Matthew López On The One Play He’s Written That He Was Terrified Of Reviving

In 2008, the playwright Matthew López had a bright idea: to examine the lives of gay male New Yorkers one generation after the advent of Aids by using Howards End as the scaffolding with which to build a new drama. Perhaps EM Forster himself could even be a character wandering through it. A decade later, the two-part, six-hour-plus epic The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic in London before transferring to Broadway, vacuuming up prizes along the way including a Tony for best play, which made López the first Latiné writer (his preferred non-gendered term for people of Latin American heritage) to win that award. The consensus was that he had written the greatest theatrical account of gay life since Angels in America.

When the concept of The Inheritance first occurred to him, however, López wasn’t equipped to write it. He had already had a play produced: The Whipping Man, set at the end of the American civil war. Any doubts he harboured about his talent had been partly assuaged by Terrence McNally (playwright of Love! Valour! Compassion!), who read one of his early plays and declared: “You’re a writer.” But López was struggling with alcoholism in 2008, and was still more than a year shy of getting sober. The Inheritance would have to wait. “I knew I wasn’t ready,” he says. “So I wrote Reverberation instead. It’s the last thing I wrote drinking. My last ‘using’ play, so to speak.”

We are sitting on a sofa in the corridor of a London theatre. Upstairs, Reverberation is in rehearsals ahead of its forthcoming European premiere at Bristol Old Vic. The 47-year-old López, who is petite and summery in a charcoal polo shirt, white trousers and black sockless trainers, is mulling over the problems he is about to cause for the marketing team. “This is really gonna sell some tickets,” he laughs. “But it’s one of my darker plays in terms of my mindset at the time. It was terrifying, and it was not fun to write.”

Indeed, it is unrecognisable as the work of the same man who later co-wrote and directed Red, White & Royal Blue, a glossy, teen-friendly love story about an English prince and the son of the US president. That hit movie is, to use one of López’s pet phrases, a “joy-bomb”. For all its prickly humour, Reverberation is more like an A-bomb.

Like The Inheritance and López’s 2011 play Somewhere – about a Latin American family in late-1950s New York whose neighbourhood is being bulldozed to make way for the construction of the Lincoln Centre – Reverberation addresses the fragility of the home. Its action is confined to two apartments. Make that two flats: originally set in New York, it has now been relocated to London, much like López himself, who moved to the UK three years ago. It has also been subtly updated; there is even a Suella Braverman reference. But it is still a three-hander about two neighbours – Claire, who works in retail, and Jonathan, an illustrator living in the flat below – and a much younger man, Wes, whom Jonathan meets on a hookup app.

While Wes is irrepressible and largely ignorant of danger, Jonathan, still shaken by a violent attack, is withdrawn to the point of near-agoraphobia. Claire bobs somewhere in between, flinging herself manically into new romantic experiences – she even chances her arm with Jonathan – yet still prone to sink into the doldrums. López has been each of them at various points in his life, he says. “But I was Jonathan while I was writing it.”

He had arrived in the city eight years earlier, having grown up on the Florida panhandle. “As a queer person of colour in New York, I didn’t feel safe. I had frightening experiences on the subway. I was terribly afraid of the world for the longest time, and I was barricading myself with alcohol. The play comes from wanting to resist that.” He was also in the foothills of a new relationship with the man to whom he is now married. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m in love for the first time. How would I respond if I lost that?’” Out of this collision of horror and hypothesis emerged Reverberation.

The new production will be only the second. “It’s honestly the play of mine that has broken my heart more than any other,” he says. “There was a long period where I couldn’t get it produced. It scared people.” The laughter from the audience at the US premiere in 2015 could scarcely have been more welcome. “The actors breathed a sigh of relief. We all did.”

Several of the funniest moments emanate from the nuances of gay hookup culture. Not until page 13 of the script, for instance, do Jonathan and Wes exchange names, long after exchanging bodily fluids. “I love an uncomplicated emotion, and I love creating them in an audience,” says López. “But the thing that excites me is happy-sad. The joyful-grim.”

Bleakly funny it may be, but Reverberation is unavoidably an X-ray of trauma. It captures with stinging accuracy the way that pain can sometimes be downgraded by the people suffering it.

“Claire and Jonathan are survivors of violence and aggression from men,” he explains. “Some of those instances are drops in the ocean and others are barely survivable. They have each found ways to get past it, but in learning that those ways are rather unhealthy for them, they begin a process of course correction. What I’ve discovered in dealing with violence against myself is that you sometimes don’t jump automatically to the conclusion that a crime has been committed. We also don’t want to think of ourselves as victims or vulnerable, so there is an understandable desire to move past unpleasant or dangerous experiences. Yet that very impulse not to deal with things is what keeps us from moving past them.”

Trauma duly dealt with in Reverberation, López’s first play after getting clean was The Legend of Georgia McBride, a riotous comedy about an Elvis impersonator who becomes a drag queen. “I knew I had to write something deeply silly,” he says. This is the way it tends to work with him: each project is a response to, or recovery from, the last. The Inheritance dealt with its own generous helping of trauma, not only from Aids but also the 2016 election. In the play’s most notorious speech, one character observes that Donald Trump is akin to HIV, and that he has “attached himself to American democracy and is now destroying the American immune system … He’s replicating his genetic material from tweet to tweet, from person to person.” Loath to discuss the forthcoming US election, López will say only that he is feeling “optimistic but also snake-bit”.

The pinballing between drama and comedy continued after The Inheritance. Even as that play was opening in London, López was already writing a queer – or rather, queerer – Broadway musical version of the cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot, which opened in 2022. He then planned to make his directorial debut with a new film of Forster’s posthumously published gay love story Maurice, previously adapted in 1987 by Merchant-Ivory, only to struggle to raise even a modest budget. “It was period and it was queer, so …”

Instead, he rebounded with Red, White & Royal Blue. “I tried to do something ‘serious’ for the snobs with Maurice. Then the mass-appeal thing came along, and I felt passionate about it, so I thought, ‘Let’s do that. Sounds like fun!’” He is currently writing the sequel with Casey McQuiston, author of the original novel. “This time there’s no book to adapt, so we’re basically sitting around making up fan fiction.” Still, he is avoiding looking at any of the actual fan fiction that’s out there. “I’m scared they might have better ideas than me.”

I confess to him that I had snootily avoided the movie until I knew I was coming to meet him, not even realising that this piece of cinematic candyfloss was spun by the same hand as The Inheritance. This is hardly the first time he has heard that reaction. “I’m fine with it,” he smiles, then cites an exchange from Reverberation. When Jonathan says: “I think I may have underestimated you,” Wes replies: “I think I may have let you.”

That’s one from the heart. “I love being underestimated,” López admits. “It’s so freeing, because it means you get to do whatever you want.” The one downside is that it’s less likely to happen with every day, and every play.