Andrew Burnap Is the Pulsing Heart of 'The Inheritance'

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Five nights a week, a group of barefoot young men gather around a spare elevated platform to share a story. Their tale, Matthew Lopez’s intense and gripping The Inheritance, is one of the most ambitious new plays to reach Broadway in recent memory, from its subject, the aftermath of the AIDS crisis and gay identity in 21st-century New York, to its sweep, over seven hours in two parts, to its scope, using EM Forster’s 1910 classic Howards End as a loose framework for a very contemporary creation. In place of Forster’s central Schlegel sisters, Lopez offers up a young gay couple, tracing them from marriage proposal to breakup to dissolution. Margaret Schlegel—methodical, idealistic, and reasonable—is replaced by Kyle Soller’s social advocate Eric Glass. The younger sister, Helen—impulsive, optimistic, and impassioned—takes the form of the writer Toby Darling, an arresting whirl of emotions portrayed by Andrew Burnap in his Broadway début. “Everyone has their opinions about Toby—how could you not?” the 28-year-old actor laughs. “I find him to be magnetic in a way that many humans are not. I find his love of life so attractive, his vivacity, his vitality, his need for the extremes of life, his desire to be loved, his profound loss of love and meaning. He takes life by the horns and says, ‘Fuck you if you don’t want me to live the life that I want to live.’”

Toby’s volatile trajectory over the course of The Inheritance from ambitious novelist to achingly lonely has-been stands in stark contrast to that of Eric, the former rejecting the boundaries of the narrative he finds himself in whereas the latter seems to be proceeding dutifully towards his own perfectly composed conclusion. While Eric settles into a steady forward motion, Toby spins, dips, and spirals, consumed by his emotions, desires, and a penchant for self-sabotage as he careens from opening night of his play on Broadway to a drug-fueled party on Fire Island to a lonely night spent pleading with an escort. “Living with Toby for this long has been the greatest gift of my life, but it’s also been a challenge,” Burnap admits, having inhabited the role through two runs in London in 2018 and now since last September in New York. “There are definitely times when I leave the theater and I think quietly to myself, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this,’ which is how it should be. When you play a character for so long, it starts to rub off on you a little bit. Your very brain chemistry and your emotional DNA start to change because you’re putting yourself through a car crash every night and you’re trying to tell it truthfully. When you get close to it each and every night, it can start to change you a little bit.”

Still, Burnap professes nothing but gratitude for the opportunity to play Toby, a role he was originally told by the playwright he was “never” going to get. After starring as the Elvis impersonator-turned-drag queen at the center of Lopez’s earlier work The Legend of Georgia McBride in Los Angeles in 2017, Burnap was originally sent the script for The Inheritance from his agents, who wanted him to audition for the role of rising actor (and Toby’s unrequited love) Adam. “I was so excited and I talked to Matthew and he goes, ‘Absolutely not!’” he laughs. “He was like, ‘You’re too old, you’re not right for it, it’s not going to happen,’ so that was as far as I got.” Back in New York a few weeks later, Burnap was asked to read a smaller role during early workshops of the new play, which at the time stretched to almost nine hours. “I remember reading the play and being floored by it, not only its subject matter and its writing but also the sheer audacity and ambition of it,” he recalls. “The only thing wrong with it at the time was there was just too much of it.” The night before the next round of workshops, Lopez called Burnap and told him he couldn’t find anyone he wanted to play Toby and asked him to fill in, “followed up by, ‘Ultimately, you’ll never play the part in production,’” the actor laughs. Four months later, he was officially offered the role in the premiere at London’s Young Vic Theatre under the direction of Stephen Daldry.

For anyone who has seen The Inheritance, it might be hard to imagine any other actor bringing the captivating mixture of ebullience and melancholy to Toby that Burnap does, but it’s understandable that the playwright felt protective of the role, one he has said pulls from his own past. When rehearsals began, however, Burnap says Lopez offered just the right amount of instruction and guidance without overburdening him. “There was always an understanding. There was always space that he gave me to throw myself into it,” the actor recalls. “Some of these things did happen in his life so he knows viscerally what that was like, so I would rely on him where my experience stopped and his started, but there was never a time where he said, ‘No, it’s not that, it’s this.’ There was always a give-and-take in terms of finding Toby.” Still, he admits that some of Lopez’s mannerisms and behaviors made it into the production, part of what he calls “taking his essence and putting it into Toby.”

The Inheritance opened in London to rapturous reviews and quickly transferred to the West End, where it picked up four Olivier Awards, including for Best New Play, but for the cast and crew, New York was always the end goal. Daldry himself jokingly referred to the London productions as “million-pound workshops,” and there was a sense that bringing the production to New York would be coming “home in more ways than one,” Burnap says. During the London runs, he adds, “we worked out a lot of the kinks of the play and figured out what it was over there without the watchful inspection that I think New Yorkers tend to have when they’re watching things about themselves.” That scrutiny might help account for the show’s less-ecstatic reception here, where its local notes, from persistent jokes about the size of Eric’s rent-controlled apartment to an impassioned argument about national politics in which one character equates the current president to the AIDS virus attacking America, might hit too close to home. “I think in London, people viewed it from a sense of otherness, as in, ‘This is about other people,’” Burnap reasons. “Every opinion here is exponentially more intense, so the people who love it love it even more. The people who hate it hate it even more. People have stronger opinions about every scene, every location, every choice that the characters make because everything is steeped here in New York. [In London,] they were able to keep a safe distance, whereas here in New York, you’re there.”

That visceral response comes as no surprise for Burnap, whose earliest memories of performing were intense and immediate. “The first thing that I can remember is being pulled into the Big Apple Circus as a kid, which is crazy,” laughs the actor, who grew up in Rhode Island. “The ringmaster pulled me in and had me conduct the orchestra. I was maybe five or six but I can remember it because I remember the smell of the sawdust on the ground and the smell of the animals. I remember it being thrilling having the power to direct. I wasn’t actually conducting them, but it looked like I was and I felt like I was.” A few years later, he joined his hometown Chorus of Westerly as a “little soprano” and remembers being powerfully affected during its celebrated annual Twelfth Night pageant. “This giant green horse entered into the hall and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that scared in my life ever again,” he recalls. “I was terrified. It felt so real. I don’t think I could articulate it at the time, but I remember feeling like, ‘I want to be able to elicit an emotional response like that in people. I want to be able to incite that incredible shock of passionate emotion.’” The next year, he auditioned for a speaking role and soon became, in his own words, “obsessed with musical theater.” “I asked for a top hat and a cane and a tuxedo for Christmas one year, so my parents had this feeling like, ‘This kid, he’s got something going on,’” he laughs. “To be honest with you, I think I just loved being looked at and clapped at a little bit.”

After graduating from high school, Burnap studied acting at the University of Rhode Island before heading to the Yale School of Drama for a master’s degree, which proved to be a profound experience. As a self-described “privileged white boy from a middle-class family in a really nice, sweet town in Rhode Island,” he admits he felt outweighed by his fellow students at first. “I always had this feeling at URI like there was something remarkable inside of me,” he explains. “I don’t know if that was based on vanity or ego, but when I got to grad school, I lost that feeling. I was surrounded by people who were immensely talented who I viewed as having had far more unique life experiences than I did. I felt like an impostor in a way. I felt like I had tricked everyone that I deserved to be here.” After a period of introspection, rather than lose faith, Burnap used the revelation as a spur for growth. “I started to work harder and thought that I needed to be better,” he continues. “I started to realize what would make me better was actually understanding the things that make me unique, the things that make me unlike anybody else.”

With The Inheritance, Burnap is putting those lessons to use on a grand scale. As he began to research the history of the AIDS crisis, he came to understand the necessity of personal accounts to illuminate the past—whether they be factual, like the individual tales of lost lives on the AIDS Memorial’s Instagram account he followed, or fictional, as in Lopez’s play. “It’s almost impossible to fathom the numbers, the hundreds of thousands,” Burnap says, “so when I heard one story of a mother losing her child, a man losing his partner, a friend losing her friend, that’s when I started to be overwhelmed by the sheer pain and suffering of that time. Eric has a line in the play, ‘I can understand what it was, but I don’t think I can ever possibly feel what it was,’ and for those of us who weren’t around at the time, I don’t think it’s possible to truly, viscerally understand that time.”

But The Inheritance argues that it’s worth trying, offering up art as the closest you can get to actual experience. The play’s title, after all, refers not only to the cultural legacy passed down from gay writers like Forster to those like Lopez, but also the one passed down from earlier generations of gay men to those living today, when marriage equality is federal law and AIDS is no longer a death sentence. For an actor like Burnap, bringing Toby to life is more than a job, it’s a responsibility. “When I started to realize that this life that I’ve chosen is actually not about me, it’s about telling stories for the benefit of others,” he says, “that’s when I started to realize, ‘I think I can do this forever and I want to do this forever.’”

The Inheritance continues through March 15 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York.