Rent – Southern Utah University
Dramaturgy Note: “Bohemia is Dead”: “Viva La Vie Boheme”
“Today, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia.” –Henri Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème
Henri Murger published these words in 1851 in the preface to his collection of short stories about Bohemianism¾loosely based on his own life experience. This work served as Puccini’s inspiration for La Bohème (1896) and subsequently inspired Jonathan Larson as he examined the lives of New York artists in Rent. Produced on Broadway in 1996, Rent received numerous awards including four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Larson died tragically the night before the play’s off-Broadway premiere¾never to enjoy the critical acclaim and financial stability afforded by a hit musical. In many ways, Larson fits neatly inside Murger’s definition of a Bohemian: “[an] obstinate dreamer for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession.” Rent and its characters reflect not only the financial challenges of this ideal but its more confounding results within the context of the early 1990s. Larson lived this context, barely scraping by, working at diners, and struggling to succeed. Where Puccini employed tuberculosis to create his bohemian tragedy, Larson relied on his personal experience with AIDS, a disease that was killing his friends and devastating his community.
Rent was one of a number of plays that provided a glimpse at the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s. The disease, officially recognized in 1981, wasn’t publically mentioned by President Reagan until 1985. It wasn’t until 1987 that Reagan gave a speech dedicated to the health crisis that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Once AIDS finally found itself on the radar of Washington D.C. politicians, it became clear why it had taken so long to address this growing health crisis. David Corn makes the political attitude toward the AIDS epidemic obvious: “Karen Burke, a policy analyst at the House Republican Study Group, observed that homosexuals now have the gall to request Federal support for the treatment of victims. ‘Not only are we supposed to pay taxes for research,’ she complained, ‘We’re supposed to take care of them.’” Prejudice and discrimination against the LGBTQ community was at the heart of the slow response to the AIDS crisis. The effect, according to Donald P. Francis (former director of the AIDS laboratory at the CDC), was a lack of financial and policy support.
The history of AIDS serves as one example of the effects of poverty in our society. Larson’s play works to connect the very real effects of impoverishment with the ideal of the Bohemian artist: the sacredness of art above all material needs. As we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Broadway premiere, Rent continues to ask not only how art can address politically charged issues but whether art itself can survive in a world rife with commercialism, poverty, homelessness, and AIDS.
Waiting for Godot – Florida State University
“Samuel Beckett’s first play Waiting for Godot, at the Théâtre de Babylone, will be spoken of for a long time. Perhaps a few grumblers complained that it is a ‘a play in which nothing happens,’ because they didn’t find the more or less conventional plot used by innumerable authors from Aristophanes and Plautus on; or because, on leaving the theater, they couldn’t summarize the play, or explain why they had laughed with embarrassed laughter.”
–Sylvain Zegel (La Libération, January 7, 1953. Trans. Ruby Cohn)
Zegel is reviewing the original production of Waiting for Godot in 1953. At first, the play teetered on the edge of obscurity, but country by country, it ultimately won international acclaim. Samuel Beckett wrote the play at the end of 1948 but quickly gave up hope of finding a producer. His wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesenil continued to peddle the script, finally convincing the famous actor and director Roger Blin to stage the play. The initial struggle to stage Godot was to be repeated time and again. In Britain the first production of Godot, at the private Arts Theatre Club in 1955, captured the minds of spectators only after two leading theatre critics, Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, championed the show. Alan Schneider directed the first production in the United States at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida. On opening night he described the crowd as “ambulatory.” Lawrence Graver adds that “by the beginning of the second act almost everyone was gone. For Schneider it must have been oddly consoling to hear Tennessee Williams and William Saroyan shouting ‘Bravo!’ in a nearly empty auditorium.” [1]
Why does Waiting for Godot profoundly touch the lives of so many while at the same time it confuses and frustrates others? Patrick McCarthy writes that Godot “seems both to attract and to resist overly neat identification.”[2] The play’s ability to elicit strong contradictory responses has been in evidence since the beginning: an essay published anonymously in a 1956 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) argued the play presented a metaphor for Christian morality. For over a month, letters flooded in, challenging and supporting the essay’s contentions. This rich debate on the meaning, themes, and merit of Waiting for Godot continues to this day.
James
Knowlson tells us “that the key word in [Beckett’s] theatre is ‘perhaps.’”[3]
This simple word may represent the only definite bit of language one could use
to offer up an interpretation. As Beckett said to Blin, “Godot might perhaps be ‘a pair of old army boots.’”[4]Perhaps, as Eric Bentley wrote, Waiting for Godot represents the “the
quintessence of existentialism.”[5]
Perhaps Godot is God. The play, perhaps, supports Christianity; perhaps it is a crushing critique. Perhaps it supports Hegel’s view of
master-slave relationships. Perhaps
it documents the crumbling of European civilization after WWII. “Perhaps” is
embedded within the text itself.
Knowlson tells us “that 24 percent of the utterances [of the characters]
are questions, while only 12 percent are replies. And many that seem to take
the form of questions are not this at all, since they leave the troubling
problems that provoked the questions entirely unresolved.”[6]
As Beckett said of James Joyce, “his writing is not about something; it is that
something itself.”[7] So
too Waiting for Godot is not the sum
of its contradictory interpretations. It is at once itself: all and nothing.
[1] Rich information, for further reading, about Godot and Beckett is provided in: Graver, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 14.
[2] McCarthy, Patrick, ed. Critical essays on Samuel Beckett. Boston Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1986. 1.
[3] Knowlson, James. Introduction. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot : with a revised text. By Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dougald MacMillan. 1st ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. XIX.
[4] As qtd in. Knowlson, James. Introduction. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot : with a revised text. By Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dougald MacMillan. 1st ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. XVI.
[5] “The quintessence of existentialism” became a canonical explanation of the play when it was printed on the cover of the Grove Press paper back edition of Waiting for Godot. See: Kiesenhofer, Tony. “Reading against the Grain: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48.6 (1993): 358-369.
[6] Knowlson, James. Introduction. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot : with a revised text. By Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dougald MacMillan. 1st ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. XX.
[7] As qtd. In Hutchings, William. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2005. 24.