Rent
Rent is a monthly charge by an owner for providing apartments, land or office space.
In theoretical economics rent is a concept introduced by David Ricardo and is the the excess of the produce or return yielded by a given piece of cultivated land over the cost of production; the yield from a piece of land or real estate."[1]
Contents
The play
Rent is Jonathan Larson's 1996 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical (and film) about bohemians living in New York in the early 1990s. The plot and much of the detail is borrowed directly from Giacomo Puccini's famous 1896 opera La Boheme, set in Paris, which focused on the disease consumption (tuberculosis). In Larson's version, AIDS takes the place of consumption.
Controversy
A student version of the musical has been released for high school drama clubs to perform. Though some sexual content and drug use had been partially removed (most notably the removal of a sexually explicit song), it was insufficient to meet some community standards of decency. "Administrators or parents raised objections about the show's morality, its portrayals of homosexuality and theft, and its frank discussions of drug use and HIV" and performances of the musical have been canceled at high schools in California, Texas and West Virginia.[2] The play generally glosses over the homosexual lifestyle (most of the characters are homosexual), and despite a serious AIDS pandemic (four of the main characters are infected), the play somewhat perplexingly tries to glorify intercourse outside of marriage. (One song urges the characters to forget the consequences of sex, because there is "no day but today".)
| “ | Ron Martin, the theater teacher and director at Corona del Mar High School in Orange County, found out how controversial Rent can be. It was canceled after he chose the student version for the spring musical, hoping it would counter what he saw as creeping homophobia on campus... "This is the first time I've chosen a show for the high school because I had an agenda," Martin said. "In this instance, having an agenda as a teacher didn't give me pause."[2] | ” |
See Also
References
- ↑ rent (English) (HTML). Dictionary.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-30.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Stage Set for Controversy When Schools Put on 'Rent' San Diego Union-Tribune, February 20, 2009.
