Jordan Barbour ’01 Makes His Broadway Debut in The Inheritance

With a varied and successful acting career already under his belt, Jordan Barbour ’01 made his Broadway debut in November as a cast member of The Inheritance. This sweeping two-part play tells the stories of a group of gay men living in contemporary Manhattan and addressing challenges from their past and present. Jordan portrayed Tristan, a doctor and close friend of lead character Eric Glass.

Jordan navigated an atypically lengthy audition process to land the part. He advanced through four rounds of auditions, then received a call asking him to return to New York for a callback while he was in Ashland, OR to see friends in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (which he performed in for the prior three years). “They kind of put me through the wringer for the whole summer,” Jordan said with a laugh. “And what was really refreshing was on the first day of rehearsal, both [Inheritance writer] Matthew Lopez and Stephen Daldry, the director, individually came up to me and apologized for how nerve-wracking the summer was for me. They were both so happy I was in the room.”

Jordan felt an instant connection to Tristan as he prepared to play the character. “I realized, in thinking about this play and who Tristan was as a character, that he is actually not terribly different from me,” Jordan says. “He’s dealing with being HIV positive. I am not HIV positive, but I do understand the trials and the difficulties of being a black gay man in America.” In many prior productions, Jordan has determined ways to inhabit characters with various traits and qualities, but The Inheritance required a new type of vulnerability. “I did what was actually probably the scariest thing for an actor to do, which is try and be myself as much as possible on stage,” he said.

The Inheritance is a two-part play that runs nearly seven hours, so it required a long rehearsal process. This allowed the cast to develop a natural camaraderie that is reflected in the strong friendships onstage. “What’s so lovely about this group of people is that we really do like each other and we really like the material that we’re working with,” Jordan says. The Inheritance garnered significant critical and audience acclaim, up to its final performances in March.

As he looks ahead to his next roles, Jordan reflected fondly on his past experiences and his time at MFS. “I had really supportive teachers, in the arts and in my humanities education, that were encouraging me and that were supportive of me,” he said. Jordan also described the life-changing impact of Meeting for Worship. “When you’re a kid, the last thing you want to do is sit in silence in a room for about an hour, once a week. But there is so much power in silence. There’s so much power in stillness, and there is so much power in community. Having to do that once a week was a very essential tool that I did not understand the full power of until I became an adult.”