A Show About Something
By Ryan Perez Adame
Rent is about something. That's been our company mantra since our first rehearsal. Maybe that seems obvious, but having seen a number of productions of this musical over the years, that wasn't always clear to me as an audience member. It has often felt like a rock concert to me (albeit an enjoyable one), but not so much a story about real people or actual lives.
Real lives, deaths, and displacements informed the characters created by Jonathan Larson. At the heart of the rhythms and melodies of this energizing and eclectic score are the final breaths of the tens of thousands of AIDS patients who died from the beginning of the epidemic until Rent opened on Broadway in 1996 - more than 40,000 deaths each year in 1993, 1994, and 1995 alone. As a not-yet-out gay young man who turned 15 in 1995 - the year with the single highest number of AIDS-related deaths recorded in the United States - the images and signals of the late 80s into the early 90s impacted me in ways I'm still considering and unpacking thirty years later.
Those images of sick, dying gay men, of enraged protesters, the AIDS quilt on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. left me with the haunting idea that being gay meant disease and dying young. And doing so alone. Missing were the pictures of our lesbian sisters wiping the feverish brows of their gay friends in their last hours when no one else, not even nurses and doctors would. Also missing were the photos of makeshift funerals held by chosen family members because funeral homes refused to accept the bodies of the dead. Absent from those images were the care, profound compassion, love, fight, and spirit of our beautiful Queer family. The images of what it means to be a community.
That's what I think Rent is about: community. But not just any community: our Queer community. Our brick-throwing, riotous, fabulous, pole-dancing, two-parent-nuclear-family-having, black, brown, cis, trans, non-binary, all-walks-of-life community. The challenges facing our community today aren't new; the language and methods being employed to target our Trans family are eerily, sadly from the same tired playbook that has always been used against Queer people. It will take more than "a thousand sweet kisses" to protect the legal rights and bodies of our family, but without them, without the tendernesses and intimacies that were denied to so many dying AIDS patients, what will be the measure of our lives as individuals? or more importantly, as a community?
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