125 Stanford Stories

NO. 42
Student Life

Relevant ‘Rent’

Stanford student production finds today’s truths in a 20th-century classic

A young woman living with deadly illness struggles for acceptance. A young man agonizes over his career path.

The storylines of the musical Rent touched hearts – and sparked discussions – on the Stanford campus when the student-run Ram’s Head Theatrical Society mounted its ambitious production of Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer-winning play in April 2016.

Itself a reworking of Puccini’s La Bohème, Rent is set in the hardscrabble artists’ Bohemia that was Manhattan’s East Village in the 1990s – a milieu that was vanishing before most of the Ram’s Head cast was born.

Yet members of the production said Rent’s themes and situations resonate today: complicated relationships, nontraditional lifestyles, artistic drive, the need for tolerance, the challenge of creating community from diversity.

That last theme made Rent a perfect fit, cast member Preston Lim, ’17, told told Stanford Magazine: “There are so many diverse people on campus,” said Lim, who plays Mark, a filmmaker who fights loneliness and survivor guilt as his friends succumb to AIDS.

Ram’s Head’s Rent exemplifies the power of the arts at Stanford, where students across disciplines contribute unique talents to distinctive and relevant collaborations.  While Ram’s Head is a Stanford institution founded in 1911, the challenges that its members set themselves are perpetually new.

One challenge for Rent was to create the intimacy of the original repertory production in Stanford’s 1,700-seat Memorial Hall. It was solved by computerized moving scaffolds automated by the student group LITES (Lighting Innovation and Technology Education at Stanford) with grants from the office of the provost, the vice provost for student affairs, the Stanford Arts Institute, and the School of Humanities and Sciences.

To facilitate conversations about issues brought up in the show, Stanford mounted post-production events through OpenXChange, a year-long, community-wide initiative to strengthen and unify Stanford through engagement around issues of concern.

“When I was in middle school or early on in high school, I saw the movie for the first time, and since then, Rent has been a part of me and my life in ways that I cannot always even explain,” director Elizabeth Knarr, ’16, told the Stanford News Service.

“The music and the story are powerful and driving, and they speak to me on good days and bad, because they encapsulate the full emotional spectrum of human life.”

Listen to the Ram’s Head Theatrical Society cast sing Rent’s “Seasons of Love” from the show.