Review: Anthony Rapp's Without You
I posted this on tommycollison.net in September 2012. I'm reposting it below in order to have all my writing on one website.
Anthony Rapp's Without You is a raw, bittersweet, and utterly moving look at love and loss. The show's compelling honesty is matched only by its enormous heart.
In June 2008, I discovered the musical RENT during a summer camp, and promptly fell in love with the quirky 90s rock opera, so when I heard that Anthony Rapp's one-man show, Without You, was coming to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I knew I had to make it over there.
Without You is the title of Rapp's memoir of 'love, loss, and the musical RENT', where Rapp explores his thoughts and reactions the show's meteoric rise to stardom, which happened concurrently with his mother's battle with cancer and death in 1997 at just 55. In addition to that, the night before the show opened off-Broadway (a short few months before the Broadway opening night), the show's composer, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at just 35.
Rapp is a gifted voice actor, conveying entire conversations while easily shifting between his own mellow Midwestern murmurs, to the more plaintive tones of his ailing mother, to the intensity of Jonathan Larson's own voice. Touchingly, and with aching sadness, Rapp's imitation of his mother's meek tones get weaker and weaker as he charts the decline in her overall health.
As well as R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" (what Rapp sang for his RENT audition in 1994), music from RENT appears at several points in the show, most touchingly when Rapp sings Without You at the show's climax. As the song ends and Rapp signs "I love you" towards the sky, mouthing a silent "thank you" to his mother, the emotion is almost too much to bear.
Throughout the show, Rapp's tender vulnerability shines nakedly through, never veering into the territory of martyrdom and never feeling as if the actor is somehow abusing or taking advantage of his grief.
Anthony Rapp in Without You . Photo credit: Nobby Clark for the Toronto Star.
In "What You Own", a song from the show, Rapp's character sings how he found "connection in an isolating age", and in a lot of ways, this is what Without You seems to me. I'd seen shows before, but there was something otherworldly and almost, yes, spiritual about this show. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the show, the small audience and the unshakable feeling that Rapp is speaking directly to you personally as he speaks of his experiences and innermost feelings. The barrier between performer and audience, as far as this show is concerned, is nonexistent. There is an unparalleled emotional intensity that runs throughout the show.
Rapp sings the upbeat "Seasons of Love" (also from RENT) as an encore, but I found that I couldn't absorb the song's uplifting message; I was still caught up in the tidal wave of emotions the show had brought to the front of my consciousness. The raw power of that emotion was unlike anything I'd experienced before, almost like a physical blow. I felt numb as I made my way out of the theater, determined to find the theater's stage-door to try and put some of what I was feeling into intelligible sentences. I was lucky enough that I met Rapp that night, and stuttered my way through a 'thank you', trying to express some small fraction of the intensity of my emotional reaction. For his part, Rapp nodded quietly, his head down, as I spoke, seeming to be genuinely touched by what I said.
In the age of the internet, I think it's easy to become disconnected, to separate yourself from emotion, to create a persona and then disengage from it. Whether the world or my generation or whatever are becoming more emotionally isolated is not for me to say, but I can say that I had never, ever, felt emotion so keenly as I did during that show. It was an unfamiliar, sometimes scary, but ultimately cathartic experience. Without You is impossible not to emotionally engage with; a wonderful, timeless story of love, and loss.
September 2012 Update: Together with Anthony Rapp, PBS Classics released a recording of the show. It's currently available on iTunes and I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out. Much of the emotional power of the show does come through the CD.
