Bono's snakebit Broadway stab at Spiderman ought to commiserate over beers with the troubled Nashville Dinner Theatre production of Rent. Mounting a musical is hard enough. Toss in casting woes, a foreshortened run due to flagging ticket sales, and a cast walk-out protesting plans (since dropped) to tone down the late Jonathan Larson's play — a topical rock opera portraying a year in the lives of East Village bohemians facing poverty, tangled romances and the specter of AIDS — and the task becomes Herculean.
Yet the most recent blow landed on Kaine Riggan, owner of the popular Printer's Alley playhouse, when the male lead portraying the HIV-positive character Roger claimed he was dismissed from the production in late March because — in the cruelest of ironies — he actually is HIV positive.
"You just can't do this to people," says Byron Rice. "It hurts more than anything."
The alleged incident is hotly disputed on all sides, with Riggan accusing Rice of turning sour grapes into bitter fruit. He says ever since the actor was replaced in the role — for reasons having nothing to do with his health — Rice's supporters have tried to gin up outrage and destroy his theater. Rice's friends fire back that the theater treated him shabbily, especially in light of the play's subject matter.
It might have remained a matter of backstage intrigue, if a sympathetic article by Rice's friend F. Daniel Kent on the DIY news site Examiner.com hadn't been linked recently on the well-traveled national weblog Daily Kos. Kent's original article has since been taken down and reposted elsewhere, but the rancor hasn't subsided.
As Rice tells it, after a week and a half of rehearsals, he received a series of phone calls and texts notifying him that the next couple of rehearsals were postponed — except they weren't.
"The guy who plays Benny, Mychal [Maupins], he texted me and he said, 'I hope you're all right. We finished blocking the rest of the play tonight.' And so I was like, 'Uh, finished blocking the rest of the play? I was told we didn't have rehearsals tonight.' "
Riggan maintains that Rice's HIV status was never a factor in the casting change. "He was somebody [creative director] Vance Nichols had called in because he was doing a writer's night, and the second I saw him I knew he wasn't right," he says. "He was not attractive. He was not what the role called for."
Maupins isn't convinced. "At no time did that ever come up until a week ago," he says — referring to Kent's Examiner.com story, which quoted Riggan as saying Rice was too old and had the wrong "body type" for the part. (In a subsequent Facebook exchange, Kent appeared to offer not only to desist but to write a positive article about the show if Riggan met a list of demands, including an unconditional apology to Rice: "No 'body type' bull. Nothing about his age. I don't care if it is true or not.")
Maupins and Rice believe the dismissal stemmed from an incident during a March 29 rehearsal when Joann Coleman, the actress portraying Rice's love interest Mimi, allegedly refused to touch him because she said she had small cuts on her hands and was worried about becoming infected with the AIDS virus. "She would adjust herself to where she wouldn't have to touch him," Maupins says.
Riggan doesn't deny that Coleman was uncomfortable with the physical contact, but said it played no part in the outcome. "It was after the fact," he said. "She was mad when she found out that he had it and nobody told her, but that's just an ignorance thing, you know?"
Maupins, however, says Rice was upfront when it came to his HIV status. "He'd been really open about it. If he got hurt, he didn't want anyone to do anything about it without having themselves protected."
All of this is disputed by Coleman, who split from the production. She says the incident referred to by Maupins and Rice never happened. "I'm just a young lady in her early 20s — a Christian — and I wouldn't do that," she said. "Sorry, anyone who knows me would say the same thing."
Nevertheless, Nashville CARES, a nonprofit organization that provides AIDS prevention, support and education services, excluded Nashville Dinner Theatre from its proposed list of restaurants and venues participating in Dining Out For Life — a fundraising event where participating establishments donate portions of the proceeds to the organization. Spokesman John Winnett would only confirm that the alleged circumstances surrounding Rice's removal from the play sparked the organization's decision.
The costly Rent, which was slated to run until the end of May, will be performed for the last time this weekend. Nashville Dinner Theatre's next production will be decidedly less controversial: The Honky Tonk Angels.
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