60 pages • 2 hours read
Jonathan LarsonRent
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Rent
The motif of “rent” has clear significance as the title of the play, and the opening number explores the immediate importance of rent in the lives of the main characters. Rent is the difference between living in an apartment and setting up a tent on the vacant lot, and Benny, who allowed Mark and Roger to live rent-free for a year, tries to coerce them to stop Maureen’s protest by flexing his power over their access to housing. As the musical demonstrates, rent, especially expensive rent, provides an obstacle for those who are trying to escape from poverty. It requires high payment for something that is essential to survival but provides no investment or asset for the renter. Rent is foundational in capitalist mechanisms that make advancement and property ownership difficult or impossible for much of the working class. Despite more recent criticisms of Rent that address the main characters’ refusal to acquire gainful employment and pay rent, the play also suggests that the bootstraps mentality of capitalism is faulty, and hard work hardly guarantees the ability to rise above poverty or even achieve self-sufficiency. Mimi, for example, works hard as an exotic dancer, which is a demanding and dangerous job. Collins is a highly educated and qualified professor, but he finds himself caught up in the drudgery of overwork while still living in poverty. Angel is a street musician whose income is inconsistent at best. The two characters who have wealth have been able to acquire it only through generational advantage and privilege. Joanne is an Ivy League-educated lawyer because her parents are wealthy and politically connected. Benny married into generational wealth. For the other characters, working long hours for low wages seems to be a minimal-reward situation, particularly for those who have limited time and are trying to make art.
In Benny’s case, he bought the entire building with his newfound wealth, and he seems to have originally had altruistic intentions toward his friends by allowing them to live rent-free. Joining the upper classes changed Benny’s outlook, as evidenced by his verbal abuse of the people who are living rent-free in tents on his property. It also comes with strings attached that don’t allow him to prioritize his former friends’ access to shelter over the investment plan that Benny apparently presented to his in-laws to convince them to buy the building. Benny doesn’t need his friends’ rent money, but he needs their cooperation. His access to wealth is only as secure as his marriage. Rent equals precarity, raising the issue of permanence and stability in all aspects of life, including the continuance of life itself. Just as one financial misfortune can mean the difference between paying rent and sleeping on the street, one encounter often changed the lives of those who became infected with HIV/AIDS, particularly in the years when modes of transmission weren’t fully understood. In this sense, life is only a rental, as are relationships, artistic inspiration, and fame and fortune. Collins and Angel make the clear decision to invest their time, love, and pain in their relationship, even with the knowledge that it isn’t theirs to keep. For Mark, who sees himself as the group member who is burdened with survival and, therefore, a need to plan for the future, he nearly sells out his principles for money because, “When you’re living in America at the end of the millennium, you’re what you own” (129). Mark and Roger conclude, “I don’t own emotion—I rent” (129).
Jonathan Larson saw the title as not only referring to the notion of renting property, but also in terms of that which is rent, or torn apart. In “Rent,” Mark and the company sing about how the past “reaches way down deep and tears you inside out ’til you’re torn apart—rent,” and the entire cast asks, “What binds the fabric together when the raging, shifting winds of change keep ripping away?” (12). The musical is essentially about a year in the lives of people who are fighting to avoid being torn apart by capitalism, disease, betrayal, and the constantly shifting landscapes of their lives. On New Year’s, the group makes a toast and a resolution to always stay friends, but they are almost immediately separated when they go off into their separate romantic pairings, leaving Mark alone. Meanwhile, the three romantic relationships come together and are repeatedly ripped apart by pride, fear, addiction, and death. At Angel’s funeral, Collins is disturbed that the members of the group that he sees as family can’t seem to stand each other. With Angel gone and Roger leaving town, Collins views this moment as the group’s final rending. Without Roger’s guitar, he’ll never write his song, and without the group to film, Mark won’t finish his documentary. But Roger returns, and the group manages to pull back together after a year, although Angel is gone, and Roger has been unsuccessful in finding their missing piece, Mimi. The musical suggests that there is a primacy to their chosen family that survives even as its members are torn apart and brought back together, just like bloodlines in a biological family. In the end, Mimi returns because she is drawn back home to her family when she is at her most desperate.
The Answering Machine
Throughout the musical, the answering machine is a recurring symbol as the (often comical) gatekeeper that allows the main characters to decide whom to allow into their lives. Primarily, the characters use their machines to avoid their parents. As a device, the use of the answering machine comments on the way changing technology complicates personal connection—a commentary that reverberates from its original mid-‘90s context to resonate in new ways in contemporary productions. On one hand, the answering machine facilitates connection. A person can go out and live life without missing out on a call from a loved one or someone offering an opportunity. But on the other hand, it provides a layer of technology that interrupts connection. As evidenced in the play, the characters, like many people since the advent of voice mail, screen their calls. In the musical’s first voice message, Mark’s mother is taken aback by the machine’s loud beep and unsure whether the machine is even functioning. She also asks Mark if he’s home and screening his calls, a question that recurs throughout the musical as the characters who call often view the answering machine as a personal affront. For example, Joanne repeatedly calls Maureen and tells her through the answering machine to stop screening and pick up her calls. Then, at New Year’s, the tables turn, and Maureen is begging through Joanne’s answering machine for her to answer, interrupted by Joanne’s entrance, demonstrating that she wasn’t screening at all. The answering machine offers an opportunity to catch potential missed connections, but it also provides an obligation to return a call that can’t be avoided without sending a clear message of indifference or even animosity. This same phenomenon of communication manifests in the 21st century through texting and the expectation of availability and response that takes on meaning—whether intended or unintended—when neglected.
The irony of what Mark and Roger call “connection—in an isolating age” (130) is the way the characters use connective technology as a way to distance themselves, particularly from people they don’t want to face. Roger’s former girlfriend, April, communicated the impossibly difficult news that they both had AIDS with a written note and the much larger and less ignorable message of her own body after dying by suicide. By slitting her wrists, April exposed not only her diagnosis but also the spreading blood in their bathroom, which contained the materiality of their disease. In contrast to the answering machine, April’s body and blood are messages that don’t expect or even allow for a response, but they create a visceral connection through the trauma of finding her and the potential danger presented by her blood. Her death communicated her own feelings of hopelessness in a way that denied the possibility of help or intervention. Afterward, Roger essentially cuts off communication with everyone but his roommate, overwhelmed with the burden of April’s message. He becomes sober, which is significant since Roger and April seemingly contracted HIV/AIDS from contaminated heroin needles. Roger also becomes afraid of connecting again. The only answering machine message for Roger that appears in the play comes near the end, when his mother calls to express worry about where he is. Roger has communicated with her through postcards about moving to Santa Fe and then moving back, keeping the line of communication closed between himself and his mother. Alongside the message from Roger’s mother are messages from Mimi’s mother, Joanne’s father, and Mark’s mother, all wondering where their children are, which is especially poignant from Mimi’s mother, since Mimi is missing.
One of the central themes in Rent is the concept of creating one’s own family when one’s biological family fails to be accepting. In “La Vie Bohème,” Mark lists the characteristics of being bohemian, including “hating dear old mom and dad” (73). Part of living outside mainstream approval, particularly for the LGBTQ community but also for artists, sex workers, drug users, and those with HIV/AIDS, is the potential for ostracism from family and community. Through the answering machine, their parents show varying levels of tolerance. Mark’s messages from his mother seem the most supportive. She talks about having sent Mark a hot plate, offering sympathy over his breakup with Maureen and confidence that he can find someone else. She also hints at potential conflict between Mark and his father when she congratulates him for making the news and adds, “Even your father says Mazel Tov” (94), urging Mark to call him. Alexi Darling becomes an extension of Mark’s parents’ expectations by offering a mainstream job that would make his parents proud but would violate his personal ethics. Joanne’s parents want a relationship with their daughter, or at least a public show of one, but they don’t want her to read as a lesbian through her clothing or by showing up to events with a partner. Maureen’s voice on Joanne’s answering machine is a clear signal of their lesbian domesticity, but Joanne’s parents dismiss her show as if it’s a silly hobby, unworthy of Joanne’s time, unlike unwed mothers in Harlem. Roger and Mimi’s mothers seemingly show concern only when they receive no communication. Collins pronounces the group a family, but their unity as a family turns out to be as tumultuous and difficult as that of a biological one.
Mark’s Camera
At the beginning of Act I, Mark addresses the audience to give some brief exposition about where, when, and who he is. Then, the musical begins when Mark turns on the camera to film, and it ends a year later with the viewing of the documentary he makes, framing the entire musical through the parameters of Mark’s gaze and perception. Mark also serves as an ipso facto narrator as he occasionally adds his voiceover to the footage he is filming. Mark serves as a stand-in for the author, Jonathan Larson, who wrote the story from a similar perspective as a straight, white, HIV-negative man who was affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis through his close friends but expected—erroneously but perhaps reasonably—to be one of the few to survive. Mark announces in his opening lyrics that he is, from that moment, filming unscripted in hopes of finding something that he has been heretofore unable to show with his scripted films. During the opening sequence of songs, Mark and Roger complain of the cold and the lack of heat in the apartment, and they start burning what they can find in their illegal woodstove. Mark brings out his screenplays, and as he and Roger toss them in, they read lines aloud that relate to fire and burning. By offering his screenplays to the fire, Mark is emphasizing his statement about shooting his film unscripted, making implicit commentary about his attempt to represent something that captures reality. Thus, Mark resists Benny’s offer for space in a technologically advanced studio with virtual reality capabilities because he sees virtual reality and technology-supplemented ease as distancing from the grit of reality.
Notably, the musical is sung-through (with a few exceptions, which are typically rhythmic or at least underscored with music), but the singing doesn’t begin until after Mark’s initial introduction, when he points the camera at Roger and says, “Smile!” (1). This suggests that the singing and the music are part of Mark’s perception of the narrative, and perhaps it is impossible to perform reality, because reality is mundane. Mark chooses what to film, as when he claims that his camera battery is dead when Benny tells him to film his formal apology. It stands to reason that the characters are also shaped by Mark’s point of view. Perhaps the seemingly shallow instability of Maureen and Joanne’s relationship, their clear incompatibility outside of passion, is the manifestation of Mark’s jealousy after Maureen cheated and left him. However, his portrayal of Joanne is friendlier, treating her as a fellow victim. In contrast, Collins and Angel are perfect and without conflict, a model of a loving relationship that ends only in death, reflecting Mark’s respect for Collins as a genius and an anarchist who is always sharing what he has with the group. The musical also depicts Roger as deeply traumatized, his hot-and-cold treatment of Mimi—sometimes marked by cruelty—the result of his emotional damage and fear. Meanwhile, Mark’s perception displays less camaraderie with Mimi, who seems to be more self-centered and seeking a good time before she dies. Benny is the villain, with motives that are only glibly self-serving until Angel’s funeral, a reflection of what Mark sees as betrayal.
Mark’s perception of the narrative is also expressed through the uneven passage of time throughout the musical. Christmas Eve takes up the entirety of the first act, because Mark sees the events as an incredible moment of connection, friendship, and reality in which he is present and his filmmaking is celebrated. Mark has an impact on his friends, helping Maureen and persuading Roger to connect with Mimi, and he even has a very real—if unflattering—encounter with a woman who is unhoused and doesn’t encourage his attempts at heroism. New Year’s Eve is a less perfect follow-up, as their efforts turn out to be unnecessary when Benny brings them the key to the building. The days that follow are drab, because his friends have paired up into couples, and Mark is left alone to realize that his friends aren’t excluding him so much as they are living their own lives. Mark represents this period, the most intimate time for the three couples, as abstracted in “Contact,” in which all three couples are in bed. Two of them have sex and fight until the passion burns out and they break up. Collins and Angel experience together a tragic but romanticized vision of Angel’s final illness and death. Much of Mark’s spring and summer blur together because his friends’ significant experiences happen outside his view. He nearly decides to give up on his film because nothing lives up to the mystical reality of Christmas Eve. Halloween and Angel’s funeral bring his life back into focus. On the following Christmas Eve, although his documentary is finished, Mark witnesses another magical moment when Mimi is resurrected from the dead through the power of love and art, indirectly justifying his own singular focus on creating work.
