Rent the Movie Brings Lesbian Couple, Controversy to the Big Screen

When the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Rent reaches theaters in November, moviegoers will be treated to an unusual sight: a lesbian relationship at the center of a big-budget movie.

Directed by Chris Columbus (the first two Harry Potter films, Mrs. Doubtfire and Home Alone), Rent, the movie, features much of the original stage cast--including Taye Diggs (Kevin Hill, Chicago), Jesse Martin (Law & Order) Rosario Dawson (Sin City), and Idina Menzel, who played a bridesmaid in Kissing Jessica Stein and is married to Diggs in real life. In the beginning of both play and the movie, Menzel’s character has just left her boyfriend of four years for another woman, a role that will be played by Tracie Thoms (Wonderfalls) in the movie.

The $40-million cinematic version of Rent has a formidable act to follow. Playwright Jonathan Larson reportedly dated a dancer for four years who eventually left him for another woman, and he loosely based Rent on his own life and on his circle of friends (as well as Puccini’s La Boheme). The stage musical was an instant success when it debuted in 1996, one week after Larson died at age 35 of an aortic aneurysm.

Rent won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as an Obie award, three Drama Desk awards, four Tony awards and the New York Drama Critics Circle award. Still playing at New York City’s Nederlander Theatre, Rent has become one of the longest running shows on Broadway.

Rent portrays a year in the life of modern-day bohemians living in an East Village apartment building. The characters include gay men, lesbians, drag queens and heteros who are mostly HIV-positive and all social outcasts of a sort. In the cinematic version, Columbus and cowriter Stephen Chbosky add gay marriage to the story's original themes of poverty, the AIDS epidemic, tolerance and love--both queer and straight.

The musical’s sole lesbian relationship is full of drama and tumult. Performance artist Maureen (Menzel) leaves her filmmaker boyfriend Mark (Anthony Rapp) to shack up with Joanne (Thoms), a Harvard-educated public interest attorney. Joanne has taken over from Mark as Maureen’s stage manager, Mark and Joanne sharing an inability to resist Maureen, despite her self-centeredness and infidelity. Maureen and Joanne’s duet, "Take Me Or Leave Me"--which includes lines like "women: can’t live with them or without them"--has been touted as one of the few lesbian love songs on Broadway, even though it’s more of a lover’s quarrel.

Besides dealing with internal strife, the couple must also face parental disapproval and homophobia: Joanne’s parents leave a voicemail asking her to arrive at a family event with a dress, a bra, and neither her partner nor her Doc Marten’s.

Rent bears an uncanny resemblance to lesbian activist and author Sarah Schulman’s 1990 novel People In Trouble, but Schulman has said she is more concerned with the musical’s problematic messages than any potential plagiarism. Schulman and others have criticized Rent for suggesting that heteros are the heroes of the AIDS crisis; she refers to the musical as "straight-made homosexuality for predominantly straight audiences" in her book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. But it could also be argued that the musical counters popular myths of a "gay disease" by focusing on heterosexual, HIV-positive IV drug users.

Rent the movie will be released in theaters on November 11th, 2005;
for more on Rent the musical, visit the musical's official site.