A Recent History of Broadway's Two-Part Plays

The acclaimed play, The Inheritance, officially opens at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theater today, November 17, 2019.

It begins with a gathering of young, gay New Yorkers. Each has a story aching to come out...

Profoundly touching and wickedly hilarious, Matthew Lopez' highly-anticipated two-part play, The Inheritance, asks how much we owe to those who lived and loved before us, and questions the role we must play for future generations. Brilliantly re-envisioning E. M. Forster's masterpiece Howards End to 21st-century New York, it follows the interlinking lives of three generations of gay men searching for a community of their own - and a place to call home. THE INHERITANCE is a life-affirming journey of tears and laughter, through conflicts and connections, heartbreak and hope. A new play, generations in the making.

With the distinction of having the longest runtime on Broadway, the epic two-part play runs almost six and half hours in total. This is far from the first time, however, that the two-part format has been used on Broadway. Check out just a few more from the past twenty years!

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

April 22, 2018- ?

It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn't much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and the father of three school-age children. While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.

Wolf Hall Parts One and Two

April 9, 2015-July 5, 2015

Wolf Hall explores the deceit, betrayal, and intrigue of the court of Henry VIII, was written by Dame Hilary Mantel and adapted by Mike Poulton.

Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika

May 4, 1993-December 4, 1994
March 25, 2018-July 15, 2018

As politically incendiary as any play in the American canon, Angels in America also manages to be, at turns, hilariously irreverent and heartbreakingly humane. It is also astonishingly relevant, speaking every bit as urgently to our anxious times as it did when it first premiered. Tackling Reaganism, McCarthyism, immigration, religion, climate change, and AIDS against the backdrop of New York City in the mid-1980's, no contemporary drama has succeeded so indisputably with so ambitious a scope.

The Norman Conquests: Living Together, Round and Round the Garden, Table Manners

December 7, 1975- June 19, 1976
April 25, 2009-July 26, 2009

The Norman Conquests is a trilogy of plays written by Alan Ayckbourn. Each of the plays depicts the same six characters over the same weekend in a different part of a house. Table Manners is set in the dining room, Living Together in the living room, and Round and Round the Garden in the garden.

The Coast of Utopia [Part 1- Voyage], [Part 2-Shipwreck], [Part 3- Salvage]

November 27, 2006- May 12, 2007

Beginning in mid-19th century Russia during the repressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Tom Stoppard's sweeping epic spans a period of thirty years as it tells the panoramic story of a group of Russian intellectuals, headed by the radical theorist and editor Alexander Herzen, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the poet Nicholas Ogarev, and the aristocrat-turned-anarchist Michael Bakunin, who lead a band of like-minded countrymen in a revolutionary movement in which they strive to change and fix a political system by using their minds as their only weapon.