Document of the time

Tulsa Project Theatre returns RENT to its intimate roots

With the recent growth it’s seen with new fellowships, funding, festivals, and the success of First Fridays, an overwhelming sense of positivity, excitement, and fun can be felt in Tulsa’s art scene. We are lucky to enjoy the talents of many artists who give rich, poignant performances on all of Tulsa’s stages, where most theater, music, and dance operate to a significant degree as feel-good enterprises. This has been good for our downtown, which has been depressed for so long. But, I do have a question.

Where is the performing art that shakes us up, that makes us consider who we have been and who we want to be?

Who we have been is, among many things both great and terrible, a community that for nearly a hundred years pretended nothing really happened down in Greenwood in 1921. As we slowly make space for that reality and other unpleasant facts about our city, we are going to need art to help us. Art that connects us to reality, not just gives us an escape from it.

Performing art, through its inherent empathy-building genius, lets us look through various lenses of reality. Work that is uncomfortable, disruptive, and unexpected helps us see what we tolerate in our own selves and in our community. It gives us a glimpse of our willingness to engage with the other, expanding our imaginative and solution-finding capabilities.

Tulsa mostly experiences this type of art through new work via the certifiably punk rock Nightingale Theater and Living Arts and its New Genre Festival. Original works by locals appear at Summerstage and the Tulsa Fringe Festival. The University of Tulsa cultivates new talent with playwriting workshops and residencies. Challenging contemporary plays—“August: Osage County,” “Closer,” “Book of Mormon”—by celebrated artists pop up here and there.

Still, when theater companies bring in even mildly controversial material, as with Heller Theatre’s production of Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews” last year, there’s often an embarrassing backlash. 

Why am I talking about this? Because of Tulsa Project Theatre’s upcoming production of “Rent,” and how the company is choosing to present it. 

When “Rent” premiered on Broadway in 1996, it addressed the devastation of AIDS, which was a visceral and immediate reality. “It was this incredible bolt of lightning,” TPT executive director Ron Spigelman says. “In terms of musical theater and life coming together, [Rent] has become more than a cult; it’s a document of the time.”

Director Matthew Brown noticed “Rent” getting “a little glossy” in the years since its premiere. For its current production in the 150-seat Norman Theatre at the Tulsa PAC, Brown aims to take the musical back to the East Village of 1991, finding clothes and decor from that time and emphasizing the struggles of the characters.

But there’s more than set dressing and performance grit involved in what Spigelman calls “trying to bring the show back to what it’s really all about.” Yes, “Rent” is an iconic piece of entertainment, riffing on “La Boheme” amid the rampant poverty and sexuality politics of the era. “The show hasn’t ended,” Spigelman says. The issues it explores are even more relevant now. “Politically, it’s become supercharged again.”

Far from dodging or glossing over those issues, TPT is doing the opposite and digging in, effectively operating as a community service organization. “That’s what we want to be,” Spigelman says.

“We want our production to be more in tune with our community and their struggles. We’re going to invite people who are coming to bring photos of loved ones who have died from AIDS and they will get to walk from their seats and put that photo on the set.”

“We don’t want to just do a show to remember a time,” he explains. “AIDS is still with us, people are still dying from it. We want to do this so that people can actually feel the presence of the people they have lost as part of the experience. By the time the show ends the wall will be full of pictures.”

Real people being addressed by and welcomed into a show and given space to enter the complexity of the experience? That’s performing art that matters. “Rent” broke ground by speaking fearlessly to its viewers about their own community, about those who were other and yet belonged. Who is other to us? How can we honor them? By making theater and music and dance that connects us and helps us to connect; that exposes our fault lines; that links us in living life out of the shadows.

RENT
March 4 through March 19
Charles E. Norman Theatre, Tulsa PAC | tulsapac.com

For more from Alicia, read her article on the surreal "Cowboy."