by Anthony Rapp
When we got back from our break, our chairs were arranged in a semicircle. I sat across the room from Jonathan and a few seats down from Cy, a straight-backed, tall, thin, elegant, and earthy middle-aged woman who had floated into the room and quietly taken her seat. She wore a dark turtleneck, dark jeans, and dark glasses, all of which were offset by her several silver rings, a large silver bracelet, and a pair of silver earrings. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, to about a schoolboy’s length, with a side part. In some ways she looked like my mom, albeit much more refined and with a lot more silver jewelry. My mom had always cut her hair short, often took to wearing turtlenecks and jeans, and had worn tinted glasses at different points in her life. I sat and watched Cy as she intently and eagerly looked around the room while we slowly filtered in and took our seats. She sat perfectly straight, almost on the edge of her chair, her hands folded in her lap, her feet planted firmly, her legs uncrossed. She immediately struck me as possessing an odd combination of monk-like serenity and old-school New York City glamour.
When we were all assembled, Michael handed the proceedings over to Jonathan.
“Everybody,” Jonathan began, his tone mild-mannered and respectful, “I’m very happy that Cy agreed to come here today. It was important to me that you all would get a chance to meet her and hear what she had to say. I don’t know how much you know about Friends In Deed, but they’re an amazing organization. When my friends Gordon and Pam and Matt all became HIV-positive, they asked me to go to meetings at Friends In Deed with them, and I did, and it really helped us all deal with everything. I just responded to how they viewed life and death and illness and all of it. And so it’s really informed what I’ve written. I wrote the Life Support scene as an attempt to capture what goes on at Friends In Deed.
“So, anyway, I asked Cy if she’d be willing to come to our rehearsal, because I felt it was important for all of us to hear her speak, and she said she would, and here she is, and here we are.”
“Yes, here we are,” Cy said, her voice husky and refined and warm all at the same time.
“So,” Jonathan continued, turning to Cy, “I thought I’d start everything off by asking you some questions. I wrote up a list of what I thought was important for everyone to know.” He flashed a sheet of notebook paper he’d been holding in his lap.
“Okay,” Cy said, smiling. “Sounds good.”
First, Jonathan asked her to explain what Friends In Deed was and the organization’s philosophy.
“Well,” Cy began, “at Friends, we come from the point of view that, in life, there are no accidents. It’s all okay. There is nothing really ever wrong. Everything in life is exactly the way that it should be, very simply because that’s the way that it is. There is no other way that it can be.” She paused, letting us mull these ideas over to ourselves. She continued:
“Another very important aspect of our work at Friends is our point of view that the quality of our lives is not determined by the circumstances. So if you have AIDS, for instance, while your physical body may very well be under attack from a terrible virus, and while this circumstance may make the business of living much more difficult in many ways, we suggest that the presence of AIDS in your life does not mean that the quality of your relationships, or the amount of love you experience, or even your sense of yourself, none of it has to suffer. This is not necessarily easy stuff for people to consider sometimes, as you can imagine.”
Intrigued and stirred up, I raised my hand and asked, “If you’re saying you come from the point of view that nothing’s ever wrong, that everything’s always okay, what do you do with anger and sadness and grief when something bad happens?”
Cy regarded me for a tiny moment and then replied, “Well, try to think of it this way: there are two realities. On the one hand, you have this idea that I’ve been talking about, this reality, that it’s all all right.” She held up her right hand as she said this. “And on the other hand,” she continued, holding up her left hand in opposition to her right, “you have all of your opinions, and all of your feelings, and all of your notions about it. Like ‘it’s terrible,’ or ‘it hurts,’ or ‘I don’t like it,’ or ‘it’s painful,’ or ‘it’s sad.’ And the goal is to be able to live with both realities.” And with that she brought her hands together. “Neither one is more true than the other. Neither one is better than the other.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I lost my husband, Patrick, to cancer a couple of years ago, and believe me, when it was happening, I was absolutely devastated. It was incredibly painful. I missed him terribly when he died. I still miss him terribly. And, at the same time, while he was dying, and in the years since he’s died, I can also see that it’s all okay. It’s all happened exactly the way that it should have happened, because that’s the way that it happened. There’s no other way that it could have happened. It’s simple.” She leaned back. “But sometimes I could no longer see that, and I would feel overwhelmed by grief and sadness, and I would feel terrible, and I would cry, and miss him, and then with time, all of that would pass, and once again I’d see that everything was okay. That my grief was just as much a part of my life as everything else. There’s nothing wrong with grief. It’s an entirely appropriate response. Of course we feel grief. The trouble is, in our culture, there isn’t always a lot of permission for people to grieve. And so we think that we shouldn’t go through it, and we stifle it down, because it’s not allowed. And that’s when we get ourselves in trouble. But grief is absolutely real, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling it. Quite the opposite.” She paused again and regarded me with her clear and open gaze. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does. Thank you.” I resolved to try to incorporate all that she’d just said into my life, not very confident that I’d be able to, but already feeling comforted.
A couple of weeks later, we moved into our technical rehearsals, the last stage in our process before opening the New York Theatre Workshop’s doors to the public. I wondered how Jonathan was feeling; I hadn’t seen much of him lately, except for the day he’d dashed into the rehearsal room, waving a ream of papers, and promptly sat down at the piano. He’d started pounding out his new song for Maureen and Joanne, “Take Me or Leave Me.” Its groove and chord progression reminded me of the classic R&B song “Lean on Me,” but that’s where the comparison stopped. Instead of composing something that was blindly derivative, Jonathan had written a truly original, supremely catchy, sublimely raucous pop tune, giving Idina Menzel and Fredi Walker, who played Maureen and Joanne, the opportunity to blow the roof off the theatre. Idina is an outrageously gifted rock and roll singer, very different from Sarah, who’d played Maureen in the workshop production. Idina’s Maureen was all sex appeal and eagerness, while Sarah’s had been all restraint and pretension. I had been fond of Sarah’s rendition, but I was thrilled by Idina’s. Listening to her and Fredi learning and rehearsing their new song, their voices bursting with fire and energy, their sound contrasting and blending flawlessly, both of them trying to top each other without turning it into a ridiculous Star Search contest, was one of the most exciting aspects of the last two weeks of rehearsal.
Other than that day, Jonathan had been lying low; there wasn’t a whole lot he could have contributed to rehearsal after we learned his music. We all needed to get the chance to try our stuff out, and sometimes fall on our faces, without Jonathan’s protective eyes and ears in the room.
He popped up again, though, when we moved into the theatre and started singing with the band, so he could help refine the sound mix in the house. As the cast and band gathered onstage, Jonathan stood in the midst of the theatre’s red velvet seats, thrust his hands in the air in the infamous devil’s horns gesture, and shouted, “ROCK AND ROLL!” in his best Pete Townshend imitation, grinning like an idiot. I laughed, and Tim counted us in for the title song—“A two three four,” and we charged our way through the score, filling the intimate theatre with t
he sounds of Jonathan’s sometimes beautifully noisy and other times quietly stirring music.
The only time I talked one-on-one with Jonathan during those days was on a quick break in rehearsals. Clutching a coffee cup, looking both hyper and exhausted, he approached me in the lobby.
“Hey, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s not about the show,” he said, smiling. “It’s about Christina Haag.” My costar from The Mantis Murder.
“What about her?”
“Well, I met her at your birthday party, and we’ve been hanging out a lot since then, and, well—” he paused, grinning bashfully and shrugging his shoulders. “I really like her.”
I smiled. “That’s great,” I said.
“But I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if she feels the same way about me.”
I found his schoolboy’s crush, and its attendant uncertainties, to be completely charming. “Well, why don’t you tell her how you feel?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell if she just thinks of me as a friend. I really, really like her. A lot.”
“Well, the only way to find out is to let her know.”
“You’re right. You’re right.” He took a sip of coffee. “But the thing is, you know, with her ex-boyfriend being so famous, it’s a little intimidating. It just makes me feel like she’d probably never be interested in me.”
Christina had dated John Kennedy Jr., one of the world’s most desired bachelors, for several years, so I could understand Jonathan’s intimidation. “Yeah, that is kind of a big deal,” I said. “Do you want me to say something to her for you?”
“No, no, no, you don’t have to do that. No, that wouldn’t be good, I don’t think.” He shook his head emphatically.
“Well, like I said, you’ll never know what could happen unless you say something. She’s a very cool woman. I think she’d be honest with you.”
“Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.” He nodded somberly, staring into his coffee cup. “Maybe I will say something. But I’ll probably wait until we’re up and running. It’s not like I could really do anything about it now anyway.”
“That sounds like a plan to me.”
“Hey, thanks for talking to me,” Jonathan said. He smiled ruefully. “Sorry I’m so high-schoolish about this.”
“No problem,” I said, smiling and giving him a little pat on the shoulder. And with that, I went inside the theatre, back to rehearsal.
A couple of days later, Adam Pascal and I were gathered around the piano with Tim and Michael, cleaning up the harmonies in “What You Own,” when I noticed some commotion at the back of the theatre. I saw Michael notice it as well, but he didn’t stop us, so, unsure of what was happening, Adam and I continued singing.
We’re dying in America
At the end of the millennium
We’re dying in America
To come into our own
And when you’re dying in America
At the end of the millennium
You’re not alone
Sue White, our efficient, intense, motherly production manager, made her way down the aisle to the stage, motioning us to stop our work. In a low, calm voice, she said, “Nothing to worry about, but Jonathan just collapsed in the back of the theatre. The paramedics are on their way.”
“Wait a minute, what happened?” Adam said.
“We’re not sure. He just collapsed. It doesn’t seem too serious. He’s up again right now, but he’s very pale and disoriented, and we’re going to take him to the hospital, just to make sure that he’s all right. It’s probably nothing. He’s just stressed out and exhausted.”
“Wow,” I said.
“We’ll let you know what’s going on,” Sue said. “But I’m sure everything is fine.”
I looked up at the back of the theatre, but couldn’t really see anything: just a clump of people that had gathered around, talking quietly to each other. I could see Jonathan leaning against the wall, his head down, with someone’s hand resting on his arm. Tim, Adam, and Michael stood next to me on the edge of the stage for a moment, all of us silently trying to figure out what to make of this.
Finally, Michael said, “Well, I guess we should probably continue working. We don’t want to freak Jonathan out.”
“Sounds good,” Tim said, sitting back down at his keyboard. “Let’s take it back from the top.”
Adam and I started the song again, and as we sang, Jonathan left with Sue and the paramedics, and the strange, unexpected chill that had descended over the room gradually dissipated, until we were all firmly back in the groove of our work, trusting that Jonathan would be all right.
Over the next couple of days—our final days of tech—we first got a progress report from Sue that Jonathan was still suffering from flulike symptoms, most likely from a combination of stress and exhaustion, and possibly the result of a bad turkey sandwich he’d eaten at the Cooper Square Diner. His stomach had been pumped at the hospital, just in case, and they had sent him home to recuperate. Then Sue told us a day later that Jonathan had gone to a different hospital because he was still feeling terrible, and that after some tests he was sent home with the news that he probably had the flu. I thought about calling him to check up on how he was feeling, but then thought better of it; he needed to relax, and phone calls weren’t necessarily the best medicine, especially from a cast member who would remind him of what he was missing at the theatre.
Meanwhile, we all continued our long, long days, singing and teching from noon till midnight, putting together all of the final elements of the show, so we could finally perform it for our first audience on dress rehearsal night.
That night finally came, and thankfully Jonathan was feeling well enough to return to the theatre, joining Michael and the cast onstage before the performance for a brief photo shoot with a New York Times photographer. The Times had sent the photographer with a writer—not a critic—who was doing a story on the one hundredth anniversary of Puccini’s La Bohème and thought it might be interesting to include our modern-day, rock opera version in his piece. Jonathan still looked wan and ashen, but his nervous excitement for his big night shone through as the flashes went off.
After a few minutes the shoot ended, and it was time for us to go backstage and ready ourselves. Jonathan stood at the edge of the stage and said, smiling and waving, “Have a good show, everybody. I’ll be watching!”
For a dress rehearsal, it was a great show. The audience was with us from the first moment, cheering each number, and leaping to its collective feet at the end of the night. Their response reminded me of the response that Six Degrees of Separation had received on its dress rehearsal night when I appeared in it at Lincoln Center. For Six Degrees, our audience had laughed so uproariously that the actors in Some Americans Abroad, the play upstairs from us, could hear every thunderous outburst, even through the concrete floor that separated our theatres. Six Degrees wound up a huge critical and popular hit, with a real and lasting cultural impact, so if responses at dress rehearsals were any indication, Rent’s future suddenly seemed assured. Of course, we needed to get a great review in the Times to really make us a hit; many an audience’s favorite show had been hurt by bad press in the Times. But the critic from the Times wasn’t coming for another couple of weeks, giving us plenty of time to continue refining and cleaning up the show, so it wasn’t worth worrying about right now. For the moment, I reveled in the immediate joy that was bouncing around the theatre.
I emerged from backstage to see most of the audience still milling around, another good sign. From the stage, I could see a large group of admirers clamoring around Jonathan in the far aisle, shaking his hand and talking his ear off. I was so happy and I wanted to go over to him as well and give him a congratulatory hug, but then I decided that I should let him savor his glory—I could talk to him later—and I headed over to my friends who’d been in the audience.
One of them, an East Village p
laywright named Dan, rushed up to me and gave me a crushing hug. “Oh, Anthony,” he said, his words pouring out of him, “it’s so beautiful. I can’t tell you. I can’t. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Thank you, thank you.”
I grinned hugely. “I’m so glad you liked it.”
“Oh, my god, I loved it. I mean it. I loved it.”
Still grinning, I asked, “Have you met Jonathan?”
“Oh my god, yes. I had to. I had to just go up to him and tell him how amazing he is. He’s like a hero. You don’t understand. He’s created something so gorgeous and important, and I can’t really keep talking about it because I’m going to explode. Really. I’ve got to go, I’ve got to just go off and not talk anymore. Oh my god, thank you so much.”
Giddy from his thrilling response, I said, “You’re welcome.”
Dan dashed off, and behind him was my agent, Sarah. Her eyes were wide open, brimming over, and she was trembling as she gave me a warm, firm hug.
“Rappy, it’s amazing,” she said, holding onto my shoulders and looking right into my eyes.
“See?” I said, beaming affectionately. “I told you so.”
“Oh my god, you were so right. Rappy, it’s amazing. I had to go up to Jonathan at intermission and tell him. And then the second act just blew me away even more. I can’t believe it. It really is beautiful.”
My face was starting to hurt from all of the grinning I was doing. “Thank you,” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” Sarah said again, shaking her head, her eyes bright. “I can’t believe it.”
After I said good night to Sarah, I glanced over to see if I could finally get a chance to talk to Jonathan, but he wasn’t there. There was so much I’d been saving up to tell him on this night, so many thanks I’d wanted to give him: for jump-starting my career; for giving me the chance to sing onstage again; for asking me back after the studio production; for expanding my role so fully in the past year; for writing me new songs to sing with my voice in mind (in addition to “What You Own” I’d also been given a lovely, haunting soliloquy following Angel’s funeral, called “Halloween”); for sharing his process with me; for entrusting me with the role of narrator; for writing this amazing show in the first place; for writing a musical that featured such richly developed queer characters; for writing a show that was so incredibly fulfilling to perform, and so moving for its audiences; and, most important, for becoming both my new, supportive friend and a true, enthusiastic collaborator. I usually stored up these kinds of sentiments for my coworkers, writing them down in little cards, which I delivered on opening nights, but I wanted to tell Jonathan all of these things to his face, especially now that the night had gone so phenomenally well. But I looked around the theatre and couldn’t find him.