Traditionally, the theater has been none too expert in what’s known in Hollywood as “synergy,” but this season it’s doing its best to see that every major play comes with an accompanying tie-in news story. As with, say, the Burger King family value meals and animated action figures designed to promote a new dinosaur film, you can’t help feeling that the tie-ins are actually rather more satisfying than the products they’re meant to be tying in to. As I mentioned last month, there’s more truth about contemporary American gayness in the controversy surrounding Corpus Christi than in the play itself. Likewise, although every character in Jonathan Larson’s Rent is an artist, or “artist,” of some sort—video artist, performance artist, lesbian artist—its pieties about art and community in the East Village wither alongside the accompanying legal dispute, in which a dramaturge has been sui ...

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