Musical Cyberspace

So – to wrap up my thoughts about RENT before I move onto the next musical of the many that spin around in my mind. At any rate, I reached the point where I think I became more receptive to the show – having moved out of the realms of academia, perhaps I was less reliant on intellect and more open to a more visceral experience of RENT.

So I went along to see the South African production of the show, along with a group of thirty-odd girls from the school where I teach. Now let’s face it, the staging of the show has more than a handful of effective moments: the post-funeral fight between the main characters, the cluster of “Christmas Bells” carolers complete with rude hand gestures, the stunning journey of Mimi from her apartment down to Roger’s loft in “Out Tonight”, the table dance in “La Vie Boheme” and – most of all – the line up that is first seen in “Seasons of Love” and which is reprised to devastating effect after Angel’s death.

But there are problems with the staging – notably, the whole seems less than the sum of its parts. Partly this has to do with the often alienating manner in which the cast is directed in its relationship to the audience. On one hand, the staging is presentational, like a concert, confronting the audience with the world the show represents. On the other, there are purely representational scenes and these are woodenly staged in a faux-realistic style that just excludes the audience. After all, this is live theatre – there is no camera to allow us focus into something we can’t see. And that is a problem, I think, for an audience member who isn’t familiar with the show’s lyrics: RENT is convoluted, you have to listen to know what’s going on and this kind of staging doesn’t encourage you to connect with the show. This is dangerous is a show that is, in some senses, all about making connections.

I also felt that the multimedia aspects of the show weren’t really successful – particularly the climactic film sequence floundered in this production – and the design, with the multi-purpose sculpture as its central feature, doesn’t seem to maximize the use of space on the stage and indeed obscures some the action that occurs further upstage.

So why, with all of these problems, did I see the show three times? Because the experience confirmed my feelings that the primary problems of RENT have more to do with Michael Grief’s staging concept (handled here in the hands of original cast member Anthony Rapp) for the show than with Jonathan Larson’s text for the show. Yes, Larson’s work has its problems – the clarity of the narrative, some dodgy lyrics and so forth – but what lies at the centre of the piece is a heart that beats passionately. The show truly does make you look at your life because there’s a bit of you in each of the characters: in Mimi’s sexuality, in Roger’s insecurity, in Maureen’s passion, in Mark’s neurosis, in Joanne’s conviction, in Collins’ subversiveness and in Angel’s profound love for his friends, for life and for every moment. That’s what makes me love RENT in spite of everything: after more than a decade, when I am far away from the literal experiences of these characters there is still a message about how you measure your life. Second for second, there’s no day but today and – if you’ll forgive the sentiment and the idealism – that day is better lived when you love and you let yourself be loved in return.

During the time I spent reading for my Honours degree in Drama a dramaturg came to work with the theatre-making students on campus. Although I was not directly involved with any of the projects she co-ordinated, I attended her seminar on dramaturgy during which she mentioned the case of Lynn Thompson, a dramaturg who had worked on RENT, as an example of how difficult it was to prove ownership of material when in this enabling role. Apparently, Thompson felt she deserved more credit (and royalties) for her contributions to the show.

I went to the library to scour through the RENT book that, until this point, had been one of my primary resources in my study of the show. On the shelf was a new book by Sarah Schulman entitled: Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.

Schulman’s book mentions the Thompson case and alleges that some of the show’s narrative points and character beats were plagiarised from her novel, People in Trouble. It’s an interesting read and Schulman makes a strong case. Both cases were failures in terms of legal challenges to the ownership of RENT but Shulman’s book is successful in bringing into focus some criticisms of RENT that seemed to be hovering in some kind of liminality. So while the accusations of plagiarism were shocking and disturbing, what did prove valuable to me was Schulman’s discussion of the identity politics in the show. Suddenly, I was seeing things in a new light.

In the book, Schulman says:

“The message of my novel is that personal homophobia becomes social neglect, that there is a direct relationship between the two. The message of RENT is quite the opposite, that straight people are the heroic centre of the AIDS crisis.”

What did this mean to me? On one level, I had to confront the uneasiness I felt regarding the final scene in the show, when Mimi seems to die but then miraculously recovers. Now I realise that Jonathan Larson wanted to communicate a message of hope, but the way that this is realised in the text and reinforced in the staging of the show never sat well with me. But why? That was something that had always eluded me. Shulman gave me the tools, the language, the vocabulary to articulate what I was feeling:

“RENT clearly depicts a world in which heterosexual love is true love. Homosexual love exists but is inherently secondary in that it is either doomed or shallow or both.”

Warning: I am about to go to a point in time when I became extremely “political” and anti-RENT. What was once such a satisfying whole for me fell into little bits when I began to re-examine the show with new eyes. I have reconstructed this partly by looking at fragments of discussions I had during 2005 on a forum known as musicals.net and partly by delving into the shaky territory of memory.

The first thing that became problematic for me was that the only time you get to see Angel and Collins interacting as a male-male couple is in the scene where they first meet and when Angel becomes sick and dies. This visually reinforces the male-female relationship paradigm that the show, according to Schulman, places above all others. The audience feels more comfortable because the man looks like he’s with a woman therefore it is easier to accept/approve of the relationship because Angel’s “not really a man” and the audience can go away feeling very pleased with themselves for how tolerant they are when in fact their perceptions may not have been challenged at all. Schulman refers to this as the creation of a “fake, public homosexuality”.

And when Angel is sick and obviously going to die and the fact that we seem them as a male-male couple validates one of the old prejudices against gay men who have sex: they get infected by HIV and die. And because the characters are such nice people individually, the audience can feel sorry for them and feel proud of how tolerant they are because – “look, we can empathise with the plight of the gay man in a contemporary world”.

And this is all exacerbated by the fact that Mimi, who seems to die, gets a song sung to her by Roger and comes back to life. Collins wasn’t able to do this: he wasn’t able to “cover” Angel when it really counted. On some level this narrative implies that straight love is more powerful than gay love – so much so that it can reverse the course of Death. This ending also contradicts the “No Day But Today” premise of the show. Why live as if there is “no day but today”, when even death isn’t a barrier? At least if you’re straight.

I guess ultimately it is about manipulation: Mimi’s survival creates a genuine feeling of upliftment in the audience at the end of the show.

Now I did warn you that I was going to get extreme. Even reading through this now, I pause to wonder if I wasn’t being swayed by Schulman’s opinions too much. But I guess – and now it is time for another quote – that RENT had to be rent so that I could put it back together again and get to grips with the way I ultimately feel about this show.

Derek Walcott says:

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of the original shape.”

This was to be the next step in the journey…