Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (4 page)

Jonathan and Michael had imagined the death thrillingly: Angel becomes an ecstatic embodiment of release, the release that I imagined very ill people might experience when they’re finally relieved of their pain and go on to whatever’s next. Mark Setlock, the sweet-voiced, openhearted actor playing Angel, performed it beautifully, his body pulsing, his voice exploding out with tremendous love and heat and joy.

Then we are all at the funeral, where Collins comes to the front of the stage, clutching the coat that Angel had bought for him, and quietly and simply sings their love song, “I’ll Cover You.”

As the song builds, the rest of us join in, our fourteen voices raised as one, wailing out our love and grief for our friend who is gone. The refrain of “Seasons of Love” mingles with the refrain of “I’ll Cover You,” the two songs weaving together, escalating and cascading over each other, our voices growing in passion and volume, the melodies and harmonies taking us to new notes and new heights of emotion, until all that is left at the end is Collins’s wail ringing out. I was deeply moved by the singing of this song; we were all shaken by its enormous, bursting, aching heart. Once again, I was amazed that someone as young as Jonathan had written something so profoundly affecting.

After the funeral, “Goodbye Love” follows, in which the remaining seven central characters—Mimi and Roger; Maureen and her girlfriend, Joanne; Mark; Collins; and Roger and Mark’s ex-friend-turned-landlord, Benny—begin to splinter apart in the wake of Angel’s death. Roger is moving to Santa Fe to get away from everything, especially Mimi; Maureen and Joanne are in the middle of another of their frequent fights; and Mimi is tearing into Roger for giving up on her. (
“I’d be happy to die for a taste of what Angel had,”
Joanne and Mimi cruelly shout at their respective lovers,
“someone to live for / unafraid to say, ‘I love you.’”
) Mark stands on the sidelines, feebly attempting to make peace between everybody (
“Come on, guys, chill!”
is one of his pathetic tries), a position I was familiar with in my own life; I tended to steer clear of direct confrontations and often wound up serving as a mediator in people’s arguments. But Mark’s attempts at peacemaking after the funeral appease no one, and ultimately a grief-stricken Collins intervenes:
“You all said you’d be cool tonight / so please, for my sake,”
he begs. After singing a plaintive and resigned
“I can’t believe this is goodbye,”
everyone disperses, leaving Roger and Mark alone.

In tentative, delicately melodic dialogue, accompanied only by a piano gently spilling out a hypnotic arpeggio, Mark and Roger begin to talk. Mark begins, as usual, by nudging Roger, in this case to pursue Mimi.
“How could you let her go?”
he asks, to which Roger replies,
“You just don’t know.”
But before long, the tone shifts, and for the first time Mark turns his attack onto himself, expressing some of his fears to Roger:

Once again, the correlation between myself and my character was remarkable: I sometimes wondered if my love of acting was an escape of sorts. I’d been doing it since I was a kid, and it felt natural for me to be onstage, inhabiting other characters’ skins and souls, but offstage I often felt like a small, pale dork. I had always been comfortable while performing, never having to battle stage fright or getting overwhelmed by nerves, whereas offstage, I often retreated into the background. I enjoyed time by myself—I especially loved to read—but while I had a lot of friends and also loved hanging out with them, I often had a low-grade anxiety, a fear of doing or saying the wrong thing, of offending someone, of not being witty or sexy or cool enough, all buzzing in the background of my thoughts when I was in a social situation. My self-confidence grew enormously when I performed, probably because I had received nothing but flattering feedback from the first time I had set foot onstage (at the age of six, playing the Cowardly Lion at Island Lake Camp), while offstage I had often borne the brunt of teasing—from my brother, Adam, and sister, Anne, not to mention older kids all through junior high and high school. Like Mark, I hid behind my work; in my case, by transforming myself again and again into other people, funneling any of my own anxieties and fears and emotional chaos into my performances, rather than really experiencing and expressing it all offstage.

The scene between Mark and Roger continues with Roger’s response:

Here was another aspect of Mark with which I could identify: I’d spent the last several years beginning various writing projects—short stories, a play, a screenplay—only to quickly abandon them out of frustration and insecurity.

Roger continues:

To which Mark responds:

This line resounded with me, setting off bursts of insight and compassion. It was the first time Mark had expressed the crux of his dilemma: he was the only HIV-negative member of his circle of friends (even Maureen was positive in this version of the show), the only one with a wide-open future, and there was nothing he could really do for them. The only possibly meaningful response he had come up with was to make a film about all of them, to try to document their lives before they were gone. But of course he had been unable to finish it, and now Angel was dead, and who knew which one of his friends would be next. It would probably be Mimi, considering the way she looked—
“Mimi’s gotten thin / Mimi’s running out of time,”
Mark desperately tells Roger—and Roger was leaving, and
he
might be next, or Collins, or Maureen. And when they were all gone Mark would be truly, utterly, terribly alone. Although I didn’t share his urgent circumstances, I empathized with his fear of losing loved ones and with the fear of being alone.

The scene ends with Mark and Roger quietly and awkwardly saying “love you” to each other, the only moment in the show in which they express any real warmth or affection for each other, a moment I was glad to have. As Roger walks away, a very weak Mimi emerges out of the shadows to intercept him.

Then Mark stands off to the side and watches as Mimi sings to Roger:

Roger runs off, unable to face her, but Mimi keeps on singing after him,
“Goodbye, love,”
desperately wailing it out, until at last she quietly adds,
“Hello, disease,”
and runs off herself, leaving Mark alone onstage.

I found out later how much that last moment, as well as other moments in the show, paralleled scenes from Puccini’s
La Bohème,
which was Jonathan’s inspiration for
Rent.
But one of
Rent
’s scenes veered very much from its source: the finale. In both Puccini’s and Jonathan’s versions, Mimi goes missing until she’s finally found, near death, and is brought back to the loft. After a tender and heart-wrenching scene, in which all of her friends helplessly surround her, and her lover tries to reconnect before it’s too late, Mimi dies in Puccini’s version. But she only
almost
dies in Jonathan’s, as she comes back from the brink after having a vision of Angel telling her it’s not her time. I worried that Jonathan’s ending might bother some people, that it would seem cheesy and contrived, but he was adamant that Mimi should live at the end of his story; he wanted for his show to end with life, not death. Besides, Angel had died, so it wasn’t like there was an absence of loss and sorrow in his piece. I was ambivalent about his choice to let Mimi live, but Michael and Tim and all of us in the cast were able to find a way to make it feel real; we played it sincerely and fully; after all, near-death experiences did occur in the real world. We hoped our audiences would be moved in the end.

And after Mimi’s unlikely revival, there was no denying the power of the very last moments of the show: the entire ensemble comes together to sing a full-voiced, passionate, soaring counterpoint of two of Jonathan’s refrains from earlier songs:
“I die without you”
and
“no day but today,”
the latter phrase ringing out in gorgeous harmony as the lights fade.

The days began tumbling into each other as I spent almost every waking hour at the theatre. A couple of days before our dress rehearsal, our overworked (and severely underbudgeted) costume and set designer, transplanted Berliner Angela Wendt, frantically pawed through racks of clothes during an impromptu costume fitting with me, both of us surrounded by shopping bags and tape measures in the cramped dressing room. After trying on and discarding several items and mixing and matching the remaining possibilities, we decided on a pair of dark blue sweatpants, a black-and-white zigzag-patterned rayon shirt, and my own red, plaid, zip-up wool jacket and pair of Blundstone boots.

“So what are we going to do about your hair?” she asked in her mild German accent, chewing her lip, one hand flitting around my head, the other hand rubbing her chin. “Hmmm. Something choppy, I think, like you could have cut it yourself.”

“Sounds good to me.” I usually surrendered to my costume designers’ wishes, figuring that they knew much better than I did what would be best for the show.

“And how’s your goatee coming?” She felt my scraggly chin and then took a step back to see it in the light. “Not bad. Maybe we have to put a little eyeliner in it or something. We’ll see when you’re onstage under the lights what it looks like.”

“Sorry it’s so light.”

She laughed warmly, her mouth wide open. “It’s not your fault you’re so blond! It’ll be fine.”

Usually, technical rehearsals are
very
slow going, as all onstage work stops every few lines while lighting designers monkey with their cues and take many minutes on end to refocus a single light. But Blake Burba, our rail-thin, pale, focused, and quiet young lighting designer, miraculously didn’t make us stop once. We went through the blocking onstage, and lights appeared where they should, occasionally delayed by only a few seconds. Blake always caught up with the action, his face aglow in the light of his computer screen out in the middle of the house, so we made quick progress through the scenes.

On the second day of tech, after the lunch break, Sue White, our sound designer and the technical coordinator of the New York Theatre Workshop, handed us all head mikes for the first time.

“Ooo, look, I’m Janet Jackson,” Mark Setlock said as he put his on, performing a quick head-whipping music-video dance move to illustrate his point.

“Or Madonna,” I added, laughing.

“Hey, don’t play around with them, fellas,” Sue said, stern but friendly. She was intense: sweet, but also
very
serious about her theatre. Her manner belied her tone; she would often touch people warmly on the arm or shoulder even when telling them off. “I know you know this,” she continued, “but they’re expensive. And they’re all we’ve got. No replacements.” She smiled benignly, and Mark and I shuffled away, chagrined, and made our way down to the stage. The rest of the cast was gathering there, watching the band set up.

Jonathan bopped around the theatre, more gleeful than I’d seen him yet. “Rock and roll!” he growled in his best Spinal Tap impression as he passed me. I gave him a little thumbs-up, and then Michael took center stage.

“Everybody,” he said, “I’d like you to meet your band.” Introductions went around the room, the band looking authentically rock and roll, complete with long hair and hip outfits. I wondered what it would be like for them to play in a musical. I hoped they’d be as into it as we were.

When introductions were complete, Michael resumed speaking. “The purpose of this rehearsal is just for you all in the cast, and you all in the band, to get a sense of what it’s like to perform this music with each other. This isn’t for blocking or lights. Just music. There’s going to be a lot of trial and error as we finesse the sound mix—”