The trailer for Tick, Tick… BOOM! Dropped and the film of the musical by Jonathan Larson looks great, as it should, as it’s directed by the man who created HAMILTON.
If you haven’t seen it, here it is.
Before creating RENT, Larson wrote this one-man cabaret show called tick, tick… BOOM! which he himself performed while he was still working at a diner. Looks wonderful, doesn’t it? I don’t know that I will be able to bring myself to watch it, however. Why? Because Larson never lived to see his success, he never lived to realize his dream. Which is sad enough on its own, but Larson died of something preventable. Here’s the wiki on his death.
Larson died at his home in the early morning hours of January 25, 1996, the day of
Rent
's first Off-Broadway preview performance. He suffered an
aortic dissection
, believed to have been caused by undiagnosed
Marfan syndrome
.
[13]
[14]
He had been suffering severe
chest pains
, dizziness, and shortness of breath for several days prior to his death, but doctors at
Cabrini Medical Center
and
St. Vincent's Hospital
could not find signs of an
aortic aneurysm
even after conducting a chest X-ray and
electrocardiogram
, so they misdiagnosed it either as
flu
or
stress
.
[13]
New York State medical investigators concluded that if the aortic dissection had been properly diagnosed and treated with
surgical repair
, Larson would have lived.
[15]
See, Larson was working as a waiter at the diner above up until about three or four months before his death. He had no health insurance.
He complained about not getting paid for RENT during all the workshop rehearsals, while actors and crew got paid. He finally got a fellowship that eventually led to him being able to leave his job in the fall before RENT would premiere, but was never able to truly get to the root of his health issues.
Because, it seems, artists don’t deserve healthcare unless they make a ton of money for everyone else, first.
He didn’t have to die. But he did.
And he didn’t die of anything other than a culture of American neglect and greed. Where artists are supposed to starve and kill themselves for their vocation, though no one else is required to do so.
He lived in an abandoned building for FOUR years, without heat, mind you. RENT was autobiographical in many regards, that being foremost.
He didn’t have to die. But he did and never lived to see his dream come alive.
He died of poverty, in the end, after creating a franchise worth millions (if not more).
This hits me hard, as a former playwright (and survivor of that era in New York City).
I starved here. I starved nearly through my entire playwrighting career.
I would walk from Queens to Manhattan (over the bridge) for job interviews because I didn’t have a dollar for a subway token. I had no health insurance, no phone (I paid ten dollars a month for an answering service), no bank account (I used check cashing places), didn’t get medication, of course.
All while I had plays being produced.
This is a story my friends know, but once upon a time, back in the day, I had a lunch meeting with theatre producers, I wasn’t certain they were gonna pay for lunch (sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t) so I told them I was on a fast and couldn’t eat anything during the day.
I sat there, starving, as they stuffed themselves with expensive Italian food.
They also split the check, which meant I dodged a bullet.
The awful thing about poverty and starving is that you can’t let people know. If producers knew I was starving, they wouldn’t want to work with me.
They’d distance themselves. They viewed it as the stink of failure.
But the mistake is they’d blame me for that failure and not the true source of it.
It’s just the stink of poverty. No one is immune to it. It can hit any of us at any time. Most of us (a large majority, in fact) are but one medical emergency away from it.
And now you know why so many rich kids engage in a career in the arts and non-rich kids have to do something else. Because they can’t afford to.
I stopped when my partner got pregnant. It’s one thing to risk my life, it’s another to risk my family’s life. I love theatre but I was always clear-eyed about it. It didn’t love me back… or anyone, for that matter. I should note, American theatre.
This is very much an American issue. We view the poor as disposable. They’re not.
We view people starving as “character-building”… but it’s not.
We view an artist dying before realizing his success as somehow beautific.
It reads like a romantic tragedy. That’s the story people tell themselves.
It’s not. It’s a serious loss. He died because of us.
Because of our culture, because of this bullshit mythology that artists should have to starve. And no, they don’t.
No one should starve. Not schoolteachers, military personnel (many of whom are on food stamps), custodians, maids, construction workers, cops, firefighters, tour guides, or wait staff. Nor artists. No one should starve nor lack health care.
I am glad for this film in that it gets Larson’s work out to a bigger audience.
But I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch it. I lived in the city in that era, I was starving and struggling hard at the same time, and I often still have nightmares from it.
I believe the true lesson from Larson’s work is that we should do a better job of caring for each other, which is the purpose of creating art, after all, in the end.
To bring us together.
Let’s live on together rather than consigning a large part of our people to starving alone or dying from lack of health care, shall we?