Last fall, after getting a rejection from a dream job, one in a long string of rejections or no-replies I’d received since graduating college that June, I dealt with my frustration by watching Rent. I could have watched/listened to a more “relevant” musical—like Avenue Q, which is all about the twentysomething struggle—but instead my thoughts first turned to a musical about struggling artists dealing with the AIDS crisis in early-90s New York. “What You Own” became one of the anthems of my job-search frustration, as I hoped for offers from minimum-wage part-time positions only tangentially related to my interests, finding comfort in lines like “That drip of hurt/that pint of shame/Goes away, just play the game.”
Earlier that year, as Rent hit its twentieth anniversary, I’d seen articles calling the musical outdated, saying it was only relevant now as a period piece. Yet there were also many fans defending the show and celebrating its milestone. And this past Friday, when my sister came into Chicago to see the twentieth anniversary tour of Rent with me, the theater was packed. In the days leading up to the show, I’d seen multiple friends post excitedly on Facebook about the show. For plenty of people, this musical still resonates.
Why? After all, it’s true that Rent’s issues are no longer topical. With access to proper treatment, Americans with HIV can now lead long and full lives. Few people can afford to live in Manhattan, especially not struggling artists, since the squats they once populated are gone. The Cyberland that Maureen protested against has become a reality worldwide, and Mark’s line about “connection in an isolating age” feels quaint. With musicals like Fun Home and Hamilton raking in the Tonys, Rent’s portrayal of queer and non-white characters doesn’t feel quite as revolutionary. While the circumstances have changed, the show’s underlying anxieties, and its message of love in the face of turmoil, remain fresh.
The motif of “rent” is used throughout the show to convey temporariness. The characters lead unstable lives, with relationships beginning and ending then beginning again, friends moving away then moving back, never sure when they’re next going to eat, always waiting for the one great song or film that will justify this life they’ve chosen. Looming behind all of this is the uncertainty that comes with HIV. The HIV+ characters don’t know when the virus will become AIDS and how long they’ll have once it does. Roger is afraid to start a relationship with Mimi because he knows either of them could soon die. He, along with a member of the support group, sings that “reason says I should have died three years ago.” When you know that at any moment disease could strike, what’s the point in making plans?
While we’re not facing a deadly virus, life today is also fraught with uncertainty, especially for millennials. We, too, live transient lives, moving from job to job, not necessarily because we want to, but because it’s what employers expect. We’ll pay our dues for a couple years, then move on to a slightly better position at a different company. We’ll probably shift apartments along the way; roommates will come and go. The jobs themselves are often low-wage positions we’re overqualified for because it turns out even a college degree can’t guarantee anything. We want our work to be something we’re passionate about, but we often wonder if we would have been better off “selling out,” as Mark does for a time. Our lives don’t fit the tidy model of our parents’ generation, who fresh out of school could get a stable job they’d stay in the rest of their lives, move into a good house, and have a family.
And it’s not just our own lives that are unsettled; the world feels like it’s constantly in flux. As Rent’s opening number puts it, “What binds the fabric together/when the raging, shifting winds of change/keep ripping away?” For most of millennials’ lives, culture has been changing at a breakneck pace. We constantly have to adapt to new norms, and so, unlike our parents, we have no framework for how to build a life. Meanwhile it always feels like we’re a step away from another war, another recession, another 9/11. In response to Rent’s 2011 Broadway revival, one reviewer called it less dated than when it first premiered, saying, “The tent cities may be razed for farmers’ markets and the drug cocktails may be keeping the virus at bay, but. . .there’s still plenty of darkness to raise a song against.”
One way we cope with this is, like Rent’s characters, by creating chosen families. We cling to each other for support. In our vision of the world, we value compassion and tolerance. In many cases, these communities we create provide the acceptance our families don’t, either because they willingly choose not to or because they simply can’t relate to the world we inhabit. (Broadway may have gotten more diverse since Rent, but America still has a long way to go in embracing such diversity.) Analyses of modern American life often focus on the crumbling of traditional communities and support networks. So we carve out our own communities, for as long as they can last, and just like Rent’s support group members are urged to do, we choose hope and love over fear.
One reason Jonathan Larson chose Rent as the title was because of its double meaning; “rent” can also mean “torn apart.” Knowing this, it feels especially powerful when, at the end of the opening song, the characters say that “everything is rent.” While the forces tearing apart are different now than they were twenty years ago, the sentiment remains true. So, too, does the show’s central message: in a terrifying world, when you don’t know what’s coming next, one way to cope is to embrace today and “measure your life in love.”
