“Rent” Returns
By LINDA BUCHWALD
When Rent opened in 1996, AIDS was very much in the public eye. Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” was AIDS researcher David Ho, and new drug treatments were helping AIDS patients live longer. Those milestones underscored the musical’s message that someone could live with (and not just die from) the disease, and that message helped the musical become such a culturally relevant phenomenon.
But can the phenomenon continue? Can Rent mean something in New York City in 2011, when issues like gay marriage have taken center stage and AIDS, though still uncured, no longer dominates the public conversation?
He acknowledges that Rent is a product of its time. A rock update of Puccini’s La Boheme, it follows a group of young artists and musicians on the Lower East Side in the early 1990s. They grapple with love, sex, community, ambition, and poverty, and several of them—including the male and female leads—have AIDS. “I feel like what an HIV status meant in ’92 is very different from what it means in 2011, and I think the characters’ psychologies are true to what those diagnoses meant at that time,” Greif says
Still, as the recent revivals of Angels in America and The Normal Heart have shown, work about the early days of the AIDS crisis can still find an audience, and not necessarily because it deals with the disease. “It’s great dramatic literature,” says Greif, who also directed the <i>Angels</i> remount. “They’re great plays about enormous issues—personal, political issues. I think those plays will always be successful because they’re great plays.”
To that end, he’s confident that younger audiences seeing <i>Rent</i> for the first time will connect to the show: “I think they’ll relate to it the way young people always relate to it. It’s about a group of friends who are there for one another and get [each other] through life and death situations. It’s about building a family out of your peer group, and I think in many ways that’s always been its enormous appeal to young people who are just about to make their way out in the world and start families of their own and families in very non-traditional senses of the word.”
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Linda Buchwald is a writer based in New York City. You can find her on Twitter at @PataphysicalSci