The Responsibility Project^®. Exploring what it means to do the right thing

Rent: The Show Must Go On?

328 Comments

March 27, 2009 by Kathy McManus

There’s a “Rent” dispute raging through some unlikely places—Rowlett, Texas…Newport Beach, California…Bridgeport, West Virginia. It’s not about housing rights, but about a rite of passage—the high school musical—and what constitutes a responsible show for teens to stage. 

After the producers of the Broadway musical “Rent” spun off a modified version of the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning play, high schools across the country showed interest in staging it. “Rent: School Edition” was intended to replace aging school performances like “The Music Man” with an edgier production that doubles as a teaching tool about discrimination and tolerance. 

The school version omits some profane language and same-sex contact. But the story, centered on a group of New York City artists—gay, straight, drug addicted, and HIV-positive among them—remains the same. And that has rankled school officials, who have in turn enraged drama teachers, leaving students caught in the middle. 

“I know drugs are out there, I know children are having babies at twelve…But I don’t know if we need ‘Rent,’” said a West Virginia schools superintendent who forbade a local high school to stage the show, explaining that West Virginia families wouldn’t find the content of “Rent” appealing. 

But broadening perspectives is the point, say supporters of the show. “My responsibility as a drama teacher is to expose my students to a variety of different types of plays,” explained a California high school teacher who said his school principal told him to cancel the show after disapproving of its gay characters. The principal denies it, and flabbergasted students were told they might stage “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” instead. 

The controversy over “Rent” got so intense in Rowlett, Texas that Rowlett High’s theater director cancelled the production himself, to spare his students the pressure of local residents who called the subject matter immoral, anti-family, and inappropriate for a high school audience. “Everyone is pretty upset,” said a student with a leading role. 

All of which prompted one of the original Broadway cast members from “Rent” to remark, “You’re going to be upset in 2009 about a show because it has a man onstage in women’s clothing? You’ve gotta be kidding me.” 

Tell us what you think: When teens are shielded from reality, is it a help or a disservice? When it comes to responsibility in the arts, who should decide what’s appropriate?

328 Comments

What do you think? Leave a comment

• March 29, 2009 by kay lester

  I have been active in theatre for a long time in backstage tech. I am also a parent of theatre kids (now adults) and a former high school teacher. I think the problem is that it is NOT the school's responsibility to stage students in material that their parents or the school may deem inappropriate. While it is reasonable to acknowledge that these situations exists and engage in meaningful dialogue about them, putting students in the situations in public on a stage indirectly exposes the student and student body to the situation, which, like it or not, parents and schools have a right to object to. Parents have a right to decide what is acceptable for their children. School productions should remain "G". Budding actors can participate in community theatre or go see other productions on their own time.

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  • May 27, 2010 by Andrew Anglin

    Could you please give me a list of five plays and five musicals that will resonate with high school kids of TODAY and satisfy the "G" rating you require? It would also be nice if the plays could each have at least 10 roles (at least 5 for girls) and if your musical suggestions can accommodate a cast of at least 35. Minimal scenery requirements would also be helpful as would a title that will bring in an audience.

    BTW, I've already done these, so please don't include them: Plays: Fools, Metamorphoses of Ovid (Mary Zimmerman), While the Lights Were Out, A Christmas Carol, Rumors, The Elephant Man, The Curious Savage Musicals: Pippin, Beauty and the Beast, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Seussical, Footloose, Little Shop of Horrors, Once on this Island

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• March 30, 2009 by Linda T

  Whether it's about theatre, books or music all censorship will do is dumb us all down. Controversial subjects should be discussed, explored and then decided on, not hidden from. Schools that prevent these productions from going on are causing their students not to trust them to be available to discuss the "hard" subjects. Instead, they are telling their youth that these subjects are not fit for public discussion, which marginalizes youth that have questions about whatever the subject is.

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  • May 1, 2010 by Judy

    i do underdstand where you are coming from on that why the world kown how much you feel about that i feel that way to about it

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• March 30, 2009 by Joe Queue

  Guess what? Kids have sex, do drugs, and watch adult related movies on the computer in your living room. Rent's actually a great play, with modern life lessons that can help the actors and the audience grows as people. Sure, the parents have a right to veto what gets put on at their kids' school, but get over it already. Your kids are not innocent and neither are you. Rather than worry about what ends up going into their devious little heads, why you don’t talk to them about real world issues, share your thoughts, and learn from them. You'll realize that you've got nothing to worry about "Rent."

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  • September 29, 2010 by boadi akos

    i think this whole thing is nothing but the truth

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  • December 4, 2010 by ariel waters

    okay why is this? when teen want to have sex and do durgs and they mother and father let them it anyway .

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• March 31, 2009 by Stephen R

  Kay Lester is dead on. So long as parents are forced* to send their kids to these schools, they have every right to approve of or object to what their kids are being taught. It's yet another part of the problems created by mandatory government education centers (i.e. public schools). If people are required to attend, it creates a huge onus on that school to not create offensive situations. For all those saying "Hey, drugs and gay people are out there, therefore it's okay to do the play" -- How would you feel if they put on a play that was anti-gay? Hey, there are anti-gay people out there, so it's okay, right? Careful.... If you choose to expose your kids to these themes in plays, let them do community theater. That's the parents' call. [* forced -- unless you are wealthy enough to pay for their education twice -- through taxes and again through private school tuition.]

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  • November 13, 2010 by JM

    Do deviate from the more heated direct debate, let's consider higher education, even public, in this country. The best public Universities we offer in this the United States are University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, and University of Michigan, respectively. a good deal of tax dollars, though an abysmal number internationally, goes to supporting these schools. My point is that the culture of openness at these universities has fostered a superior educational environment. I saw that one commenter said "Parents have a right to decide what he or she learn on tax payer dollars." They DO have a right to do so in this country, which is why our education system lags behind all other developed nations. We have it reversed. If you want your children to learn Creationism, not challenge authority, and fail to thrive as an individual, and intellectual, then you need to find a way to send them to Parochial school or some other religious organization as an alternative. Keep in mind that there are just as many individuals in this country who find prayer, creationism, homophobia, and abstinence "education" far more offensive then anything that exists in RENT. Religion is often used to deny civil rights and knowledge to those who are well deserving. We need to decide if we want censorship in the form of any of these mechanisms or not. If we are just going to have kids perform Oklahoma, Our Town, and The Music Man, over and over, then why waste money when we've lost the whole point of individual expression and we're out of touch with our youth. You might feel that things were better in the past, and perhaps they were, but you can't stop culture and time from evolving.

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• April 1, 2009 by AJ Stryker

  Why do we Americans get so heated and emotional when controversy arises? It serves no one to allow emotions to come into play when trying to have dialogue. Is it any wonder that we have not evolved much in some arenas? To comment on Stephen R's comment about "anti-gay" themes. There are TONS of shows on TV and TONS of musicals that have biases against all sorts of people--gay people included. We already DO ALLOW them and don't bat an eye. Perhaps, this production attempts to start "leveling the score". If history is any teacher, it has not served us well to put our head in the sand regarding many issues---racial prejudice, hatred, abuse, HIV infection, homophobia, the economic downturn... An artist (painter, composer, writer, teacher, doctor) has a responsibility to get his audience to view the world in a different way--otherwise it IS NOT ART and not worth doing. As far as Stephen R's comment on children being "forced" to attend these schools. This smacks of utter contempt for public education. SHAME ON YOU! I am a taxpayer who has paid 25 YEARS of taxes to educate American children yet I haven't had any children. I still paid taxes to schools even though people like you try to undermine them with your hateful words. If anyone should be angry it should be me that I have to pay to educate children of ungrateful parents who aren't nearly as enlightened as they think they are. WHY HAVE WE HISTORICALLY APPEASED THE LEAST EDUCATED AND AWARE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY? It has delayed our progress from the Civil War until today! Shame on us all!

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  • February 5, 2011 by Elizabeth Livingston

    I wish I were going to Rent tonight at our local high school. I forgot the dates of the performances and the times. I have never seen a production of Rent; on my to do list. I don't know if any of the performances had a discussion time afterwards. I did go to a play in NYC where there was a discussion afterwards -- often a good idea. Oklahoma has its own dark moments. It is not all sweetness and light. I do wish parents would stop getting their noses out of joint over cultural problems and they need to remember that most of the first actors were men and they often wore women's clothes. MW, another fun way to have musicals in the schools is to do a montage of music from a number of musicals. Our junior high in Middletown OH did that once and it was great fun to have an evening of favorites from many musicals from Romburg to Hammerstein. Break a leg!

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• April 1, 2009 by Marilyn Reed

  It's NOT censorship when you make the choice of a decent show over one that does not reflect the values a school district wants to portray. As a 12 year veteran school director and a parent of a theater student, I think that the school should not allow this play and many others to be done in the high schools. There are plenty of good plays and musicals that could be done that would be appropriate (perhaps some with a few minor changes) for high school students and more importantly, for the community. Something I rarely hear mentioned is the fact that high school musicals should be for the whole community. These HS students will have plenty of opportunities in college or out in the world to go to and even perform in movies that glorify sex, drugs etc. They should do shows in HS that will be good for families so that parents can feel good about taking younger children to see the high school students perform. Also, so that senior citizens can attend and not be offended. Why must theater teachers always feel like they have to "push the envelope" with their students? If you want to do that, go teach in a college.

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  • August 27, 2010 by Pamela Camacho

    This is an outrage to hear! Have you people considered the thought, opinion, and feelings of teens. Exposing children to preform a good act of art or/and theatre is what being in reality social world's about. We have come to so many things that we don't consider thinking or discussing not only of children but of many other things! Practically you people are saying, my child needs to be vulnerable to our modern world and society. YOU are the one's exposing them to their disaster of lives and futures!Good Luck in screwing your kids lives!

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    • November 30, 2010 by TeenActress

      I would just like to say that I am a high school theater student myself, and I do not want to, and in fact have given up the opportunity to perform in, shows like "Rent" or other plays like it. I realize the topics they deal with do exist in the real world, but I do not think a youth theater group is the proper place to be introduced to them, and I find the idea of a fourteen or fifteen-year-old portraying a drug-user or a prostitute disturbing and inappropriate. I was in a teen theater class two years ago with no one in it under the age of 13; we did "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown," and you know what? We had a great time! It's a wonderful show, and we still talk about it, more so than some of the other, more "mature" plays I've been in with that same group of teens. I think what we enjoyed most about it was that we could actually relate to the characters, because we'd all been through childhood. I've seen kids in plays that dealt with adult themes where they clearly did not know what was going on. I say, leave the adult content to adult actors, and let teenagers be kids for as long as we can.

• April 2, 2009 by Kim Allen

  "Let's Get All Emotional's" response does exactly what he (or she) decries...gets all emotional. I have spent 25 years putting three children through the public school system and I have to say that I agree with "Careful..." If I had my choice, I would not have used the public school system. I don't think my children got the kind of education I wanted them to have and if I had the money, they would have gone to a private school. It isn't the public school system's job to expose our kids to the baser things of this world. It's their job to teach them the fundamentals. Parents have the right to allow their children to view what they deem appropriate at home, but the school system should be held to a different standard. It is my right as a parent to teach my child my values when it comes to sex, morality, religion, etc., and the school system infringes on that right daily. We aren't "Less educated" or "less aware". Both my husband and I are college graduates and we have raised a physicist, a nursing student and a computer engineering student. We have had to suplement their public school education to allow them to develop their potential. I'm not complaining about it. I'm just stating the facts. The government has taken the job of educating our children by default, but that does not mean that parents should have to surrender their rights at the door. With freedom comes responsibility and the school system does not have the right to constantly undermine our values. Setting guidelines for public schools is not censorship, it is responsible behavior. The school systems in this country are not just serving the liberal sector. They are serving EVERYONE and they have a responsibility to respect our values, even if they don't agree with them. THIS IS AMERICA. Just because I don't agree with you does not make me prejudiced, a homophobic, sexist, or any other name you throw at people who don't have your viewpoint. If we really want change in this country, then we need to start respecting our constitution and the people it serves...ALL of them.

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• April 2, 2009 by Joyce Bogusky

  Bravo. You hit the nail on the head. Although we want to expand our high school productions to more modern plays, G rated shows are a must. Parents and school boards have the final say.

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  • May 6, 2010 by Billyq

    And while your at it let's start making History "G" rated. Let's not talk about hatred from the Nazis and the Holocaust-right! Let's wait until they are adults so that they aren't upset about those terrible things as well-take the blinders off.

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• April 3, 2009 by Texas Girl

  I live in the small city of Rowlett, Texas... 50,000 people. It is shocking to me what this production has done to this town! Fighting for morals and tearing your town apart in the process just seems ridiculous.

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• April 4, 2009 by Laura Shipley

  I don't want to participate in the argument. I'm just curious, how many of you have actually watched Rent (the Broadway show or the movie)? Be honest. Nothing requires you to watch something if you find it offensive. I'm just curious if people's opinions are coming from their reactions to the musical or their reactions to the subject matter or content of the show. Seriously though, be honest, because you could argue from both sides whether you've seen the movie or not. Of course, please don't cheat and go watch it real fast before you comment again. If I will start by saying that I personally have seen it, but it was a long time ago and I don't remember most of it.

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• April 6, 2009 by Bill Chapman

  Some content is clearly objectionable. If someone wanted to stage a high school show with the plot of "Birth of a Nation" (which glorifies the forming of the KKK) there's no way it would be tolerated. The movie "Rent" is bigoted. Not against a race, religion, gender, or against a sexual preference, but against responsible people. Throughout the plot is a deep contempt of anyone who works a 9 to 5 job, pays their taxes, and has a good credit rating. Most reviews of this movie say the characters are trying to figure out how to pay their rent, and that's not accurate. They are trying to figure out how to mooch free rent off of people they despise. The heroes in this movie, though in their twenties, are not adults, they're adolescents. They are constantly broke, though able-bodied, because they are too "cool" to have acquired marketable skills. There is one character in the movie that is leaving the "Bohemian" lifestyle, and the other characters hate him for it. At one point they ask him "How could you abandon our ideals?” I couldn't believe it. I thought "IDEALS!?! What 'ideals' are you talking about? You're a bunch of worthless parasites!” The whole issue of some of the characters being gay is a red herring, and people who like the show will use that issue to condemn anyone against it as a "homophobe". I find the economic message of the play to be the most disturbing aspect of it, and it is not promoting the sort of values that any healthy society should strive for. -- Bill

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  • March 24, 2011 by Lisa

    You don't have to like characters in a play or musical to take the journey. "RENT" never advertised itself as a show trying to teach anyone anything, it's not a textbook, it's a musical and the whole point of entertainment is to go into the story and watch the lives of the characters unfold. No one was trying to glorify the life of a leech and I think that's it's silly to think you have to like the people or motives of the fictional characters written into a theater play! I think this is a story about accepting differences, finding yourself at a young age, coping with addiction and learning to live each day remembering what is truly important to you. "Seasons of Love" is a poignant song with an incredible message. I wish you'd taken that away from the show.

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• April 6, 2009 by Darlene Duke

  When I was teaching high school, I wouldn't have even considered presenting a musical that would offend anyone in the community. The community was my boss and they come to be entertained, not offended. I believe my teaching helped my students to develop their voices, become better actors and learn what is needed to put on a great show.

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  • April 6, 2009 by Marc Lash

    Perfectly wonderful post. Thank you! Makes you wonder why some people want to create “Drama” Pun intended.

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    • May 23, 2010 by katlynn

      forreal so much drama goes on

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