Love, Loss, and Andy Dick? Austinist Reviews Without You by Anthony Rapp
Here’s our dilemma: We really want to like Anthony Rapp's Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical “Rent.”
In his memoir, Rapp, who originated the role of Mark Cohen in Rent, follows the parallel strands of his rising professional success and his personal struggles, particularly his mother's battle with and death from cancer. Along the way, Rapp touches on themes common to most 20-somethings: finding satisfying work and sometimes compromising to pay the bills; searching for a life partner and making lots of mistakes along the way; becoming your own person; reconciling your childhood; balancing obligations to work, family, friends, and significant others.
We did find much to like about Without You. We were particularly struck by how candidly and astutely Rapp captures the fear, confusion, and awkwardness of being young and faced with mortality for the first time, such as when he writes with poignant honesty about his grandfather's funeral:
I considered reaching down and touching one of his hands that were laid across his chest, but then thought no, that was morbid. . . . So I just stood there and looked at him and waited for something transcendent to occur, for anything at all unusual or meaningful or unforgettable to happen. . . . But after a few long moments of standing and staring down at my grandfather, I started to feel absurd. And false. I hardly knew him. And he hardly knew me. . . . Looking down at his inert, unfamiliar, costumed body touched nothing in me.
This honesty continues as he confronts his conflicted feelings about his mother's cancer: wanting to be a good son to his sick mother in suburban Illinois and wanting to escape back into his exciting life in New York City. As he describes a friend whose boyfriend has left him even as he is dying from AIDS, Rapp admits,
I'd recognized myself in his fears---of facing death, of watching his lover fade away, of his own inadequacy to be the kind of caretaker his lover wanted and needed him to be. If I had been in Calvin's position, I wasn't sure that I would have been able to have the guts to stay with Ben either.
Rapp's memoir, however, isn't all gloom and doom. His brutal honesty is matched by his infectious enthusiasm for the success of Rent, as he describes the thrill of hearing rehearsing the music for the first time and his excitement as Rent became a cultural phenomenon. The book's best chapter, "Jonathan," weaves together both strands in the aftermath of Jonathan Larson's death. Larson, the creator of Rent, died suddenly from an aneurysm on the eve of Rent's off-Broadway debut. In tribute to Larson, the cast performed a special preview for his family and friends. Rapp's retelling of that performance is a skillful emotional balance between celebrating life and mourning death, and we defy you to get through the chapter without reaching for the tissues.
As much as we liked what Rapp wrote, however, we didn't like how he wrote. His style is lazy and weak. Run-on sentences, a lack of transitions, and an aversion to the serial comma (Roberta and Chris and Bonnie and I . . .) create clunky prose. His conversational tone, although endearing in parts, too often clashes against his serious subject matter, as when he describes an ambulance "zooming" his mother to the hospital.
When Rapp isn't inciting our inner editor, he's trying our patience. He includes entirely too many mundane conversations, cute anecdotes, and side stories that might amuse him but add nothing to his central story. We really didn't need to know that Darryl Coopersmith lost his innocence on Andy Dick's living room floor (yes, that Andy Dick). Even relevant anecdotes get dragged out for much too long, so that, for example, a touching conversation about his mother's guilt over his dog's death becomes tedious and grating.
The combination of lazy writing and irrelevant detail result in a feeling of self-indulgence rather than self-reflection. Writing for catharsis is all well and good, but it belongs in a personal journal. In a published memoir, we expect the author to have taken a little more care in selecting and shaping his thoughts.
All that wasted space could have been put to better use with a little more exposition about Rent. Not being Rentheads, we found ourselves at a bit of a loss to follow Rapp’s anecdotes about the musical production. A brief summary of the plot and the various characters would have cleared some confusion and perhaps added some depth to the parallel between his professional life (starring in a musical that celebrates love and life in the face of AIDS) and his personal life (seeking love and life as his mother battles cancer). Rapp also could have given more space to his relationships with his co-stars. Toward the end of the book, as people break off to pursue other opportunities, Rapp describes his sadness at their departures, but because we’ve barely been introduced to these people, their farewells feel emotionally flat. Rapp failed to give us a reason to care.
Unfortunately, these flaws overshadow much of what is good in this memoir. A few chapters contain such raw emotion that they are able to transcend the weak writing---"Jonathan" and "Floating" are particularly strong---but the majority of the book gets dragged down by Rapp’s careless style and dilettantish indulgence.
We really want to like this book. So much so that as we end this review, we’re having a hard time condemning the book outright. We, however, can’t escape the feeling that we’re putting more effort into liking the book than Rapp did into writing it.
