those well. It works brilliantly. It’s captivating, and it ends with an audience quietly sobbing.
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“An Upset,” a one-act play by David Auburn first seen in New York in 2008, is being revived around the city timed to the Open, including three shows at 99 Bowery beginning Sept. 12.
“It’s always hard to put a finger on why something is suddenly in the zeitgeist,” said Ruhl, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. “I don’t know why it is happening with tennis in theater right now. But for me, while researching the Bush dynasty, I realized tennis is such a big part of their lives and a wonderful metaphor for family competition and sibling rivalry.”
In “Scenes From Court Life,” Greg Keller plays George W. Bush as a more shrewd politician than his brother Jeb but an inferior tennis player.
“Athletes are almost another species to playwrights,” Keller said. “The writer’s world is so subjective, but for athletes there is always a winner and a loser.”
Tennis holds undeniable appeal for the theater. For starters, it can encompass widely different settings, including the Bush family compound, the public courts of the Lower East Side and Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Tennis, Keller said, is also “one-on-one, but you are not physically touching each other like in boxing.”
He added, “You are in your own little world.”
Bragen has written other works about tennis, including a monologue called “Game, Set, Match.” He said the sport offered intimacy and isolation — great fodder for writers.
“There’s a kind of dance that I feel as a player, but you are alone in your own head at the same time you are connected to other person,” Bragen said.
Ruhl said she liked the combat mixed with decorum, “the formality within the structure of competition.”
Ryan Sweeney, who played Division I tennis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is producing and starring in “An Upset,” said, “Tennis is a lonely sport, and Auburn’s script touches on the players’ vulnerabilities.”
