Diversionary Theatre closes landmark 40th season with Rent as we’ve never seen it before.

Jonathan Larson didn’t live to see his show change the world.

Rent is a Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical about a group of artists, lovers, and activists surviving poverty, addiction, and the AIDS crisis in early-1990s New York City’s East Village. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm the morning before its first Off-Broadway preview in 1996, never knowing it would become the defining anthem of a generation.

If any theater on this planet was always supposed to stage Rent, it was our own Diversionary Theatre. Founded in 1986 as a safe space for queer storytelling at the height of the AIDS crisis, Diversionary Theatre has spent four decades becoming a nationally recognized leader in LGBTQIA+ arts. The theme of its 40th anniversary season is “Love as Revolution,” chosen by the new Artistic Director, Sherri Eden Barber.

Diversionary’s Rent will be threaded through hallways and down staircases, wired with live video cameras, scored by five live musicians, and closed each night with a community chorus because co-directors Sherri Eden Barber and Coleman Ray Clark decided the audience shouldn’t just receive this story, but also feel themselves in it.

Barber arrives at Diversionary with a career that spans resident director credits on a Hamilton national tour, a Drama League Directing Fellowship, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Directors Fellowship. Her first season has made it clear she did not arrive merely to maintain, but to build upon Diversionary’s legacy.

Co-director, Coleman Ray Clark, is a director and sound designer who spent seven years in New York working with 101 Productions on shows including Dear Evan Hansen, Pretty Woman, and Cabaret, as well as with Manhattan Theater Club, Classic Stage Company, and The 24 Hour Plays — where he and Barber first found each other. He directed a sold-out, site-specific production of BARE in a church, proving Clark knows what it means to let a building do some of the storytelling.

Together, they have created a Rent that is unlike any ever staged. This show opens on May 30, yet multiple performances are already sold out. In fact, both directors admitted they’ll be standing on opening night due to ticket demand.

I sat down with Barber and Clark before their first preview to talk about why their Rent has become one of the most popular works happening in San Diego this year. (At the time of this interview, the show had only been extended once; it has since been extended again through June 28.)

The show’s run is nearly sold out before it opens. Did you see that coming?

Sherri Eden Barber: To my knowledge — and I try really hard not to say ‘first’ because that’s the first way you get to retract something — but to my knowledge, I’m not aware of a time this theater has sold out to this level before opening. I’d told the staff if we can sell out a couple of shows before we open, I will give everyone a surprise. But this has been the ultimate surprise.

You’ve both talked about the pressure of doing a show everyone already knows by heart. What was your guiding principle going in?

Clark: We told the designers if you know every word to this show, read it like it’s a new play. If you’re coming at it for the first time, treat it like Shakespeare — like it’s something everyone has always done. We wanted those two things to meet in the middle. We did a design retreat here in the space months before we had a cast. We treated it like table work, which you very rarely get to do with designers, and sat down and went page by page asking, what does this mean? Why does this character think this way? The [costume designer Claire Peterson] was making a collage mood board. The [scenic designer Mathys Herbert] was rendering on his computer. We were all in it together.

Barber: And then we produced a 14-to-15-page document that was basically here’s how Coleman and Sherri think they’re going to stage this play. Here’s who plays what. Here’s where the audience will see it, hear it, or experience it. Here’s the tone of every scene. It instilled confidence because people were like — oh, they thought about all of this. I’ve been let into this. And that matters. Because when you’re asking a staff to let you take over their entire building every night for two and a half months, you need everyone on the same page.

And this production takes over the whole building — hallways, the Clark Cabaret, the black box, the street. How did that vision come together?

Clark: The building became a collaborator. We started mapping our way through it and saying things like ‘this song reminds me of being crumpled on a staircase.’ And then suddenly a moment is born. We have a live camera on a gimbal that runs the whole show. Live video feeds from the back hallways, downstairs, outside. Pretty much every square inch of this building is being used. Five live musicians are in the black box watching and listening to everything happening on the main stage, and their music is piped everywhere — to the cabaret, to the dressing rooms, back and forth. It’s a technical beast.

Barber: And every single moment is intentional. Coleman and I have discussed every beat. There’s a specific video moment that’s an homage to something that was happening during the AIDS crisis. You might catch it. You might not. But it’s there because it feels alive in the space. It’s in community with why this theater was created and what we’re doing with it now.

Diversionary was founded in 1986 — the same year the AIDS crisis was at its most devastating and most ignored. Does that origin feel present in the building today?

Clark: Yes. When the camera turns every corner of this building, you start to feel the easy and devastating correlation between what was happening in New York City in the 1990s and what is happening in San Diego today. Rights being stripped. Healthcare being withheld. A community whose voices are louder than ever precisely because they are being threatened. And this space — the cabaret walls covered in Lambda Archives photographs, decades of Pride marches and protests, and moments of joy — is all seeping into the production. You cannot stand in this building and do Rent casually.

Barber: We are seeing things that are killing people again that should be easily treatable. We are watching fear in real time. We are watching rights disappear. And what Rent as a concept meant in the 90s — when gay marriages weren’t recognized, when if your partner died and they were on the lease, you had nowhere to go, when all you had was your body and your community — that’s not ancient history. It echoes right now. We are right in the middle of a major, crucial moment in arts funding cuts. Sometimes a play hits at exactly the moment it needs to. People are showing up because it feels like something you can do — you can be in the arena.

You’ve spoken about the intergenerational nature of this co-directorship — you lived through the AIDS crisis, Coleman didn’t. How does that sit in the room?

Barber: I think it’s the most important thing about what we’ve built. I grew up during this era. I remember my cousin’s partner dying of AIDS. I remember visiting him in the hospital. I remember seeing trays left outside rooms and asking my mom why no one was bringing them in — and looking back now, understanding that many of those who stepped up to care for people were lesbians. I remember my grandmother, an Orthodox Jewish woman, holding this Catholic man’s hand as he was dying, terrified he was going to hell, and telling him, “you are all of God’s children. You can rest. I’ll see you there soon.” And within about four minutes, he passed. His tombstone says, “We are all God’s children.” I have carried that with me. This sense of what we can offer each other in a crisis.

Clark: I didn’t live through it. But I feel the weight of that history as a responsibility — to honor who did it before us, to understand how we keep fighting what we’re going through right now. And I think that’s also what makes our partnership beautiful. The way we each understand this story is different. And both of those things are in the room every night.

Tell me about the community choir outreach for “No Day But Today” and bringing non-actors on stage for that final number. Was that your idea, Sherri?

Barber: Yes. I was playing Rent in my car, thinking about the season, and I got to that song again, and I just started singing at the top of my lungs. It was right at the same moment the current administration had announced another awful thing — just add to the list — and I started thinking: there are more of us. There are more of us that want good than there are of them. It’s just who has the microphone right now. And when we get to that final “No Day But Today,” I wanted the audience to feel that — that just when you think you’re alone in this, remember: there are actually more people with you. I asked: How do we bring them into the room each night?

Clark: Bringing community into this production is the seed that planted itself in every direction. Past, present, and future of what Diversionary is, at this landmark moment of 40 years. The idea that gathering people in a space — regardless of what’s happening in the world — is why artists are important. We can gather, heal, commune, and create a better life. And if the actors singing to you create an experience, imagine if you can sing back to the actors, and we reverse the usual roles.

Barber: So far, 150 community members have engaged. And counting.

Diversionary Theatre has been holding this story in its walls for 40 years. Let it hold you, too. RENT runs at Diversionary Theatre through June 28.