The editors’ note: Carmen and Priya went to see Inheritance on separate nights and came back with feelings that were, diplomatically, not aligned. What follows is an edited version of the conversation they had about it over ramen in Midtown — which lasted two hours and resolved nothing, which is why we’re publishing it.
Carmen: I’m going to say it before you can say it: I liked Inheritance more than I was supposed to. I went in ready to be irritated by the hype — six months of downtown buzz, every theater Twitter account calling it “the next American musical,” the kind of anticipation that is almost always a setup for disappointment. And then I sat in that seat at the Beaumont and the overture started and something in me went, okay. Okay. This is real.
What won me over first was the score. Lena Park has written music that sounds like it came out of the specific soil of New York Jewish immigrant experience — klezmer inflections in the woodwinds, a rhythmic instability in the ballads that makes every love song feel slightly unfinished, like the characters themselves can’t quite trust happiness — and it never feels pastiche. It feels like she’s writing from inside the tradition rather than sampling it from outside. That’s hard to do. I don’t want to underplay how hard that is.
Priya: You are being very generous with that overture, Carmie.
Carmen: Don’t Carmie me when you’re about to argue with me.
Priya: Fine. Here is what I think is happening with Inheritance. The score is genuinely good. I am not disputing the score. Lena Park has real compositional sophistication and I will sign my name to that. What I have a problem with is the book — specifically, what the book does with the score, which is use it as emotional scaffolding for a story structure that I find both familiar and unearned.
Here is the shape of the show, for anyone who hasn’t seen it: three generations of a Jewish-American family in New York, following money, following secrets, following who gets to claim what their grandparents built. This is not a new story. This is a very well-established story that American theater has told in many forms — The Cherry Orchard exists, August: Osage County exists, various Wendy Wasserstein plays exist — and Inheritance knows it’s in that tradition but doesn’t seem to feel the pressure of it. It hits the beats you expect. It cries at the places it has told you it’s going to cry. There’s nothing wrong with it exactly, but there’s nothing necessary about it either.
Carmen: I think you are confusing “familiar” with “bad.” Not every play has to reinvent the form. Some plays are supposed to do a particular emotional job very well, and Inheritance does its job. I cried at the Miriam scene in Act Two. I cried because the scene earned it. The playwright, Devorah Stern, has written something that I believe — something that feels like it happened to real people — and that is a genuinely difficult skill that we don’t praise enough because we’re too busy worrying about whether the structure is innovative.
Priya: I’m not worried about innovation for its own sake and you know I’m not, so let’s not do that. I’m talking about whether the work interrogates its own inheritance — the literary inheritance, the theatrical tradition it’s drawing from — or whether it simply benefits from it. Fold & Press interrogates. Osei-Bonsu has clearly read his Parks and his Morisseau and he’s doing something with that knowledge. Stern is doing something with that knowledge too, but what she’s doing is using it to make the audience comfortable rather than uncomfortable. That’s a choice. I’m just saying it’s a less interesting choice.
Carmen: But here’s where I push back: is it the job of every piece of theater to make the audience uncomfortable? I sat in that theater with people who were seeing a story that looked like their family for maybe the first time on a Broadway stage. The grandmother’s voice. The way money and love and obligation get tangled together in ways that are very specific to that experience. For those people in that audience — and I could feel them around me — the comfort is the point. Recognition is the point. You can have political and formal theater and you can also have theater that says here, I see you, your family was real. Both are necessary.
Priya: That’s a fair point and I don’t fully disagree with it. What I’m going to say is: recognition theater works best when it also surprises. When it tells you something about your family that you didn’t know you already knew. And Inheritance keeps choosing the version of the scene that confirms what you already feel rather than the version that complicates it. In Act One there’s a fight between the mother, Ruth, and her son Daniel about money that the play defuses just before it gets actually uncomfortable. Stern takes the scene right up to the edge and then steps back. I felt it. I wanted her to jump.
Carmen: Okay. I also felt that. I’m giving you that.
Priya: I know.
Carmen: Here’s what I keep coming back to. The performances in Inheritance are of a level that is — I don’t say this lightly — among the best I’ve seen in a straight-through musical on Broadway in the last five years. Miriam Levy as Ruth is doing something in the body, not just the voice, that I can’t fully describe. The way she carries the weight of everything Ruth has chosen not to say. Act Two is the best seventy-five minutes of musical theater I’ve seen this season, and I think that weight is so significant that it compensates for what the book doesn’t do in Act One. I went home thinking about Ruth for three days.
Priya: Miriam Levy is extraordinary. I’ll put my name on that too. And the Act Two work is genuinely excellent — Stern seems to find the confidence in Act Two that she’s hedging against in Act One, and the family dinner scene, where they all finally say the things they’ve been not-saying for three acts, is as well-constructed a scene as I’ve seen in a new musical in years. The structure of who speaks when, what each character allows themselves to hear — it’s technically impressive. I just think it’s held at arm’s length from something rawer.
Carmen: So where do we land?
Priya: I think it’s a very good musical that wants to be a great one. I think the hype is slightly ahead of the work. I think it will win awards and deserve most of them. I think it will be revived in twenty years and the revival will be tighter, and I might like that production better.
Carmen: I think it’s a great musical that doesn’t quite know it yet. I think Devorah Stern is a major talent and this is her second full-length — which means she is still growing into what she can do — and that room at the Beaumont on a Thursday night, with that audience, with Miriam Levy standing in the last light of Act Two, is something I am glad I was in the room for. Not every piece of art has to announce its greatness with formal innovation. Sometimes it just has to be true.
Priya: Fair enough. I still wish she’d let the Act One fight go somewhere.
Carmen: I know. Maybe the revival.
Inheritance is playing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater through October 5th. Tickets at the link in the sidebar.
