Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

by Anthony Rapp

  One by one, Jonathan’s friends stood on the stage, in front of a series of slides of Jonathan, and introduced one of his songs, or shared stories of their lives with him. I sat next to Daphne, holding her hand. I had cried so much over the past week and a half, onstage and off, that my tears felt dried up, but when I heard Jonathan’s song “Destination Sky”—written for a children’s video entitled Away We Go! and sung by a young boy in a pure, sweet, angelic voice—I was instantly shattered by its simple, delicate melody and lyrics:

  So auf wiedersehn

  Gotta catch the plane

  So don’t be sad or cry…

  Destination sky

  Destination sky

  I squeezed Daphne’s hand tightly as I wept. I couldn’t stand such a light in the world as Jonathan being gone, I couldn’t stand all of the songs he hadn’t yet written never being heard, I couldn’t stand that only now I felt like I was really getting to know him as a full human being, now when it was too late. I couldn’t stand that I would never be able to tell him how much I loved being a part of his show, how much it had already given to me, how much the people who witnessed his work embraced it. As much as I’d tried to make peace with his absence, as much as all of us in the cast told each other and ourselves that he lived on in the words and music he’d left behind, the truth was that he was dead, he was dead, and there was no denying how fucked that was, how wrong.

  And then the song ended, and the fresh, intense wave of grief and anger that had washed over me began to fade, and my head began to clear, and I felt once again a moment of peace, of acceptance. Grief was, after all, just as Cy had told us it would be: unpredictable and frightening and cathartic, sometimes all at once. But as painful as this time had been, in some ways I had never felt more engaged with my life, more receptive to and appreciative of the people around me, or more exposed to the complexities and depths of my own emotional core. Life had suddenly become incontestably immediate to me, necessary and vital, and that was something for which I was profoundly grateful.

  Glory

  Opening night was on February 13, 1996, ten days after Jonathan’s memorial service. I was still feeling cautiously optimistic about our prospects with the critics, who had all attended the last few preview performances so their reviews could appear promptly after opening night. My friends’ reactions to the show were encouraging, and the audience at our final preview, mostly consisting of fellow actors and theatre people, was our most enthusiastic yet. It was after this show that the most surprising response came, from an actor friend who rushed up to me as I emerged from backstage and shouted, “Oh my god, you are all so fucking sexy! I wanted to fuck you all!!!” If that wasn’t a positive endorsement, I didn’t know what was.

  Our opening night crowd was relatively dormant, as opening night crowds tend to be; everyone is nervous, waiting for the reviews, hoping that all goes well, so it’s rare to find an exuberant, free, generous opening night crowd. We didn’t give a shoddy performance that night, by any means, but we also didn’t give our best show.

  The party was held in the rehearsal room, but I didn’t feel like I could let loose until after I saw the Times. Periodically, I tracked down Richard Kornberg, our press agent, and asked him, “Is it here yet?” He smiled knowingly and forgivingly at me and replied, “Don’t worry, I will tell you when it is,” and I aimlessly wandered around the party, picking at the food and sipping at my drink, unable to enjoy myself.

  Finally Richard came up to me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me off to the side. “It’s in,” he whispered, “and it’s great.” Flooded with relief, I followed him into a downstairs room where the only copy sat—it was kept away from the party because some people wouldn’t want to read it even if it was a rave—and devoured Ben Brantley’s review, reading as quickly as my eyes would allow. My worst fear, that he and other critics wouldn’t embrace the show’s heart, was immediately laid to rest as line after line affirmed what I so strongly believed about the show, calling it “exhilarating” and “vigorous,” and saying that it “rushes forward on an electric current of emotion.” He also said flattering things about the entire cast, singling several of us out (always a good thing for our egos), but, disappointingly, he disparaged Michael’s brilliant contributions. He did include a nice mention of Tim and the band, however, saying that they “lovingly and precisely interpreted” Jonathan’s score. And then, as if he hadn’t already made it clear how much he loved our show, he took his review over the top with its final sentences: “People who complain about the demise of the American musical have simply been looking in the wrong places. Well done, Larson.”

  I laid the paper down and looked right up at Richard. “That’s what we needed,” I said.

  “Yes,” Richard replied, “that’s what we needed.”

  The next day, our entire run at the Workshop sold out within hours. Such was the power of a rave in the Times. We quickly extended our run for two more weeks, and promptly sold that out. Rumors began to fly around the cast and in the press about our moving to Broadway, and were confirmed a week after opening night by our commercial producers, who pledged to make inexpensive tickets available so young people would be able to afford the show. Soon, and with great rapidity, television crews descended on our theatre, and we all became adept at sitting in front of a camera for CNN or CBS or ABC or VH-1 and talking about our little show that had become such a huge, overnight smash. Print media joined in as well, with editors calling some or all of us in for lavish photo shoots. Within a matter of a few weeks, we’d traveled around town to various photographers’ studios to pose for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Time Out New York, Out, and Harper’s Bazaar. And night after night, we showed up at the theatre, where long lines for cancellations twisted down East Fourth Street, and performed the show to increasingly enthusiastic crowds. Celebrities began showing up, too, although we didn’t get to meet many of them; the theatre had no easy access to the backstage area, so the celebrities tended to dash out after the curtain call to avoid being inundated by crowds of admirers. Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman were the first ones to stay and say hello, and the cast surrounded them afterwards, giddily snapping pictures, shaking their hands, and drinking in their praise for our show. They had come to celebrate Rhea’s birthday, so we spontaneously serenaded her with an R&B-influenced rendition of the birthday song, complete with intricate gospel harmonies, which seemed to thrill them.

  All of this attention felt insane and yet deserved; we had all worked so hard to get the show where it was, and Jonathan had in some ways lost his life for it, pouring everything that he was into its creation. But the media machine had its own relentless, cyclonic energy, feeding off of itself, swallowing everything in its path, with the story about Jonathan’s death sometimes overshadowing the story about his work. This seemed like a minor trade-off, however, if it resulted in more and more people finding out about Jonathan’s words and music, thereby keeping his spirit alive that much longer.

  My own personal publicity soon kicked in, with a request for an interview with the gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate. I was pleased that they’d called; I had never been in their pages and wanted to do anything I could to raise my profile, both for the sake of my work and for the sake of gay and lesbian issues. I didn’t believe that being an out actor was detrimental to my career. On the contrary, I had come out publicly three and a half years before in my bio for The Destiny of Me by thanking my then-boyfriend, David. (With the best of intentions, I’d naïvely called David my “partner for life” in my bio, only to break up with him a year and a half later, a fact that led to much subsequent teasing from friends and coworkers.) Out had run a feature story on me a year after my coming out to coincide with the release of the film version of Six Degrees of Separation (in which I’d recreated my stage role), but since then my profile had been too low to merit exposure in the press, gay or otherwise. So I jumped at the chance to sit down with a reporter from The Advocate.

 
Among the many subjects my interviewer and I discussed over our lunch at the Life Café was the state of my romantic life, which was currently a little confusing; I’d recently begun seeing a different ex-boyfriend, an actor named Marcus. We’d been involved with each other on and off for the past two years, although for the past year we’d been mostly off. However, as I told my interviewer, Marcus was not out publicly, nor did he ever intend to be. He so deeply, almost desperately, wanted to have a successful acting career that he refused to allow anything, including the hypothetical backlash that might result from being an out actor, to prevent it from happening. At times I’d felt as though I could never respect him for this decision, because, to me, the stakes for queer people in America, specifically young queer people, were too high for anyone with a conscience to justify remaining in the closet, especially if that someone was a public figure in a position to bring much-needed attention to queer issues. On the other hand, I recognized that each queer individual had a very personal choice to make: to reveal that aspect of his or her personal life or not to. Marcus was his own person, and I was my own person, and while I wished that he felt differently about being in the closet, I did love him, and I didn’t want our differing politics, as personal as they were, to determine the outcome of our relationship.

  A few nights after my interview, and with all of these issues swirling around in my mind, I went to dinner with Marcus at Angelica’s Kitchen, one of our favorite restaurants. Inside, the dining room was quiet and mellow, and as we ate I enjoyed the glow of the restaurant’s low, soft light as it flattered Marcus’s pale, lovely features. I was feeling safe and in love and content.

  And then I said, “I wanted to talk to you about opening night on Broadway.”

  I felt Marcus immediately tense up, his eyes clouding over. “What about it?”

  “Well, I want you to be there with me.”

  He regarded me with suspicion. “Okay…”

  “But you should know that there will probably be lots of press there. Lots of photographers.”

  “Well, then I can’t go,” Marcus replied, firmly sitting back and waving his arms in front of him, warding me off. And with those words, and that gesture, I knew in my gut, without even a coherent thought, that there was no future for us. Tears sprang to my eyes, surprising me with their force. As much as I’d wanted to believe that I could be okay with Marcus’s choice to remain in the closet, the truth was that I wanted to share my life with him, and that meant all of my life. I wanted to hide nothing; I couldn’t live my life any other way. And if he could not stand to be seen alongside me on one of the most important nights of my life, if he couldn’t be there for me, then I couldn’t be with him. I didn’t feel any anger, though, in that moment, only sadness and a profound recognition in my heart of what was true. Suddenly, the abstract notions of personal politics had very real consequences indeed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, crying, feeling no malice, just surrender. I truly was sorry. “I can’t be with you. I’m sorry.”

  Marcus iced up, chewing his hurt into his lip. “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it…” he said. We’d been down similar roads before, and he’d had similar reactions, but this time it was final.

  “I really thought I could handle this, I really, really did. I thought a lot about it. But I can’t.” I tried to keep my throat from tightening up as I talked through my tears, still surprised by the intensity of my emotions. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Marcus shrugged, his mouth set tightly. “That’s okay. I’m used to it with you.”

  He was right; I’d led him on, I’d opened the door to him after having closed it, only to close it again, and not for the first time. I looked away, stung.

  We didn’t talk much after that, and then paid the bill and went our separate ways.

  Our commercial producers had announced our move to Broadway without knowing which theatre we would be inhabiting, but soon enough they settled on the Nederlander. I thought it would be the perfect house for our show: it was the only Broadway theatre situated below Times Square, on the slightly scuzzy West Forty-first Street, and it hadn’t had a hit in many years. We’d swoop in there and clean the joint up, breathing new life into it, the same way we were breathing new life into the world of musical theatre.

  Our rise to fame was happening rapidly. The Times devoted page after page of the March 17th edition of the Arts & Leisure section to our show, including a splashy, half-page, technicolor photo of the entire cast on its cover, miniprofiles of each one of us inside, and a thorough report on the genesis of the show and the aftereffects of Jonathan’s death. When I read through my copy, gladdened by the balanced and compassionate writing I found there, I thought, Yes. This is right. This is what happens when you are a part of something important.

  New rumors began to swirl that Jonathan would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for writing Rent. I thought that he should win—his work was having more of a cultural impact than any other piece of theatre that year—but I also thought that the Pulitzer committee would not award it to him. They had given the prize to only a handful of musicals in the past, and our show was youth-oriented and popular and probably not “literary” enough.

  I’d been following the news of the impending Pulitzer announcement online, so I knew that on April 9th, we’d hear whether or not Jonathan had won. When that day came, we were all in the Nederlander, working through “Christmas Bells” on our new stage. It was snowing fairly heavily outside—a highly unusual occurrence in April—while we sang the recurring motif of the number over and over again: “And it’s beginning to snow.” The dual snowfalls, inside the theatre and outside, made me think that Jonathan was saying hello.

  As I stood onstage on one of the tables, next to Daphne and Adam, I noticed a camera crew, a couple of reporters, and our producers enter at the back of the theatre. My heart started thudding, and I whispered to Daphne, “We’re going to find out about the Pulitzer now.”

  “Don’t think about it,” she whispered back, and as she said it, Kevin McCollum, one of our producers, walked to the lip of the stage and asked Michael to stop the work so he could make an announcement.

  “I just wanted to let you all know,” he said, as coolly as possible, “that Jonathan Larson just received the Pulitzer Prize for Rent.”

  I made an involuntarily crazy, relieved, inarticulate, joyful sound, a kind of a sigh and cheer, and raised my hands to the ceiling, feeling so many things all at once: foolish for caring so much about a damn award, so happy that Jonathan had been recognized, and so terribly sad that he wasn’t there to receive his prize. Among the cast, there was a smattering of applause, and a few minor cheers, but overall the mood in the room was confused. Normally, in any other circumstance, we’d be able to go up to our friend who’d just won one of the most prestigious awards known to writers and give him a hearty slap on the back or a deep hug. But now we didn’t know what to do.

  A week later the mood was jubilant and nervous as we headed into our first performances in our new home. And from the moment we stepped onstage at our dress rehearsal, the twelve hundred friends and acquaintances and associates who’d packed themselves into the Nederlander erupted in a collective cheer. The sound of that many people clapping and whistling and hollering had a heady force that stopped us in our tracks. We had become something like rock stars.

  In the long moments it took for the audience to quiet down, I locked eyes with my friends onstage, each one suppressing a huge grin, their eyes gleaming. I knew my eyes were also gleaming, and when at last the audience was silent, I took a deep breath and began.

  The audience didn’t stop screaming for the rest of the night, nor for any of our two weeks of previews. We all took well to our larger house, opening up our performances to fill it with our voices and passion and commitment to each other and to what we were singing. Any lingering doubts that anybody may have had about whether we were a bona fide Broadway show were eradicated.

  I
hadn’t talked to Mom very much over the past two months because I’d been so busy with the show, but along the way I had kept her abreast of our developments. She had been dismayed by Jonathan’s death, saying, “It seems like they should have known at the hospital that something was very wrong with him.” She had often shared stories with me about using her nursing skills to correct doctors’ misdiagnoses, saving several people’s lives in the process, which always made me wish there were more nurses like her working in hospitals.

  Mom hadn’t been to New York for a visit since the Broadway opening night of Six Degrees of Separation, five and a half years before, so I was thrilled when she arranged a trip into town for Rent’s Broadway opening night on April 29, 1996. Accompanying her were her brother Chris, his wife Bonnie, Mom’s sister Roberta, and Mom’s old friend Phyllis. Phyllis lived in Portland, Oregon; she and Mom had met in 1978 when they were nurses together at Island Lake Camp. They had kept in touch ever since, talking on the phone or writing long letters stuffed with snapshots of their children. They had seldom seen each other over the years, but had managed to remain extremely close.

  Because of my two shows on the day before opening night, I was only able to see Mom and everybody else on the day itself. We arranged to meet for breakfast, and Adam and I rendezvoused with them all at their hotel, eager to see how well—or how unwell—Mom looked. She had more energy than I’d seen in a while, although she did have a cane with her, just in case she needed it.