I love words. I love to know them, use them, choose them, write them, read them - they are dear to me. Really. So spending the first week of the production listening to the words Rent is made up of worked really well for me, and eventually sent me running for a dictionary. I didn't grab it to look up unfamiliar words, but to read about a very ordinary one: rent. It's worth about 6" in the Webster's dictionary I use, when you count variations...
Rent: to pay for the temporary use of - money owed for a space, but deeper for me now. In the face of death spread by love, or lust, is a virus the rent on the use of a body? In the face of addiction, is need or withdrawal rent on the use of a drug? What's the cost of using someone else's needle? If life is a temporary gig - and it is! - what do we pay for our stay?
Rent: payment received for the temporary use of - what do we gain when we allow others to let space within and around us? What are we paid when we allow others into what is ours, what is us?
How do we measure the cost, the gain; the rent paid out and taken in during the course of our stay? What's the cost of a year? How can you measure it? Things gain value when they're in short supply - is a year worth more when you're aware that you may not have many of them? Can we recognize the value of any year, of every year, more clearly if we see a year through the eyes of those who live on !borrowed time"?
Rent: a variation of rend - a hole or gap made by rending or tearing, a breach of relations, as between persons or in an organized group; schism...
(Yeah, schism. A split or division in an organized group or society, esp as the result of difference of opinion or doctrine - sound familiar?!?)
Rend: to tear apart, to rip apart with violence (a tree rent by lightning); often used figuratively (a roar rends the air); to tear one's clothing to show grief, anguish...
When everything is rent, it's all been torn apart. When everything is rent, there are divisions in a community. When everything is rent, we're grieving. When everything is rent, every moment comes with a cost, and with a gain.
I love words...
Ripping apart. That definition of "rent" speaks the most to me. And is the lens of our production.
ReplyDeleteThe RENT wiki points out that the 'torn apart' definition is one of the reasons Larson chose the title for the musical:
ReplyDelete"In 1988, playwright Billy Aronson wanted to create "a musical based on Puccini's La Bohème, in which the luscious splendor of Puccini's world would be replaced with the coarseness and noise of modern New York."[4] In 1989 Jonathan Larson, a 29-year-old composer, began collaborating with Aronson on this project, and the two composed a few songs together, including "Santa Fe", "Splatter" (later re-worked into the song "Rent"), and "I Should Tell You". Larson made the suggestion to set the play in the East Village, the artsy avant-garde neighborhood of Manhattan down the street from his Greenwich Village apartment, and also came up with the show's ultimate title (a decision that Aronson was unhappy with, at least until Larson pointed out that "rent" also means torn apart.)"
Brilliant entry, Sue. Brava.