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Seasons of change

Ithaca College performs the Broadway classic “RENT,” while Cornell University’s latest show explores the challenges of change at work and at home

By Barbara Adams

Poster by Chris Holden.

In 1996 –– a hundred years after Puccini’s “La Bohème” chronicled a Parisian demimonde of impoverished artists –– Jonathan Larson’s “RENT” did the same for struggling East Village artists and rebels. His musical, which won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer for Drama, struck a nerve and defined an era –– one in which the creative community was decimated by AIDS.

Our own pandemic, equally global, equally deadly, makes Ithaca College Theatre’s choice to stage “RENT” painfully apt. Under Cynthia Henderson’s inspired direction, this powerhouse production, featuring 22 talented young actors and over 40 songs, is a tsunami of stagecraft and emotion.

The world of these bohemians, squatters in an unheated building, is marked by drugs and disease, homelessness and prostitution, anger and despair. But it’s also fueled by creative dreams –– Mark (Tristan Tierney) is inseparable from his movie camera; Roger (Hunter Kovacs) tries to pick out “just one good song” on his old Fender.

The downbeat of their lives is countered by their vibrant camaraderie and friendship, a community that includes Tom (Anthony Garcia) and his drag queen lover, Angel (Michael Marrero); and Mark’s former girlfriend, the performance artist Maureen (Amanda Xander) and her new lover, Joanne (Alaysia Duncan). And of course, there’s Mimi (Sierra Martinez), assertive and seductive, a far cry from Puccini’s fading flower.

The fellowship extends to all the others in the neighborhood living marginally, eluding cops, barely imagining something better. This swell of humanity is fascinatingly diverse and yet familiar (thanks to casting and to costumer Nicole Brooks, one of four seniors who designed the show). The denizens of the Lower East Side swarm over the levels of Olivya Deluca’s rundown set, metal scaffolding over boarded-up windows and endless graffiti. The six-man band, conducted by Chris Zemliauskas, lurks in the rear, sounding the heartbeat.

All the action (Daniel Gwirtzman, choreography) is unforgettably rendered in a succession of striking stage pictures, of couples, trios, or the entire ensemble. The most memorable, and comical, is a long feasting table with everyone gathered around, echoing Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”; the most moving are the continuously breathtaking washes and cones of light by designer Kyle Stamm.

Henderson keeps the layered story moving briskly and the actors’ delivery is fully committed. Xander’s Maureen creates street theatre to protest their eviction by their once-comrade Benjamin (Neftali Benitez); her cow-poem performance is superb comic parody. As lesbian lovers, Xander and Duncan spar incessantly. Martinez’s Mimi is as tough as Tierney’s Mark is sensitive, both equally driven by what they desire.

An otherworldly element comes from Angel, the drag queen whose gentle wisdom calms their conflicts. Lean and towering in little-girl dresses, Marrero gracefully steals everyone’s heart.

All the bickering and break-ups are mended by the music, from the rousing “La Vie Bohème” to the tender “I’ll Cover You” and the nostalgic “Seasons of Love,” registering a year’s passing. When the HIV support group sings “Will I Lose My Dignity,” the anguish is palpable, and the memory of those we lost to AIDS conflates with the sharpness of those we’ve lost recently –– an eloquent moment in a remarkable production.

Ithaca College

“RENT,” book, music, and lyrics by Jonathan Larson; directed by Cynthia Henderson. Ithaca College’s Hoerner

At Cornell, similar themes of time passing, loves won and lost, and the imminence of death appear in the comical drama, “Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England,” by playwright Madeleine George ’96, as directed by Samuel Blake. In a small liberal arts college, somewhere in New England, dean Cynthia Wreen (Samantha Noland), has to defend the decision to tear down the tired but cherished natural history museum on campus to make way for a spa-like dormitory. As both students and townspeople protest, Wreen also faces upheaval at home.

Her new-age lover, Andromedea (Yue Aki Ji), 20 years her junior, is among the protestors, and her old friend, the love of her own youth, philosophy professor Greer (Kit Ellsworth), has moved in with them at Wreen’s insistence –– Greer being weakened by a relapse of her stage IV breast cancer.

Greer is grounded and sensible, a touchstone of normality. Wreen, consumed by her work, is turning into a pragmatic administrator who can justify any collateral damage. (She proposes giving the museum’s mammoth skeletons away to local businesses…to display and decorate.)

Andromeda is pure-hearted but excessively childlike, enthusiastically sharing spiritual truisms and rituals that the older women can’t relate to. (One gets the gist; unfortunately, fewer than half of her rapidly delivered speeches were decipherable.)

Both the dean and her young lover are critiqued here as types, yet we’re also asked to invest in them. Another concern is that the script details every encounter to its fullest, stretching the production out to nearly three hours. Judicious cutting would pick up the pace and leave something to the imagination.

The simple setting, by Jason Simms, includes an old museum room with a natural history diorama, flanked by glass cases displaying random stuffed animals. And it’s this space that offers comic relief, which comes in two forms: the elderly museum caretaker (Trence Wilson-Gillem), who somberly reads aloud passages from the local newspaper, and the surreal element of four early humans in skins and wild wigs, who first appear inside the diorama, and then pop up elsewhere. They pose motionless, as in a display case, in the midst of skinning animals or grinding corn –– meanwhile conversing in contemporary speech on ordinary concerns, like relationships and drugs and money.

It’s a fresh and amusing device in a play exploring, in Andromeda’s words, “alternative kinship structures.”

Cornell

“Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England,” by Madeleine George, directed by Samuel Blake. At Cornell’s Flex Theatre, Nov 19 & 20, 7:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Barbara Adams, a regional arts journalist, teaches writing at Ithaca College.