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Matthew Lopez is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is most widely known for his 2006 play The Whipping Man, which garnered Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards as well as the John Gassner New Play Award by the Outer Critics Circle. His 2018 play The Inheritance opened at the Young Vic Theatre in March 2018 before moving to the West End in October 2018. Lopez’s plays frequently examine American class structures, race, sexual identity and their relationships with American society at large.

Early Life
Lopez was born in 1977 in Panama City, Florida to two public school teachers. His mother is Polish-Russian, born in Greenpoint Brooklyn and his father is Puerto Rican, born in San Juan. Lopez graduated from the University of South Florida in 2000, with a Bachelor’s degree in theatre performance.

The Whipping Man
Lopez’s breakout play The Whipping Man debuted at Luna Stage in Montclair, New Jersey in 2006 and premiered in New York at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2011, directed by Doug Hughes and starring Andre Braugher and Andre Holland. The off-Broadway production of The Whipping Man extended four times, and won Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards. Lopez won the John Gassner New Play Award for his writing.

The Whipping Man is set in Richmond, Virginia in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War and concerns two recently freed slaves encountering their former master. The former slaves, like their former master, identify as Jewish. The play examines the unique occurrence of Passover in 1865 beginning the day after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It explores the meaning of freedom and the various ways people are enslaved—to addictions, to prejudices.

In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood called the play “emotionally potent, almost surreal in the layers of meaning it conjures.” Braugher and Holland both earned critical acclaim for their performances.

Somewhere
Somewhere was first performed at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2011, before moving to Hartford Stage. The play, featuring a majority Latinx cast, concerns a theatrical family living in Manhattan in 1959, as West Side Story captured the zeitgeist. The proposed construction of Lincoln Center and the ensuing demolition of their neighborhood leaves the family to fight for their home and their dreams. Somewhere was directed by Giovanna Sardelli, and starred Priscilla Lopez of In the Heights. Critics lauded the production, comparing Lopez’s writing to Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.

Reverberation
Lopez’s next play Reverberation premiered at Hartford Stage in 2015, directed by Maxwell Williams and starring Luke Macfarlane. The story follows Jonathan, a gay millennial New Yorker, and his unhealthy relationships with both sexual partners and casual friends. The play examines themes of gender, passion, and modern isolation. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times writes that “the play is marked by a perceptiveness about the echoing loneliness that many urban dwellers live with.”

The Legend of Georgia McBride
The Legend of Georgia McBride debuted at Denver Center of Performing Arts in 2014, and premiered off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 2015. Lopez’s work concerns an Elvis impersonator fallen on hard times, who decides to convert his performance space into a drag bar. The play toggles between quippy comedy and show-stopping dance numbers, with Charles Isherwood commenting, “The playwright has a plush line in funny-bitchy repartee.”

The Legend of Georgia McBride is currently being adapted into a feature film, produced by and starring Jim Parsons.

The Inheritance
In 2018, Lopez debuted his play The Inheritance at the Young Vic Theatre in London, before transferring to the Noel Coward Theatre on the West End. The two-part epic about a homosexual community in New York, directed by Tony Award winner Stephen Daldry, is a loose adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. The premiere production featured a cast including Vanessa Redgrave, John Benjamin Hickey, and Paul Hilton as Forster himself.

The Inheritance tells the story of Eric Glass and Toby Darling, a young gay couple in New York. As the play develops, it broadens its scope to issues of identity, modern politics, and the gay community’s relationship with its previous generations.

The play received widespread critical acclaim. The Daily Telegraph hailed it as “the most important American play of this century” and The Evening Standard declared the play “a work of rare grace, truth, and beauty.”

Lopez received the Evening Standard Award for Best New Play for The Inheritance.