RENT as Unintentional Period Piece
This is one of a few articles detailing different musicals, and what it really means to be a product of its time. First, we go to the currently trendy 1990s with Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus RENT.
Some musicals are very much a product of their time. To explore these unintentional period pieces, the reviews and receptions of these musicals are key. Furthermore, the revival dates are of keen interest, as the choice to revive a particular show can be similarly reflective of contemporary attitudes.
RENT, for example, with its Broadway debut in 1996, very quickly became dated owing to two factors: 9/11 and the Internet. Internet cafes and email are mentioned very briefly, but the events of the musical take place in a world largely unaffected by the digital revolution.
What technological advances we do see regularly are what poor artists would have had access to in the mid-1990s- phones (only Benny and Joanne seem to have mobile phones) Mark’s camera, and the broken sound equipment Mark and Joanne need to wrestle with to make Maureen’s show happen.
Technology, when used, is used to create space. Mark uses his camera to insulate himself from real life. Every character uses their voicemail to ignore their parents. Benny only communicates with his unseen wife, Allison, by phone. Allison is never made sympathetic, even with Benny’s poor treatment of her. Maureen’s equipment is the only exception- through its failure. When the equipment fails to work, Mark and Joanne find a connection they would never have made with functioning technology. In fact, the catalyst of the entire play begins when Benny has the electricity shut off in Mark and Roger’s building.
In present day media, technology is still used to show disconnection from each other while also a connection to the greater world, as shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Be More Chill incorporate cell phones and social media to create both space and connection between their protagonists, their love interests and families, and the world around them.
Set at the height of the AIDS crisis, the characters specifically name AZT several times. Half of the principal cast suffers from AIDS. However, Larson still manages to fall prey to the tropes of the time. The only white, heterosexual character to have AIDS is recovering drug addict Roger. Collins, a homosexual traditionally played by a black man; Angel, a trans woman; and Mimi Marquez, a Latina exotic dancer and addict, are traditional “victims” of the AIDS crisis. Maureen and Mark, both white, sober, and coming from traditional families, avert this, despite Maureen’s lack of caution and monogamy throughout the play. Joanne and Benny both conform to stereotypes, with him being moneyed and heterosexual, while she is a lesbian lawyer. Though both are traditionally played by black actors, their status as upper-middle-class seems to protect them, despite Benny’s known sexual relationship with HIV-positive Mimi. In an earlier draft of RENT, this was even worse- only white, male, heterosexual Mark Cohen was HIV-negative.
Though there is no denying how humanized Larson’s AIDS patients are, they all play into the stigma surrounding AIDS at the time. There is no Ryan White, an innocent who contracted HIV through a medical mistake, or anyone representing the countless people who develop the virus after a heterosexual encounter. Despite his efforts to humanize AIDS and its victims, he manages to other the disease as a problem unique to the Bohemians. Theatergoers would not have gotten the message that HIV is- and especially was at the time- everyone’s problem.
In 1996, the very year RENT began performances off and on Broadway, the year Jonathan Larson died, the Center for Disease Control downgraded AIDS from a fatal illness to a chronic one, signaling the end of AIDS panic in the United States. However, at the time RENT was written, HIV was a death sentence. Jonathan Larson also conveniently glosses over the ugly parts of AIDS, instead representing characters like Mimi and Angel as beautiful and luminous even in near-death. Larson, being HIV-, does make unfortunate and narrow-minded choices in refusing to give a less traditional “victim” HIV.
Mimi’s life came at the price of Angel’s, with the latter’s death serving as the emotional low point in the middle of Act 2. Angel’s death is the catalyst for the rest of the action of the musical, causing Roger to leave Mimi and pursue his vague dream of Santa Fe, causing her to slump into the depression that leads to her near-death of apathy in the park, where Maureen finds her.
Larson actually does consider an issue ahead of his time with the inclusion of trans woman Angel Dumott-Schaunard. Only presenting to the audience as male when she is dying, throughout the rest of the play Angel presents and is referred to as a female. Angel is an important representation well before her time. The inclusion of queer characters is also a hallmark of its time: in the 1990s, we were only just beginning to see mainstream representations of queer characters in shows such as Will and Grace and films such as The Birdcage (itself based on the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles.)
Along with queer characters, RENT embodies the here-and-now, no-day-but-today attitude that Sarah Taylor Ellis explores in her article on queer temporality in RENT. This timeline emphasizes living in the moment, since HIV+ people were all too aware of their shortened time on earth, and the uncertainty of their own futures. Arguing that heteronormative time is forward progressing and sensible, RENT sets its first act within a single night, while its second takes place over an entire year. The importance of time is clear. With every song in Act Two, we are told exactly when it occurs, from the Act Two Openers “Happy New Year A & B” to Finale A &B, which open the exact same way as the show’s opening of Tune Up #1
It must be mentioned, of course, that most of the plot of Rent is lifted from La Boheme, an 18th century Puccini opera. However, in the opera, only Mimi is affected by the plague of the times- tuberculosis- and she actually dies at the end, instead of having the suitably dramatic death and uplifting (if unlikely) resurrection Mimi Marquez enjoys.
Unlike opera, 1990s musical theater trended towards happier endings. Ben Brantley recognizes this trend in his April 30, 1996 New York Times review of RENT when he says that collectively, the cast members “beam with the good will and against-the-odds optimism that is at the heart of the American musical” despite being “fringe artists, drag queens and H.I.V.-infected drug users.” This juxtaposition of the innocence of the American musical and the timeliness of the issues was what made RENT a financial success.
Brantley’s review reflects this “theater-as-theme park” attitude that began in the 1980s with the British mega-musical. He describes the Nederlander theater, completely revamped for the show that was the jewel in the 1995 Off-Broadway season’s crown:
“Furthermore, the Nederlander, a theater that has long been dark, has been decorated with all manner of downtown accouterments: its exterior has hand-painted urban murals, and inside there is fake leopard carpeting and the sort of crockery mosaics that can be found on the bases of lamp posts on St. Mark’s Place.
But let’s not kid ourselves. This is the stuff of theater-as-theme park, and the Nederlander has become East Village Land, much in the way that the Eugene O’Neill Theater, where the revival of “Grease” is running, is 1950’s Land. And the top ticket price for “Rent” is a whopping $67.50, a figure that would feed most of its cast in an Avenue B restaurant.”
These certainly are tone-deaf elements to RENT. With Broadway audiences tending to be at least middle-class in socioeconomic standards to pay those $67.50 ticket prices, having dancing homeless people may make them uncomfortable. They can be perceived as exploitative or, taken at face value, a reminder that homeless people are people.
Echoing that but-not-too-edgy feeling is how essentially silly Maureen’s protest is. Despite the courage of numbers like “Contact,” Maureen’s protest is a surprisingly milquetoast condemnation of corporate America. The climax of Act One- Maureen’s performance protest and resulting riot among the homeless of Avenue B- echoes a real event in Thompkins Park in January 1988, when several thousand homeless people were evicted after complaints from the gentrifying forces that are taking hold in the play through Benny. Filmmakers, like those echoed in Mark Cohen, captured the event, providing evidence against seventeen police officers. The park wasn’t closed entirely until 1991.
Much of the criticism leveled at RENT attacks it for its success- indeed, that by becoming a Broadway hit, the small, intimate New York Theater Workshop hit sold out as much as Mark did working for Buzzline.
Because no discussion of RENT can ignore it, we must now discuss the death of Jonathan Larson. Only five years after the death of white-hot grunge god Kurt Cobain, Larson provided a tragic, visionary icon for the cynical mid-90s. Larson’s other well-known work, Tick, Tick, BOOM! explores more timeless concerns of aging out of relevance, starting a family, and the nomadic life of an artist against the settled life of a family man.
What might be the most unintended example of the unintentional period piece works on this sad, microcosmic level. Mark and Roger seek to immortalize themselves, their friends, and the time and place within which they exist through art. By making a piece that eminently captures a snapshot of the 1990s East Village, Jonathan Larson achieved the goal of his characters.
Works Cited:
Brantley, Ben. “Enter Singing: Young, Hopeful, and Taking on the Big Time.” The New York Times. April 30, 1996
Ellis, Sarah Taylor. “‘No Day but Today’: Queer Temporality in Rent.” Studies in Musical Theater 5.2 (August 2011): 195–201. EbscoHost. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
