We're Not Gonna Pay

If you haven't read/seen either RENT or ANGELS IN AMERICA, and care if aspects of the endings are revealed, don't read this post.

Lately and suddenly, I have been listening to RENT with a vengeance I have not had since ninth grade, when I had to be obsessed with it because my friends were. It's an amazing phenomenon, really, that everyone of my generation who has any interest in musical theater can sing the entire first track of that musical verbatim. It's leaving me very conflicted, especially because I'm thinking of the polarity surrounding Bush's reelection as similar to that surrounding Reagan's, and, though it was not produced during that time, RENT is one of the two theater pieces that stand as the most prominent works coming out of the late-Reagan, fairly-early-AIDS years. The other is Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA, which I may or may not get to in this post. Yes, the TV movie was recent, but Kushner's play was written in the early '90s about the mid-'80s.

RENT was written by Jonathan Larson (that's got its own controversy attached to it, but I may get to that later), first workshopped at New York Theatre Workshop (an East Village stronghold) in the late '80s and coming to "full fruition" in the early '90s. At NYTW, it was tapped to go to Broadway. It did, and would go on to become a huge hit and cultural phenomenon, but Larson unfortunately died of an aneurysm (sp?) during the first preview. (Controversy: after his death and RENT's success, his dramaturg, whom I've known, sued to get partial authorship credit that she claimed Larson was planning to give her, and it caused a huge and interesting split in the NY artistic community. She eventually lost, but it's still interesting.) By the time RENT made it to Broadway, the marginalized, alternative lifestyles it lauded were barely marginalized and alternative any longer; the East Village was trendy and getting trendier, and while the show would say differently, it was attracting a resident population much like the "good" characters in RENT (not Benny), but richer. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with all this, but I think RENT and the AIDS epidemic are what I wanted to talk about.

Generally, what I feel about RENT is, to paraphrase my mother, that I wish I could hear the next thing Larson would have written. That is, I think Larson's clearly an incredibly talented composer, but RENT, basis on LA BOHEME nonwithstanding, is incredibly trite, both lyrically and message-ly, and that its ending is a serious cop-out. But that takes me to ANGELS IN AMERICA, overall a much better piece, but with the same issues of ending: implausible life-savings, last-minute pull-throughs for no reason except that the authors couldn't bear to let their characters (or in the case of RENT, their characters' lovers; Mimi, in my view, qualifies as little besides an abstraction of love for Roger) die. Instinctively I turn from that as an artist, but at the same time, Kushner and Larson were writing in and/or about the height of the early AIDS epidemic, in a time when particularly artistic circles and circles of homosexual men (a disproportionate number of whom, always, are in the arts) were decimated, leaving particularly gay men but everyone in such circles feeling their lives were both literally and figuratively at risk. (Sometimes I really wish I had been of an age of reason then; it seems awful, but I am so deeply curious about what it was like. G says this is the biggest marker of the five-year age difference between the two of us--I remember when I was just learning to read well, seeing the early signs about AIDS on the subways and figuring out what every word meant, reading the "Decision" comics--the New Yorkers will know what I'm talking about--while G remembers her first complex encounter with it being an HIV+ speaker coming to her high school, and being the only person to talk to the speaker afterwards.) And at that level, I want to be like, so what's wrong with a little wish-fulfillment? You're watching tons of people in your life die, and you can't bear to let too many people in your theatrical work do so. Can I fault authors for that?

It's dishonest, though, and what I value most in art is honesty. The endings are illogical in the worlds they have created, RENT much more so than ANGELS IN AMERICA (my biggest dramaturgical problem in the latter piece is not with the ending per se, but with Prior's encounter with the Angel--the answer he comes up with seems way too simplistic), and therefore betray both their writings and their audience. RENT's got plenty of other problems on that front too, and if you really care, I think you should read, or borrow from me, Sarah Schulman's book STAGESTRUCK. While she can be kind of a pain in the ass, she's got a lot of interesting things to say about RENT. Basically, she wrote a novel with a very similar storyline--including many of the non-LA-BOHEME-oriented plot details--except that a lesbian, one of the Maureen/Joanne couple (I've yet to read her novel, so I'm not clear which) was the protagonist and the novel placed the gay experience as the central, protagonistic viewpoint, whereas in RENT, whatever marginalized groups we are exposed to, our protagonists, the people who lead us into and through the plot, are the two white straight men in its entire world, Roger and Mark. This is true even if you believe, as I do, that Collins and Angel are the only compelling romantic couple in the piece (even as "Today 4 U" is one o the biggest pain-in-the-ass songs ever). And the truth is that RENT probably could not be the hit it is if not for that. We can hear and sympathize with the straight white guy's gay friends (I recall TM, when I was a freshman in high school and he a junior, saying of Joanne and Maureen, "But it was dumb! I mean, I know some lesbians, and they're mad cool, yo! Those lesbians [i.e. M & J] spend all their time just being lesbians!"), but we, the audience, cannot be asked to *be* the homosexuals/minorities ourselves. The straight white guy has the universal experience that can lead us into this world, and the straight white author (Larson) is the one who can see all the viewpoints within it. So Schulman claims, and while I think she has a lot of minor points that can be successfully challenged, for me that part kind of stands. Also, it allows SWG to avoid feeling his automatic complicit-ness with the establishment, if this is the world he gets to lead us into.

Will we get the kind of art out of Bush's second term that many got out of Reagan's second term and its aftermath? Will the Iraq War/the War on Terrorism take on the artistic magnitude of either the early AIDS epidemic or, earlier, the Vietnam War? Will we be able to find that kind of resonance in it? What does it mean to find that kind of resonance in it? I think I'm going to stop here, because this is going to be a much much much longer post if I try to go into all of that now. What are other people's thoughts on this front? I'm not talking about Artistic Revolution here--though I do want to go into that further, talk about RENT versus HAIR as embodiments of a generation, bla bla bla etcetera--but more about what an artistic community does in response to disaster, not just Bread-and-Puppet-esque direct-action political theater but what politics infuses, and what's the cause of our doing art; at what point, especially in this country, politics infuses our daily lives enough to be in all our important theater . . .