View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is Eric in the middle of doing when Henry visits in Act Three, Scene Two?

2. What movie does Adam suggest that he, Toby, and Eric watch together?

3. On page 85, what specific expression does the text cite as having been appropriated from drag and ball culture?

4. How long does Toby claim to have been in love with Adam?

5. Whom is it implied that Leo looks like?

Short Essay Questions

1. When Walter comes to the apartment for dinner, what similarity do he and Eric recognize in their relationships?

2. Which character does Young Man 10 become in Act One, and how does this make sense with his lines in the Prologue?

3. What is Adam's purpose in telling his story about the bathhouse?

4. How do their differing responses to the AIDS crisis illustrate something fundamentally different about Walter and Henry?

5. During their argument in Act Two, Scene Three, what does Eric have to say about Toby's writing?

6. During Eric's birthday brunch, how does Jason 1 turn a nostalgic conversation about the past into a conversation about future goals?

7. Who is Tom Durrell, and how does he become significant in the Act Three, Scene One conversation between Toby and Adam?

8. At dinner with Henry and his sons, what innocent joke does Eric make and why does it so alarm Paul and Charles?

9. Why does Young Man 1 turn to Morgan for help in the play's prologue?

10. How do Charles and Paul's attitudes in the hallway after Eric's brunch foreshadow their actions at the end of Act Two?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What relationship exists between the specific cultural works mentioned in the play and the play's overall theme? How do the works vary in the prestige associated with them? Why does it matter which characters are associated with various works? What domains are the works drawn from? Which are associated with New York, specifically? How do these works paint a picture of a time and place and a specific lifestyle? Write an essay that considers these various aspects of the cultural works mentioned in The Inheritance and that ties these works to the play's overall theme. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text.

Essay Topic 2

What larger ideas about community and responsibility does the farmhouse represent? Why does its location matter? How do its owners' histories support the ideas it represents? How do Walter's and Henry's varying responses to the farmhouse relate to the farmhouse's meaning? Why does Henry frustrate Walter's plan to leave the house to Eric, and why does he discourage Eric from spending time at the farmhouse? What do the ghosts signify? What does the figure of the caretaker add to the reader's understanding of the house's meaning? What does Eric eventually choose to do with the farmhouse, and how does this confirm the meaning of the house? Write an essay in which you take and defend a position on the meaning of the farmhouse and its relationship to the play's concern with responsibility to community. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text.

Essay Topic 3

Do some online research into the Brechtian theater technique of Verfremdungseffekt, or "Distancing Effect." What is this technique, and what is its purpose? What does it have to do with Lopez's use of characters who seem to be both present and not present in certain scenes? Write an essay that explains this technique and its purposes and then shows how Lopez uses it when he creates scenes where characters are not literally present but can still interact with the action onstage. Finally, offer insight into Lopez's purpose in distancing his audiences from his characters in this way. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,273 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample