The Opposite of War Is Creation: 78 Nights with RENT and a Life Learning to Be Myself

Somewhere between the first time I saw RENT and this night at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, it stopped being simply a musical and became part of the vocabulary of my life. Seventy-eight performances later, I still look toward that stage and hear the same truth that found me when I was coming of age: “The opposite of war is not peace—it’s creation.”

Perhaps that is why I keep returning. We survive, we love, we lose, and then—by grace and sheer stubbornness, we create something beautiful from what remains. No day but today.

— Photograph by Ron Stafford, RENT: 25th Anniversary Farewell Tour, Belk Theater, Charlotte, North Carolina, November 2021.

There are works of art we admire, and then there are works of art that somehow become part of the architecture of our lives. They arrive at precisely the right moment, take up residence somewhere deep within us, and never really leave.

For me, RENT is one of those works.

I have seen RENT performed live 78 times.

Yes. Seventy-eight.

At this point, I have spent enough time in that freezing New York loft that Benny should probably be charging me back rent. I know when the audience will laugh. I know when the silence will fall. I know which notes will make my chest tighten even though I have heard them hundreds, probably thousands, of times.

But I keep returning because RENT has never simply been a musical to me.

In some strange way, it helped teach me how to live.

Coming of Age in the Age of RENT

RENT premiered on Broadway in 1996, and there is something important to me about that date. I was coming of age at almost the same moment.

I was trying to figure out who I was and, perhaps more importantly, whether the person I was becoming had a legitimate place in the world.

The world of my youth was still filled with rules about what a respectable life was supposed to look like. There were proper paths. Proper careers. Proper relationships. Proper ways of speaking, believing, dressing, loving, succeeding, and belonging.

And then Jonathan Larson opened the door of a shabby loft in the East Village and introduced me to a collection of artists, outsiders, lovers, intellectuals, addicts, dreamers, queer people, sick people, angry people, frightened people, and gloriously imperfect people who were trying to make something beautiful before the clock ran out.

They were not waiting for permission.

That mattered.

For a young man coming of age in the South, RENT offered something almost sacramental: the possibility that the world was larger than the boundaries I had inherited.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, it taught me something I desperately needed to know:

The world was fine.

And perhaps even more importantly,

I was fine just as I was.

I did not need to become less intellectual, less artistic, less emotional, less eccentric, less questioning, less myself to deserve a place at the table.

There was room.

“The Opposite of War Is Not Peace…”

There is one line in La Vie Bohème B that has followed me through virtually every version of myself:

“The opposite of war isn’t peace—it’s creation.”

I think I understood that line before I understood why I understood it.

Peace can simply mean that the fighting has stopped.

Creation is something else entirely.

Creation says that after destruction, we build.

After grief, we make meaning.

After someone tells us who we are allowed to be, we create a life that answers them.

That idea has become increasingly important to me as I have grown older.

Perhaps that is where RENT intersects most profoundly with my Southern Gothic way of seeing the world. Southern Gothic has never pretended that beauty requires the absence of decay. Quite the opposite. The old house can be collapsing while the roses still bloom against the porch. The family silver may be tarnished. The churchyard may be full. The ghosts may still wander through the rooms.

And yet somebody sets the table.

Somebody lights the candles.

Somebody sings.

Somebody creates.

That is not denial.

That is defiance.

And, increasingly, I think it is also faith.

Creation as a Spiritual Act

My spiritual life has taught me that resurrection does not erase the wounds.

The risen Christ still bears them.

That has become one of the most important theological truths of my life. Christianity, at its deepest, does not promise that suffering will never touch us. It makes the much stranger claim that suffering and death do not get the final word.

Something can come afterward.

A stone can be rolled away.

A life can be remade.

A broken thing can become something sacred without pretending that it was never broken.

And so, when RENT says that the opposite of war is creation, I hear something almost theological in it now.

Create anyway.

Love anyway.

Teach anyway.

Write anyway.

Photograph anyway.

Set the table anyway.

Sing anyway.

When the world has done its worst, make something beautiful in response.

That may be one of the most spiritually serious things a human being can do.

No Day But Today

Of course, RENT is haunted by mortality.

That is part of what makes it so powerful. These characters know something most of us spend our lives trying not to know: the clock is running.

Jonathan Larson knew it too, though tragically he did not know how literally.

And I understand that differently now than I did when I first encountered the musical.

When I was younger, “No Day But Today” sounded romantic.

Now it sounds true.

Life has taught me that bodies fail. Plans collapse. Careers change. People disappear. The life we thought we were going to have can vanish with astonishing speed.

But that does not make life smaller.

If anything, it makes the ordinary almost unbearably precious.

A photograph.

A conversation.

A book.

A piece of music.

A classroom.

A church pew.

A meal with someone you love.

An evening in a theater when the lights dim and, for the seventy-eighth time, you already know what is going to happen, and somehow it happens to you again anyway.

Still a Bohemian

I suppose seeing RENT 78 times suggests that I have never quite gotten over it.

I hope I never do.

Because somewhere inside me is still that young man who encountered RENT and realized that perhaps he did not have to apologize for taking up space in the world.

He could be educated and strange.

Southern and cosmopolitan.

Devout and questioning.

Intellectual and sentimental.

Traditional in some ways and wonderfully unconventional in others.

He could love art too much, read too much, feel too much, photograph crumbling buildings, sit in darkened theaters, wrestle with God, quote Virginia Woolf, adore Puccini, and still find himself cheering for a group of bohemians dancing on tables in the East Village.

None of those things had to cancel the others out.

They could all belong to one life.

My life.

Perhaps that is the greatest gift RENT gave me.

It did not teach me that the world would always understand me.

It taught me that I did not require the world's permission to exist as myself.

And after all these years, after education and vocation, faith and doubt, success and disappointment, illness and survival, loss and resurrection, I think I understand Jonathan Larson's words better than I ever could have at twenty.

The opposite of war is not peace.

It is creation.

So, we create.

We make art. We make photographs. We make classrooms and libraries and friendships and communities. We make dinner. We make beauty. We make meaning. We make a life from whatever materials have been left to us.

We create because destruction does not deserve the final word.

We love because death does not deserve the final word.

We live because there is, finally, no day but today.