The World of 'Rent'

Newsweek
May 13, 1996
By Gregory Beals
With Yahlin Chang and Nina A. Biddle

IN DECEMBER OF 1995, Jonathan Larson wrote his good friend Victoria Leacock a touching Christmas card. This was typical of Larson; even when he was entirely consumed with his work, he still made the effort for his friends. He'd been working on "Rent," obsessing over it, since 1989. Now it was finally going to open. But for both Leacock and Larson, the season was a difficult one. They'd lost two close friends to AIDS since September. Their lives and deaths had been on his mind; he spoke at their memorial services, and wrote both into the fabric of "Rent." So when it came time to compose a Christmas greeting for Leacock, he wrote, "Vic, darling Vicks, '96 will be our year. And no more funerals." She received the card the day after his memorial service.

Larson spent the last weeks of his life overstressed by the demands of his work, and poor as the characters in his show. Then days before his death he had to sell some books to buy a ticket to "Dead Man Walking." His health was deteriorating. A friend brought him care packages--chicken soup, noodles, Mylanta--to combat the dizziness and the stomach problems he was suffering. Final preparations for the show were typically chaotic. In late January, Larson and director Michael Greif were singing one of the songs from the production when Larson felt an acute pain in his chest. "You better call 911," he said. "I think I'm having a heart attack." He was rushed to the hospital, but at ECG revealed no heart irregularities. His friend Eddie Rosenstein, a documentary filmmaker who visited him in the hospital, thought the problem was psychosomatic. This, too, would be typical of Larson. "He blacked out once before a tryout and thought he was having a heart attack." The lyrics Larson and Greif had been singing ran: "We're dying in America to come into our own." Three days later, on Jan. 25, the day of the final dress rehearsal, Larson died in his apartment of an aortic aneurysm. He was 35.

I lived with Jonathan in that apartment on Greenwich Street in downtown Manhattan from February through July 1994. It was a loft space, converted into a three-bedroom apartment. Roommates tended to come and go. The doorbell didn't work, so visitors had to call from the phone on the corner, and we'd toss the keys down. The claw-foot bathtub was in the middle of the kitchen; the roof leaked. Jonathan was from a middle-class background; he grew up in suburban White Plains, N.Y., and had a childhood of drama clubs and trumpet lessons, but he seemed to thrive on the improvisational clutter. Sometimes he tried to impose some order on the decay. He ran fat orange extension cords around the place to make up for the lack of electrical outlets; when the seat covers on the kitchen chairs wore out, Jonathan replaced them with leopard-skin vinyl. But disorder ruled. I remember once watching the news with Jonathan when suddenly he blurted out, "Did you know that this ZIP code has the second highest AIDS rate in the country?" He began telling me about a woman he knew who had contracted the virus sexually at the age of 16. Then, just as abruptly, he started talking about Madonna's outrageous recent appearance on Letterman.

The bohemia of "Rent," though liberally exaggerated, came out of characters whom Jonathan knew and loved. He was sometimes an odd man out in this world: he was as passionate about Broadway and his mentor, Stephen Sondheim, as he was about downtown. We went to a very hip East Village party one time, full of young filmmakers, actors, dancers, artists. When anyone asked what he did, he'd say, "I'm making a rock opera for the '90s.." People just turned away. Finally he learned just to say he was a rock songwriter. Yet he was fiercely engaged with the multiracial, multisexual world downtown, determined to bring it to the stage with sensitivity and affection. Lisa Bonacci, an old girlfriend of his, remembers his telling her that one of the actresses auditioning for the role of Mimi, the HIV-positive dancer at an S/M club, was squeamish about the part. She'd never known anyone who was into S/M. "Oh, really," he joked. "I think all my friends are."

Anthony Rapp, who plays Mark, lives in this world. Rapp, 24, is one of the two openly gay members of the cast. (The major gay characters are played by straight actors.) He lives in an East Village apartment, where for three years he was a squatter. Last week, like many of the players, Rapp seemed tired from the recent publicity blitz; he was also depressed that he'd been snubbed for a Drama Desk award nomination. "If you walk down St. Mark's Place," he says, "you're going to see a lot of people who look like people in the play: our haircuts, our clothes. We recognize this play is a theatricalization of something, but we feel like we're being represented. My friends and I, we want something alive, something relevant, something meaningful, and thrilling and sexy, and sad." He says he related to the no-big-deal sexual fluidity of the show. "My generation is sort of making our own rules about all that stuff," he contends, "and hopefully doing it with safety and respect."

In fact, the cast members, several of whom were not actors, supplied a lot of the energy and breadth of their Characters. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, 24, who plays the transvestite Angel, the show's guiding spirit, says that "you see more of the person than the [skills of the] actor with most of us." Heredia, who was born and still lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, says that for him the East Village is "the only place I felt normal." He settled into the role of Angel without much difficulty. A number of his friends are gay or transvestites, so he was close to the material; the challenge was more to grasp the character's soul. To that end, Angel became Heredia. "People are baring their heart and soul onstage," he says. "We've given at least 70 percent of our own personal character. We're almost all ourselves in different circumstances."

When production began on "Rent," Jonathan called his friend Timothy Britten Parker to offer him a role in the ensemble. He told Parker, "Toby, I'm so happy. I finally have a life in the theater." Larson would have loved to see the way his cast and his characters grew together, changing each other in the process. He was fascinated with other people's tales. The actress Molly Ringwald, a friend of his for the last four years, remembers his helping her move into the apartment. "I knew him as the person who'd hang up my Dustbuster," she says. The day of the move, he sat around her living room with a big smile on his face, looking at all her stuff. "He wanted to know where everything came from," she says. "It wasn't like he was interested in the deco, but in the stories." This was Larson: always devoted, always curious. His stories, and those of his friends, are now the freshest, most loving show on Broadway. He'd have loved to see that, too.