The Inheritor: A Play

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education

In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the radically different experience of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam. Revealing a world of privilege where ＂there is no such thing as luck,＂ the play features a beheaded knight, a talking record player, and a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds.

Based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, the play was collectively created by Théâtre de l’Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.

KATE BREDESON (she/her) is a theater historian, director, and dramaturg. Her project as a scholar is to research, write about, and practice the ways in which theater can be a tool for radical activism and protest. She is the author of Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 (finalist, George Freedley Award) and the editor of The Diaries of Judith Malina, both published by Northwestern University Press. She is a professor of theater at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

THALIA WOLFF (she/her) is an interdisciplinary theater maker, teaching artist, and storyteller. She is an MA candidate in Emerson College’s Theatre Education and Applied Theatre program.