Rent

Roger, Mark’s roommate, is a musician and songwriter whose promising career came to a halt when his girlfriend, April, informed him in her suicide note that they both had AIDS. At the start of the play, Roger is struggling to tune his electric guitar, which he just picked up for the first time in a year. He spent the last six months withdrawing from heroin and has also stopped leaving the apartment. Roger’s response to negotiating his own mortality is to close himself off, which is contrary to the goal that he set for himself to write a song before he dies that will be great enough to outlive him. As a character, Roger illustrates the musical’s message about living for today. He gave up on living his life at all, afraid to make connections or seek new experiences. When he meets Mimi, she reminds him of April, and he becomes infuriated at what he sees as a connection he wants but can’t have. Roger doesn’t articulate what he’s afraid of—whether he’s worried about hurting Mimi by possibly transmitting the virus to her or by dying and leaving her alone, or if he’s worried that Mimi will hurt him. But cutting himself off from others destroys his ability to write music. Even after he opens himself up to a relationship with Mimi, he pushes her away. Roger leaves town because he is afraid of watching her get sicker and then die. Roger’s journey is about learning to live for today and appreciate the time they have together, which finally allows him to write his song. Based on the original production, he is traditionally cast as a white man. In terms of representation, Roger is significant as a depiction of a straight man with HIV/AIDS, defying the common misconception in the 1990s that AIDS affects only gay men. 

Collins, traditionally cast as a Black man, is a genius and a professor of computer-age philosophy. He was fired from MIT, presumably midyear given his appearance on Christmas Eve, but hired to teach at New York University. Collins is gay and has HIV/AIDS, and he tells his friends that he was fired for teaching his students about “actual reality” (26). Although he doesn’t clarify the philosophy that was responsible for the loss of his job, Collins is an anarchist. Given the era, it’s possible that the unspoken and unofficial reason that he was fired was for being HIV positive. Collins shares everything he has with his friends, who he knows are hungry and struggling, opting to support his chosen family even when he has very little himself. Collins falls in love with Angel, and their relationship becomes a beacon for the rest of the characters. They live unselfishly for each other and never waver in their devotion, making the most of the time they have together with the knowledge that it will end. Collins tenderly takes care of Angel to the moment of death and makes sure to provide a proper funeral, even though he can’t afford it. Collins is a peacemaker who ultimately reconciles easily with Benny and laments the breakup of the group at Angel’s funeral. In the end, Collins uses his computer genius to rig an ATM as an endlessly giving memorial to Angel, something that will keep Angel’s name alive as long as its letters work as an ATM code.

Benny, traditionally cast as a Black man, is the musical’s antagonist. He was once Roger and Mark’s third roommate, but he married a wealthy woman, bought their apartment building and the vacant lot next door, and is now going back on his promise to let his friends live rent-free. Benny represents gentrification, having been gentrified himself, as evidenced by his pretentious use of his full name and suffix, as opposed to the more familiar nickname that his former friends use anyway. Benny is not entirely villainous, although he does such vile things as bringing the police to the protest, evicting the denizens of the building by padlocking the door, and treating Mimi as a sex object. He believes in gentrification as progress and thinks that the bohemian lifestyle that his friends insist on is just stubbornly romanticized poverty. Benny tries to win Mark and Roger to his way of thinking, offering them luxury and a place to make art. By New Year’s, Benny’s belief in wealth and gentrification is starting to wear thin, and he’s glad to be away from his wife and rich in-laws. His relationship with Mimi seems to be a way of spiting Roger, especially when he gloats about it, but at Angel’s funeral, Benny doesn’t hesitate to offer to pay for Mimi to go to rehab. He also offers immediately to pay for the funeral when Collins can’t, suggesting that he wants to use his new financial resources to do good things, but had a flawed understanding of what “good” means. In the last scene, the other characters mention that the plan for the East Village location of Benny’s CyberArts studio was canceled because his wife discovered his affair with Mimi, suggesting that either Benny’s marriage will end soon, or he will have to cut himself off from the group.

Of all the characters, Joanne is the most out of place in the bohemian universe of the East Village. She is an attorney, typically cast as a Black woman, from a wealthy family with political connections. Joanne has an Ivy League education and lives in a building with a penthouse, and her conversations with her office suggest that she has a high-level position at work. Her parents don’t accept her as a lesbian and expect her to put on a show of heteronormativity by dressing conservatively and not bringing her girlfriend to events. Joanne falls for Maureen, who brings her into the foreign world of hipster artists in precarious living situations. At first, Maureen walks all over Joanne, who allows it because she’s in love. When Joanne realizes, after bonding with Mark, that Maureen is being manipulative, their relationship becomes a tug-of-war, a tempestuous on-again, off-again struggle for power. However, after their first breakup at the end of Act I, Joanne finds that her place in the group isn’t contingent upon Maureen. She shows up on New Year’s Eve with legal advice, as well as rope to help the group enter the building illegally. Her parents keep leaving her messages that she seems to have stopped returning, because she has been adopted into a new family that accepts her for herself.

Angel, traditionally played by a Latino or Black actor, is simultaneously the most perfectly virtuous character in the play (with the pointedly apt name) and the one with the most subjugated and oppressed identities. Angel is a gay BIPOC drag queen with HIV/AIDS who makes money by playing rhythms on a pickle tub while busking in the street. Questions about Angel’s gender identity and pronouns have been a matter of contention in the decades following the musical’s premiere but can’t be definitively answered, primarily because the musical predates the more developed and nuanced contemporary conversation about gender identities by 15 to 20 years. The stage directions refer to Angel as “he,” although the characterization by Angel’s friends and lover is less than consistent. For instance, Collins sings, “I can’t believe he’s gone” (121), while Angel’s eulogizers use “she” (115-16). However, drag is a performance art, and drag queens don’t typically dress up to gather with friends. Yet Angel appears out of drag only while dying. Although the intended answers to these questions died with the author, the ambiguity most likely indicates Larson, as a straight man who died in the 1990s, wasn’t aware of the difference between trans women and drag queens or the nuances of Angel’s gender identity. In a 2019 article in Out magazine, Charlene Incarnate identifies Angel’s gender identity as “Rent’s most enduring mystery” and mentions “a drag queen, nonbinary, trans [woman], or all of the above” as the character’s possible identities. She points out that “Angel’s commitment to her femininity is absolute, and her friends never refer to her using ‘he/him/his’ pronouns until after her death” (https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2019/1/25/angels-gender-identity-rents-most-enduring-mystery). Rent has also received ongoing criticism for making its queerest character a martyr while allowing the straight couple to survive. Angel exists in the musical to show the others the meaning of selflessness and love, using the axiom “today for you, tomorrow for me” (27) while knowing that there will likely be no tomorrow for this character.

Mimi, who is Latina, is only 19 (presumably 20 by the end of the musical) when she meets Roger. Her assertion that she is old for her age seems almost childish until it becomes clear that she is both young and old because she is dying. She is simultaneously at the beginning and the end of her life. Mimi has an addiction to heroin and has HIV/AIDS. She is also a sex worker who dances at a strip club. Mimi rarely refers to her past, but she is uncomfortable when everything is quiet, and it reminds her of home. She has a mother who calls in the second act while Mimi is missing and whom Roger mentions as one of Mimi’s alibis for the times that she disappears to use drugs. Mimi is reckless, continuing to use heroin and lying to Roger because she doesn’t expect to live to see the future. Mimi’s interpretation of the play’s assertion about living for today is to indulge in hedonism in hopes of forgetting the traumas of her past and the limitations of her future. She falls in love with Roger, who is afraid to live at all, but he takes the risk to venture forward because he loves her, too. However, Mimi reveals that she is also scared when she overhears Roger and Mark talking about her visibly declining health. It isn’t clear whether she follows through and goes to rehab for any length of time, but she ends up on the streets still using drugs. Mimi demonstrates that self-indulgence isn’t the answer to the musical’s call to make the most of whatever time one has, as her life choices seems to hasten the progression of her illness, and she nearly dies. But she receives another chance at life and love when Angel’s heavenly apparition acts as a deus ex machina and sends her back to earth.