Rent’s music is so incredibly thematic, poetic, beautiful, powerful that, perhaps over time, it’s become easy to be lulled into the imaginary utopian bubble and sing along from top to bottom. Many of its songs have become soundtrack to difficult moments of growth and transition in our own lives. In many ways, the themes and messages have outlived the characters themselves.
But what about the actual souls that sit at the center of this illusory bohemian bubble? This cage? The true isolation, stigma, and flat-out hate the AIDS and drug epidemics brought into communities like the one we see in Rent? These lived experiences that ripped away at people’s humanity served as the impetus for the songs we celebrate today.
A community of artists. A collection of dreams, desires, broken hearts, and regrets. They’re fighters. They’re lovers. They are overwhelmed with love and the fear of losing love. They’re brittle, strong, hurting, dying, living, thriving. They’re full of pain, fear, anxiety, resilience, ambition, humor. Unrelenting pressure breeds chaos.
They keep going.
They run on stolen joy and borrowed time.
I found it essential to create a world with an exposed engine. Raw messy truths and raw nerves, exposed. Our desperate need for one another, the joy that companionship and community bring, our eternal fear that this need may be used to hurt us, all exposed. We examine the choice to connect and find community in a time when we have more questions than answers. We ask the questions: How do we protect our most fragile parts? How do we offer access to our most fragile parts? How do we show up for each other even when we’re afraid? How can we prioritize each other? How can we prioritize the human? What does it cost us? I ask you these same questions, now.
For many of us, the Spring of 2020 was our first encounter with a virus that we knew so little about beyond its threat of intubation and death. For many, it’s our only experience with intense and ongoing isolation brought on by a fear of our own neighbor. Our only experience with loss in a time when we couldn’t even hug our loved ones and say goodbye. The information was compromised. We didn’t know what was true. Stigma ran rampant. Hate ran rampant.
What effect will this shared experience have on the way you engage with this play, now?
I invite you to sing the songs and remember the times. But I also invite you to experience Rent from the center of your own vulnerability. I invite you to take in how fragile the toughest of us are and, after this shared moment, I encourage you to re-enter old spaces with renewed desire to love—through both your brokenness and theirs.
We all run on stolen joy and borrowed time.
None of it is ours to keep.
—Tiffany Nichole Greene