Rent (play 1993)

 

Rent

(stage-play first preformed 1993, officially opened 1996, and later the same year had its Broadway premier, I recently saw it live in 2022)

 

Writer/Composer/Lyricist Jonathan Larson made history with “Rent” transforming Giacomo Puccini's opera “La Bohème” (1886) into a Rock-Opera set in New York City’s East Village in the 1980s. As conscious of its time-and-place as Puccini, and explores the joys of bohemian freedom, the perils of ecstatic nihilism, the despair of marginality, the terrors of pursing morality when using art and one’s guide. It substitutes HIV/AIDS for the earlier era’s Consumption, meaning Tuberculosis, but here the archaic term Consumption applies, because like the original, class warfare and avaricistic greed are front-and-center themes.

 

I lived in the East Village in the twilight of the era the play describes, as did Larson (we never met). This had been a project that Larson put aside when the moment described was on-going, then embraced it again after another play failed to find backing (“Superbia” which has been repeatedly workshopped and much of its music recorded and popular, but never officially staged) but finally realized it at the very moment of the East Village it described was passing into history. It was an odd synergy, the world could embrace it with nostalgic longing but it was a nostalgia for something so recent, if it were milk in the refrigerator, it hadn’t even begun to smell yet.

 

Larson (and my) East Village had become far too expensive for the bohemian children or even people with regular jobs like me. I’d moved to more affordable Brooklyn, while Larson had been able to hold onto his run-down, fifth-floor, walk-up, until he died in 1993 (by 2017, loft-rents in his building were going for $4k mo). He was only 37-years-old and this was just before the show’s official opening Off-Broadway in 1993. Larson’s tragedy provided a mythic aura to the play, the death of the young artist was not the reason for the show making to Broadway, but probably the reason it got there so fast.

 

Winning almost every award imaginable, including multiple Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize, it ran for 12-years, making it among the longest-running in Broadway history. It also became a film (unfortunate, a mediocrity) and has never ceased touring the USA with small companies, now thirty-years after-the-fact.

 

I saw it at the Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Milford, Connecticut, a good place that sacrificed much of its seating for comfort. The audience sit at tables and are encouraged to bring picnic baskets to share among friends. I could hear that the instruments were live performers, but I’m not sure what closet they shoved the musicians into because the usual orchestra space was sacrificed in favor of this chatty, social, tables.

 

The stage is of only modest in size yet seemed luxuriously despite how crowded with people it often became. Director Andrea Pane, choreographers Carly Jurman and Zachary Kampler, and stage-manager Pippa Walton leaned heavily on the Broadway production for look and feel. Lesley Neilson-Bowman’s costumes were near-exact recreations.

 

“Rent” is about the era when the two great symbols of New York City were the playboy Donald Trump, not yet overweight and only flirting with politics, and armies of homeless who seemed to curl up in every doorway. It’s set in a neighborhood that had been in decline for decades as the city (and the nation as a whole) turned its back on manufacturing and unions, the city’s great port already buried beneath the landfill of the still-standing World Trade Center. The poverty of the East Village attracted those who were full of energy but had empty pockets. The dynamism they brought made the largely-abandoned neighborhood attractive to developers, the artists success in creating a community but put that self-same community at risk because it was now trendy. The title refers to the characters’ economic challenges and the second song has two of the leads fretting that after living rent-free for a year in their spacious hovel they now had to pony up cash they simply didn’t have. But it had a double meaning, the word also means torn asunder.

 

The play is full of young characters who carved out a safe place for themselves in a cold and intolerant word, a bubble community where they could be who they actually were, unmolested; but it is also about how no such safe place really exists. The 1980s were the most violent periods in NYC history, the streets were ruled by gangs and awash with drugs. The increasing violence in the context of new money brought in by the neighborhoods newest and better-heeled arrivals (even newer than the artists) created pressure on the Police to clear the streets by almost any means necessary. The two real-world “Police Riots’” riots in Tompkins Square Park were triggered as much by Police thuggery as the rage of reflexively violent Anarchists, and these are referenced in the play, and though Law Enforcement is barely present in the play, they’re treated ungenerously.

 

And there was plague, its victims were pariah because it associated with promiscuity and illicit drug use. It was also a subversive disease, lurking in one’s body without demonstrating symptoms for years, all the while infectious, so those unaware of their status were unknowingly spreading it to others, who then unknowingly spread it to others still, who then spread it further …

 

At the time, it was no good treatments, it was 100% fatal, took years to kill you, and after the symptoms presented, the death was slow and nightmarishly demeaning.

 

HIV/AIDS was most strongly associated with the communities we, collectively, most despised, homosexuals, People of Color, and the poor, and many of them found refuge in the East Village. Despite almost all the plays characters being youthful, a remarkably large percentage of them were already dying before the curtains raise.

 

It had a large ensemble, sixteen performers in the version I saw, eight of whom counted as central characters in a theater environment that generally keeps that number to four. It takes an interesting approach to ring-mastering this large crowd, making one character our entrée into the world, a struggling documentary film maker, so he’s our eyes, but he is neither Hero, Heroine, or Villain. As purposes are assigned to characters in drama, his role is that of the Confidant, but more than that, he’s the Fifth Business, a supporting player whose role can’t be easily classified but is none-the-less vital in resolving the plot. He’s the equivalent of Marcello from “La bohème” but here the part is expanded, this Fifth Business is center stage more than almost anyone else.

 

That would be Mark Cohen, played by Sean Davis. The part was originated by Anthony Rapp who also starred in the film. I will commit a heresy here; I liked Davis in the part better. Mark is an awkward young man, struggling against his nature to be more visible, recently and humiliating dumped by his more colorful girlfriend, and Rapp was just plain too good looking. Davis is equally skilled a performer as Rapp, plus soft and doughy-looking. The fact that he didn’t completely belong with those he needed to belong with is obvious even before he opened his mouth.

 

Mark’s roommate, the male romantic Hero, is Roger Davis, a deeply torn soul. He’s grieving the suicide of his girlfriend which happened before the play began, and HIV-positive because of a past drug habit. He appears healthy, but knows that’s an illusion, and he tries to reject the possibility of love because it hurts too much. He, of course, lands out falling in love with the plays most vivacious, but also self-destructive, character.

 

Here, Roger is played by Dante DiFederico who, unfortunately, is the weakest of the leads.

 

Roger’s love interest is Mimi Marquez. The heroine is heroin-addicted, HIV positive, and a sex worker. She is both wonderfully warm and unaware of her own selfishness. Her duet with Roger, “Light My Candle” is a show highlight.

 

In the original opera, the original run of “Rent,” and the film, Mimi was always a star-making role. Daphne Rubin-Vega’s star-status was created by playing the role on Broadway. Rosario Dawson solidified her already existent stardom in the movie even though the film lost money. Here Juliana Rivera played Mimi, and she’s as sexy as all get-out.

 

Mark’s ex-girlfriend is also a character, Maureen Johnson, a performance artist who dumped him to explore her bisexuality with Joanne. Mark’s continuing friendship with her speaks much of the moral-codes of extreme tolerance within the community, and how that tolerance becomes a screen that extreme self-absorption can hide behind. What we see on stage is Mark growing closer to Joanne, they bond over how much Maureen drives them both crazy.

 

She played by Casie Pepe Winshell.

 

Though Mark is the romantic Hero, Joanne Jefferson is the most Hero in character. A Black woman with a White girlfriend, she’s also a Harvard-trained lawyer she could’ve written her own ticket in any of the City’s top firms, at least had she disguised her lesbianism. Instead, she chooses near-impoverishment as street-level activist. The protests she organizes and her working the payphones on behalf of clients because she doesn’t have a real office, are important for creating context, but never the focus of the story-yelling. Her endless cycle of breaking-up and making-up with Maureen is one of the play’s running jokes.

 

She’s played by Kelsey Senteio.

 

Akin to Joanne is Tom Collins, and academic and politically anarchist. He’s also Black, and like Joanne, of a upper socio-economic and social class than the homeless whom he defends. Larson’s writing is preceptive here, the play is about class struggle, but the characters were mostly bourgeoisie before relocating to the East Village. Despite their embrace of racial equity, the focus is on the Whites, and the three of the four important Black characters are better educated and/or wealthier than the central Whites. In the 1980s, the East Village was over-following with the desperately poor, but its public face of it was better-heeled young people drawn from elsewhere by an impulse to be Social Justice Warriors or to role-playing rebellion, usually a little of both. Tom enters this circle by getting mugged, and then saved by the only actual representative of NYC’s lower classes, Angel, whom he becomes romantically attached to.

 

Tom is played by Everton Ricketts.

 

Angel Dumott Schunard is a transvestite, almost certainly a sex-worker, and worse is not only HIV positive, but dying of full-blown AIDS. His name is symbolic, he’s the shows Saint and his passing makes him almost Christ-like. One thing forgotten about the two Tompkins’s Square Park riots is that they were both trigged by Police clearing out people like Angel, but the actual fighting was done by people like Joanne and Tom. Though not as important as Mark, Roger, and Mimi, Angel subtly becomes the glue that held them together, and after his wake, a powerful act-two scene, the other characters start to gently drift away from each other, a prophesy of the fate of that moment in history.

 

He’s played by Marty Garcia.

 

The final major character was Benjamin "Benny" Coffin the third, formerly a roommate of several of the above, now their landlord. He’s cast off all bohemian pretentions and embraced entrepreneurism, and is at first presented as the plays heavy, but it slowly emerges that he’s not as heartless as he first seems. Though never likable, he’s the only one thinking of his future (he couldn’t be allowed to be, the play’s philosophy was “No day but today.”). He’s conscious of the fact that he won’t be young forever and financial instability is not a future he wants. Not even our activist Joanne thinks of the future as much as he, she has no long-term program for the down-trodden she defends. As the play closes, Benny proves not as greedy as once perceived and even Mark is about to leave childish things behind and get a real job.

 

Benny’s played by Hispanic actor Marty Garcia while in the original her was played by Black actor Taye Diggs. These are interesting choices, speaking of changing racial dynamics. Racism is a subject here, but classism is more important, and wealthier classes can accept darker-skin-tones as long as they have money.

 

Homophobia is even more of issue than class, the unapologetic-ness of presenting gay and lesbian characters as just part of the crowd and deserving their safe space was among the most ground-breaking aspects of the musical.

 

Steve Belli, Markiss Robert, Cierra Jordan, Sophie Katz, Brodey Ott, Jessica Pescosolido, Mason Sacco and Daniela Sawyer round-out the ensemble. Katz, in one of the small parts she plays, is very funny as Mark’s worried mother, frequently calling him on the phone and wondering when he’ll grow up.

 

“Rent” was a phenomenon in its day, compared to the earlier counter-culture musical “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” (1967). And, in its day, the most rabid fans, called “Rent-Heads,” were younger than the audience around me in 2022 and younger than even the characters in the play. They were suburban kids who felt they missed out at the chance for Bohemia (no they didn’t, those of us who understood moved to Brooklyn, still cheap, also cleaner and safer).

 

Time has changed the meaning of this play. Nostalgic from the get-go it has become more-and-more so, the audience’s misty water-color memories have blunted much of the play’s rage. The play closes with the two still breathing HIV infected characters embracing life more fully, but still doomed (from the show-stopper song “La Vie Bohème”: “To faggots, lezzies, dykes, cross-dressers too … to people living with not dying from disease,” but that was an empty promise in 1993). Today, these two seem blessed, likely to live long enough to see better treatments come on the market and likely to get a normal-life span.

 

The play lays out the random predatory violence and the ugliness of the drug culture, the reasons the Police were so apt to abuse these adorable kids, but it didn’t over-linger on them because the first audiences saw it on their way in-and-out of the theatre. Now, it feels sanitized as we happily look upon those days as innocent while BLM protests hold our attentions rapt. But NYC, and most of the USA, in the 1980s were far uglier in terms of random criminality than now, and the Police precinct wherein this drama unfolded features the more dead cops on its Wall of Honor than any other in NYC.

 

Gay marriage is now broadly accepted (though also under threat) while it was unthinkable thirty-years ago. The class prejudices that the play spent so much time on no longer seem worthy of complaining about, which probably means it’s gotten worse. The explicit racism that the play down-played has definitely gotten worse.

 

“Rent” celebrated those whom we generally scape-goat, as they were thirty years passed, we accept them more as audiences of the play, but people like them are still those we scapegoated now. We live in an era where those who incite violence both want their speech protected, and to strip it from all others, where the same people who draft and pass Orwellian “Anti-Woke” legislation are also those who argue that Billionaire former POTUS Trump has somehow has been persecuted.

 

I have fond memories of that East Village moment, but I mostly don’t miss it. I don’t miss being mugged, stepping over bodies curled-up outside my door, a bomb exploding directly across the street from where I slept, or that an international drug dealer resided in my building and had IEDs in his closet, and certainly resented how my White presence was so deeply resented by so many only one-step-more downtrodden than the majority of this plays cast of characters.

 

As for the one character who was really from the bottom of the barrel, Angel, he (I believe the accurate pronoun, Angle presented himself as a transvestite, not a transexual) was almost certainly inspired by Marsha P. Johnson, who annoyed me (though fictional Angel did not). Johnson was a pretty-close-to-homeless, a junkie, a transexual sex-worker, but also a dedicated, if flailing, activist. She was considered an embarrassment to the gay community in life, but in death put on a pedestal by those who still remember her. Her death in 1992 was not beautiful like Angel’s, she was alone, it was violent, either a sordid murder by a customer or a suicide; but in the years following silly conspiracy theories swirl around her because those who cared for her and can’t tolerate the thought that her death was meaningless.

386.3K

Watch All New Footage of FUNNY GIRL on Broadway

K. S. Hymowitz obnoxiously wrote in 2008 “Ah, New York in the '80s and early '90s: the dealers and hookers plying their trades in Times Square; the homeless guys in your face; the car alarms crashing your sleep; crack babies; wildings -- and everyone who possibly could fleeing for New Jersey. When my youngest child went to camp in 1996 and told a bunkmate that she lived in Brooklyn, the girl asked: ‘Have you ever been shot?’

 

"Who would ever long for those days?”

 

That anti-nostalgia is more disingenuous than the indulgent nostalgia. Crack-babies were largely an urban myth. Wildings were real, but the most famous incident proved to be a rail-roading of five minors who were guilty of assaults but convicted for a rape and attempted murder they didn’t commit. And white flight had already reversed, people were coming back into the city and that was essential to the plot of the golly-garsh-darned show.

 

I bet Hymowitz voted for Trump, who wanted the “Central Park Five” executed despite being minors, were not accused of murder, and by 2002 had been already been exonerated.

 

Hymowitz went on to complain how TV mimicked “Rent” with its sitcom-fare, "Friends" (1994) and "Sex and the City" (1998), while only dismissively addressing the play’s sense of dread, that all would disappear with the next strong rain. She did, though, make an observation about the frailty of the nuclear family that touches on what the East Village was before the 1980s, and hasn’t regained since, “Don't worry, the creators of these TV series seemed to say, you are not really orphans; you can create your own family. The city may be bewildering, you may not have anything but leftover Chinese in your refrigerator, you may be terrified of your boss, your love life may be a tale of woe -- but you can still have a community of people who will buy you shots on your birthday.”

 

Larson died stupidly young, with only two full-length plays under his belt, one of which has never been formerly staged. He had three autobiographical one-acts, “30/90,” “Boho Days,” and “Tick, Tick, Boom,” each and expansion of the prior, which provided the foundation of the film “Tick, Tick, Boom” (2021), written by Steven Levison. It was nominated for a couple Oscars and about the terror of needing to achieve something before your time ran out. It was also concerning a time before Larson was working exclusively on “Rent”, and before he knew he was sick.

 

From the New York Times: “Twice doctors failed to diagnose the potentially treatable condition [an aortic aneurysm] that killed him, a four-month investigation by the State Health Department has found. At Cabrini Medical Center, doctors said he had food poisoning. At St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center, doctors said he had a virus. Both hospitals sent him home.”

 

Statements from cast and crew concerning launching the play the day they learned he’d died:

 

“At 8 a.m. the morning of the first preview, my phone rang. It was our production manager saying his body had been found in his apartment.

 

“I was freaked out when Jim called. The insecure actor in me said, ‘I’m getting fired.’ He said, ‘Jesse, we lost Jonathan.’ No part of me heard that Jonathan had died. I thought maybe Jonathan quit.”

 

“We proposed canceling the preview. But the cast felt Jonathan would want the show to go on. So, we compromised that we’d sit on the stage and sing it through, and we could all bring our friends and family.”

 

“The Act Two funeral — I don’t know how Jesse did it. He never wavered. Just from a technical standpoint, when you’re singing your throat kinda has to be open, and when you’re crying it closes up.”

 

“I held the last note so long I almost passed out. Adam Pascal literally held me up. Honestly, it was then that I learned how Collins sings that song. I hate that it was Jonathan’s death that got me there, but it did get me there.”

 

“The preview became this joyous wake to Jonathan.”