Unless he has exceptional powers of self-delusion, anyone who writes regularly on the American theater soon grows uncomfortably aware that he’s engaged in a kind of ongoing obituary column. That’s not metaphorical but literal: these days, the best shows on Broadway are its memorial services, when great actors, writers, producers emerge from involuntary retirement to lay on a spiffy send-off for one more of their ever dwindling ranks. Moreover, even the non-memorial shows wrap themselves in shrouds, as if seeking the ultimate security blanket. Angels in America gave us the angel of Death; now, Jonathan Larson’s Rent gives us the death of Angel.

Angel is, inevitably, an hiv-riddled transvestite sculptor in the East Village, where the drama is set and, indeed, where it’s playing (AT THE NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP). AIDS has glamorized death to a degree unseen in the arts for a hundred years, but Larson is the first to acknowledge its nineteenth-century antecedents in explicit formal terms. Larry Kramer and the first generation of AIDS chroniclers were concerned to emphasize in unsparing detail the realities of the disease, the sweats and the lesions. But, as its long march through the arts has continued, AIDS has been romantically ennobled to the point where the political and metaphorical burdens it bears can no longer be contained by the dreary naturalism of the (so to speak) “straight” play. So Larson has turned to Puccini: for, like the tubercular heroines of the last century, the person-living-with-AIDS,