As for the People in Trouble aspect, I haven't read the book so can't say. I suppose I'll have to eventually, though. Let me fill you in:
* Both are set in the East Village milieu of AIDS, homelessness, homosexuality, and artists.
* Both involve a love triangle between a straight artist couple and the woman's lesbian lover.
* The woman in the middle, in both pieces, is a performance artist who does a performance that defeats the greedy landlord evicting people with AIDS, which serves as a cathartic plot point for both works. In
People in Trouble, the landlord dies; in
Rent, he changes his ways.
* In both pieces there is an interracial male gay couple where one partner dies of AIDS. In both works this death is a cathartic plot point.
* Both contain a scene where the performance artist's lesbian lover meets the straight guy and they form some kind of strained relationship.
* In both, the lesbian couple become involved with people organizing to defend people with AIDS. In
People in Trouble, an AIDS activist group steals credit cards to feed the poor. In
Rent, a gay man programs an ATM machine for similar purposes.
* Furthermore, a difference between them only serves to highlight the use of
People in Trouble in the creation of
Rent.
Rent is set in the 1990's, rather than the late 1980's. However, anachronistically, the use of watch alarms to remind people with AIDS to take their medications is a prominent paradigm. When Schulman was writing
People in Trouble, in 1987, AZT was prescribed to be taken every four hours, necessitating the use of watch alarms, which would then go off in public places where there were many people with AIDS, such as the ACT UP meetings that she attended every Monday night. Her use of this image in
People in Trouble is the first articulated observation of this cultural detail. In the 1990's, when Larson was writing and setting
Rent, AZT was prescribed every
twelve hours, so no one would have been using watch alarms. Leaving aside for a moment (and I'll tell you why in a minute) the fact that he had friends with HIV or AIDS and attended support group meetings going back to the late Eighties, Larson could not have observed this detail in the Nineties, because it was not there to be observed.
Now, you're wondering why I asked you to rule out personal inspiration in the event of that last one. There are two reasons. Firstly, it stretches the bounds of credulity that he took all that from the novel and didn't take the watch alarms as well. Secondly, it stretches the bounds of coincidence when you consider what happened after the novel's publication in 1987/88:
* In 1987, while writing the novel, Schulman met Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie, a team who wanted to make the novel into an opera. The three developed a treatment which circulated for the next three years to many prominent houses in the U.S. and Europe, including the Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Lincoln Center. The package included the treatment and various drafts of the manuscript, finally including the published book once it appeared in 1990. They described their project as a "
La Boheme for the '90's." Among those approached with this project was Ira Weitzman, whom the official
Rent story advises ultimately suggested to Billy Aronson that he collaborate with Jonathan Larson.
* In 1994, Michael Korie and Jonathan Larson were both awarded a Richard Rodgers Prize and both attended the awards dinner. At the dinner, Jonathan described the plot of his play to Michael, who responded, "That sounds like
People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman." Jonathan expressed surprise that Michael was aware of the novel and affirmed that he had read the book and was using it in creating
Rent.
* Finally, Billy Aronson has repeatedly stated that when he was working with Jonathan Larson on the collaboration that turned into
Rent, none of the content that overlaps with
People in Trouble was in the project. Aronson claims that the material came in once Jonathan went off to work on his own. Concomitantly, both Michael Greif and Lynn Thomson say that the overlapping materials were already in place when they came into the project (as director and dramaturge, respectively). This leaves the inclusion of the infringing material in the hands of Jonathan Larson.
As Schulman summed it up in the end, "There are only two basic plot lines in
Rent:
People in Trouble (the gay plot line) and
La Boheme (the straight plot line)." Plus or minus
Stagestruck's arguments about
Rent and other theater pieces monopolizing and commodifying homosexuality, genderqueer, and AIDS, that's the meat of her argument.
Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05
Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus, BorisTomashevsky, Seb28
Updated On: 9/6/13 at 08:04 AM
- Margaret Martin 
