Unless he has exceptional powers of self-delusion, anyone who writes
regularly on the American theater soon grows uncomfortably aware that
he’s engaged in a kind of ongoing obituary column. That’s not
metaphorical but literal: these days, the best shows on Broadway are
its memorial services, when great actors, writers, producers emerge
from involuntary retirement to lay on a spiffy send-off for one more
of their ever dwindling ranks. Moreover, even the non-memorial shows
wrap themselves in shrouds, as if seeking the ultimate security
blanket. Angels in America gave us the angel of Death; now,
Jonathan Larson’s Rent gives us the death of Angel.

Angel is, inevitably, an hiv-riddled transvestite sculptor in the
East Village, where the drama is set and, indeed, where it’s
playing
(AT THE NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP). AIDS has glamorized death to a
degree unseen in the arts for a hundred years, but Larson is the
first to acknowledge its nineteenth-century antecedents in explicit
formal terms. Larry Kramer and the first generation of AIDS
chroniclers were concerned to emphasize in unsparing detail the
realities of the disease, the sweats and the lesions. But, as its
long march through the arts has continued, AIDS has been romantically
ennobled to the point where the political and metaphorical burdens it
bears can no longer be contained by the dreary naturalism of the (so
to speak) “straight” play. So Larson has turned to Puccini: for,
like the tubercular heroines of the last century, the
person-living-with-AIDS, in defiance