Traditionally, the theater has been none too expert in what’s known
in Hollywood as “synergy,” but this season it’s doing its best to
see that every major play comes with an accompanying tie-in news
story. As with, say, the Burger King family value meals and animated
action figures designed to promote a new dinosaur film, you can’t
help feeling that the tie-ins are actually rather more satisfying
than the products they’re meant to be tying in to. As I mentioned last
month, there’s more truth about contemporary American gayness in the
controversy surrounding Corpus Christi than in the play itself.
Likewise, although every character in Jonathan Larson’s Rent is
an artist, or “artist,” of some sort—video artist, performance
artist, lesbian artist—its pieties about art and community in the
East Village wither alongside the accompanying legal dispute, in
which a dramaturge has been suing for her share of the many millions
this show has brought in since Larson dropped dead a week before
opening.

Lynn Thomson, dramaturge of the New York Theatre Workshop, sat in the
room with Larson, restructured his script with him, and wound up
writing—writing—new material for the play. None of this matters
much when you’re in rehearsal in some pokey little theater downtown:
what’s the point of arguing about your rightful percentage of the
royalties, when, in strict dollars and cents, a percentage of zip,
nada, diddly is still zip, nada, diddly? It’s not talked about much,
but dramaturges do this all the