SOURCE: "Smash!," in Vogue, May, 1996, pp. 305, 347.

[In the following review, Guare considers the tragedy of Rent and of Larson's death.]

I'm sitting in the Truck and Warehouse Theater on East Fourth Street in New York City's East Village, a.k.a. Lower East Side, a.k.a. Loisaida. The matinee performance has just ended for the new smash hit Rent, which reviews have ballyhooed as the most important musical since A Chorus Line, I can't help going back 25 years to when I sat in this same theater (now the home of the New York Theater Workshop) in the same cold month, waiting for my play The House of Blue Leaves to open. In 1971, I was in my early thirties and felt that everything depended on my play's reception. Stephen Sondheim's telegram—"Have a wonderful opening tonight. Your entire future depends on it"—made me roar with laughter but...