525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

TimesPeople
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

September 21, 2008
525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

“RENT” closed with the usual celebratory brouhaha. Hours before its final curtain on Sept. 7, the sidewalk in front of the Nederlander Theater, where the musical had played for more than a dozen years, was strewn with barricades signaling the potential presence of celebrity — or at least the expensively self-important. Gawkers piled up three or four deep behind the barriers, cellphones in picture-taking mode.

Sure enough, a freshly minted young tabloid star stepped out of a car and splashed into the glare of television cameras, looking at home in the spotlight, her long tresses curling picturesquely across her shoulders, beautiful accessory boyfriend huddled protectively (if a little shortly) at her elbow.

She was Blake Lively, a star of “Gossip Girl.” Or so I was told by the daughter of a colleague. And that Abercrombie boy was no mere human bangle but a star in his own right, Penn Badgley, of the same television series.

“Oh, my God, I’m such a teenager,” my informant added sheepishly, and charmingly, embarrassed by her excitement. She needn’t have been. In the presence of celebrities who cause paparazzi stampedes — even celebrities you’ve only vaguely heard of — most of us regress to jittery teendom just a little. She at least had the excuse of actually being a teenager.

Blake and Penn soon moved onto the red carpet, into the theater and presumably out of my life. (But by the way, when did soap actors begin acquiring the names of soap characters?) Yet as I watched “Rent,” I wondered what these two glittery young stars would make of the world conjured onstage by Jonathan Larson, an urban landscape in which hope and promise were shadowed by disease and despair. It is a milieu far removed from the New York of today — and thank goodness. While rents may be even more dizzyingly out of reach for struggling artists in new-millennium New York, a plague no longer casts a pall over the city’s creative community.

Today’s Blakes and Penns, born in the late 1980s, had not hit puberty when “Rent” opened on Broadway in 1996, after it scorched its way into history at its Off Broadway premiere at the New York Theater Workshop. Would they be perplexed by the frequent allusions to AZT, a problematic if promising early therapy for H.I.V.? Would they have any understanding of the grimmer details of what the characters go through?

For what struck me on my return to the show — which I had not seen on Broadway since shortly after it opened — was how deeply it is saturated in the anxious, dark, embattled mood of the moment in which it was created, when AIDS was ravaging the bohemian enclaves of New York and every other major city.

The passing of time can transform your perceptions of art. When I first saw “Rent,” I found some of its characters flimsy and stereotyped. (I admit I still cringe at the cheesy outfits of the drag-queen character, Angel; drag queens of my acquaintance were and are far more stylish.) At the time I was roughly the age of the East Villagers in the musical, and while I lived in Los Angeles for most of my 20s, I visited New York regularly and certainly moved among people a lot like them: recent college grads with more attitude and artistic aspirations than money.

Perhaps because I lived in a milieu similar to the one depicted onstage, in which the specter of early death seemed to cast its shadow everywhere, the immediacy of the show did not seem particularly remarkable. Maybe because the surface details of the characters’ experience were familiar to me, they seemed shallowly drawn onstage, sketched in shorthand. I suspect I overlooked the depth of feeling with which Larson wrapped a generation of young, ambitious and threatened characters in a musical embrace.

What impressed me most forcibly at the final performance was the empathetic reach of the writing, the generosity of spirit driving both words and music. Larson lived among and loved the people he was writing about, ached for their losses, expressed their fears, dreams and everyday indignities in sharp lyrics and evocative melodies that drew on both Broadway forms and pop and rock sounds.

One of the weaknesses that bothered me a dozen years ago — the ending that finds the doomed Mimi springing back to life after appearing to expire — strikes me today as a flaw that Larson may have recognized but could not bring himself to correct. The integrity of art must have seemed a less urgent priority than the dissemination of hope. The awkward affixing of a happy ending to a fundamentally tragic story was a form of prayer, a plea that life might imitate art. I probably rolled my eyes at this absurd resurrection in 1996; this time I fought back tears.

Larson’s book and lyrics are steeped in references to the physical and psychological struggles faced by people with AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, before the drug cocktails that have made the disease more manageable. Four of the play’s main characters — the heroin-addicted Mimi; her ex-heroin-addict boyfriend, Roger; the black activist, Tom Collins; and his lover, Angel — are H.I.V.-positive. The musical also includes a sequence set at a support group for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. One of the show’s most moving songs — “Will I?” — consists of just three questions set to a simple, mournful, gently shaped melody, sung not by the principal characters but by the more anonymous members of the support group:

Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

You probably need to have lived among gay men coming of age during the years when AIDS became a global calamity to recognize just how much bone-deep knowledge of the specific terrors of the time is packed into those three little lines.

They conjure the afflictions of the opportunistic infections that made the disease such a dreadful one; the stigma that was attached to it; the fear of dying lonely and abandoned; and the vague, oppressive, almost unbearable anxieties that young people — with the disease or living in terror of contracting it — had to live with every day. The epidemic left a psychic mark on a generation of artists as surely as the Vietnam War did; the difference is that many of the artists responding to AIDS ultimately succumbed to the condition, their mature responses to it never to be shown on gallery walls or in theaters.

Larson himself, of course, did not live to enjoy the global success of “Rent” or to see how, in just a few years, the fates of characters like Mimi, Roger and Angel would have been altered by advances in the treatment of AIDS. In one of the saddest circumstances in theater history he died at 35 of an aortic aneurysm after the final dress rehearsal of the Off Broadway run. (I should add that AIDS continues to claim lives today, in New York and across the globe, and the medical advances have inadvertently led to a disturbing ignorance about the realities of living with H.I.V.)

“Rent” has been a phenomenal success in New York and around the world, and the story does not stop with the end of its first Broadway run. The final performance, filmed in high-definition digital video, will be screened this week at some 500 movie theaters in the United States and Canada. (Details are at thehotticket.net/rent.) A new tour, featuring Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp from the original cast, begins in Cleveland in January.

And while you might expect that a musical grounded so specifically in a historical moment would have a date stamp on its endurance, the surprising resurgence of “Hair” this summer in Central Park provides proof to the contrary. Diane Paulus’s frisky production of that frolicking-hippie musical from 1967 will move to Broadway next year.

Nostalgia for the flower-power era is surely behind much of the enthusiasm for the show, which remains a sweet but rather scattered and shallow exploration of a complex time. But wait a minute — I once thought that was the rap on “Rent.” Whether either musical is perfect seems beside the point. Just a dozen years after its premiere “Rent” has become a vital, even precious document of a tumultuous era — much like “Hair,” in truth.

On the way home from the theater I remained under the spell of the musical’s powerful evocation of a time that is not very distant chronologically but seems eons ago spiritually. “How did we get through it?” I found myself asking, recalling the years of grim statistics and rumored advances in treatment that didn’t pan out, the burdensome sadness, the fear and sense of futility as yet more news came about the illness of a friend or acquaintance or luminary.

Instantly I caught myself. How did we get through it? Too many of us didn’t.