The AIDS/HIV virus is a very destructive disease it sees no race, no age, no gender, and no economic background this can affect anyone, at any time. AIDS stands for what is called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The virus causes the body’s immune system to break down and become useless in fighting illness and bacteria. In the 1980s and 1990s AIDS and HIV was a very controversial topic, but no one spoke about it and was usually swept under the rug. The play Angels in America written by Tony Kushner spoke about the AIDS plagued ‘80s when being gay was shoved into a closet and hidden and especially being gay with AIDS or HIV was even worse.
The play’s plot shows the lives of two very different AIDS patients during the 1980s. RENT written by Jonathan Larson was another play that was written to spread the word about HIV and AIDS to the younger generation. These plays were both written to not only show how HIV effects the lives of those infected, and try and shed light to this terrible disease. Both plays discuss critical issues during their time and caused them to become very successful but without them having these strong themes, they would not be the successes they were.
RENT was written in the attempt to spread the word about HIV/AIDS in a way that would interest the younger generation of people. It talks about AIDS as a part of life and that all types of people can be infected, and that it is not only a disease for gay people but something that can infect anyone. The play was written in the early 1990s when people were ignorant about the disease and still believed they were safe if they were straight. RENT is loosely based on the play “La Boehme,” an opera that focuses on the lives of bohemian artists living in Paris at the end of the 19th century.
RENT is set in the East Village in New York City, at the end of the 20th century. Jonathan Larson’s RENT is about a group of friends struggling with many problems like love, drugs and AIDS. The characters are the narrator Mark, Maureen his former lover, Maureen’s lawyer and lesbian lover Joanne, former drug addict and Mark’s HIV positive roommate Roger, Roger’s lover the HIV positive drug addicted exotic dancer Mimi, their former HIV positive roommate Collins, Benjamin or Benny an old friend of the group who, has become their new landlord, and Collins’ HIV positive drag queen lover Angel.
Angel can be seen as a “guardian angel” to Collins and his friends, as she helps Collins after a bad mugging and later makes the food for a Christmas “feast”. The play begins on Christmas Eve and shows the characters’ lives over the course of one year. The story focuses in on Mark and Roger. While a past tragedy has made Roger numb to life, Mark tries to capture it through his attempts to make a film. During the course of the play, the characters protest the landlord’s plans to evict them and face other challenges that are more difficult to overcome, like drug addiction, AIDS, and their troubled relationships.
The characters do not overcome all their problems, but those that they do overcome provide them with a sustaining sense of community and the will to endure. Angels in America by Tony Kushner is a play that also speaks about the AIDS crisis and in the same setting New York City, one of the epicenters of the disease in America, and the stories of people who are indirectly and directly impacted by the disease. Angels in America focuses on the stories of two very different troubled couples, one gay, and one straight Louis and his lover Prior, and Joe and his wife Harper.
Prior tells Louis that he has been diagnosed with AIDS, and Louis panics. He tries to care for Prior but soon realizes he is not fit for the job. Then the play switches over to Joe as he, is offered a job in the Justice Department. But his wife Harper, who is addicted to Valium and has problems with her anxiety and hallucinations, does not want to move to Washington. The two couples stories connect as Joe and Louis strike up an unlikely friendship based in part on Louis’s belief that Joe is secretly gay. Harper and Prior also meet, in one of Harpers hallucinations and Prior reveals to Harper that her husband is a” closeted” homosexual.
Harper then confronts Joe, who denies it but says he has struggled with the issue. Joe’s good friend Roy receives a surprise as well, at a doctor appointment Henry finds out that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. But Roy, who considers gay men inferior, wants nothing in common with them tells people he has “liver cancer. ” Prior’s sickness and Harper’s fears both get worse. Louis strays from being Prior’s aide to have sex in Central Park at night with anonymous people. But fortunately, Prior has another caretaker named Belize, who is a dear friend and ex-drag queen.
Prior tells Belize that he has been hearing a mysterious voice; Belize doesn’t believe it, but once he leaves the voice speaks to Prior, and tells him she is a messenger who will soon arrive for him. As the days pass, Louis and Joe grow closer and there starts to be more flirting and lust obvious. Later Joe drunkenly calls his mother Hannah in Salt Lake City to tell her that he is gay, but Hannah doesn’t believe him. Afterwards, Joe tells Harper about his homosexuality, and she screams and orders her to leave, and at the same time Louis tells Prior he is moving out.
Later on in the play the gloomy Prior is woke up one night by the ghosts of two ancestors who tell him they have come to prepare the way for the unseen messenger. At the end of the play Joe follows Louis to the park, then takes him home for sex, while Prior I visited by a beautiful Angel who crashes through the roof of his apartment and says, “The Great Work begins. ” But both these plays were not significant because they great works of theatre, they were significant because they brought light to controversial topics during a time when they weren’t spoken about.
If Rent and Angels in America did not have these strong controversial themes, they probably would not have the success they did. For instance the Broadway show Bring it On, adapted from the film was not successful like its other Broadway predecessors, it got mixed reviews and closed five months later. It did not have a strong plot or themes like Angels in America or RENT and it did not speak on any important issues. The play was not as groundbreaking and significant as RENT and Angels in America was, because they told stories of people who were never talked about but were living with very hard lives.
Angels in America and RENT were both created to not only show how HIV effects the lives of those infected, but to try and shed light to those who were putting themselves at risk. All of the characters in Rent are HIV positive except one and in Angels in America two characters are HIV positive one gay and one straight. It seems that even today people tend to forget there is still a major risk of infection, even though for the most part HIV is becoming more of a controllable disease, but still potentially deadly.
In 1985 AIDS was viewed as an immediate death sentence, and a horrific one at that, to the infected person. There was apocalyptic terror that this epidemic could wipe out mankind. Now, although there is still no cure for AIDS, education and other aggressive actions are stemming the spread of the disease. On an individual basis, the length and quality of life of people living with the AIDS virus is dramatically increasing. Medicine will ultimately conquer AIDS and with the confidence of having done so, medical practitioners will be better prepared and equipped to meet the next plague when and if it comes.