Meeting Jonathan Larson performing his “rock monologue” Boho Days, Seller felt the songs resonating with his life and helped bring Larson’s next musical to the stage. Without Seller and his producing partner Kevin McCollum, it’s possible that Rent—a show featuring homosexuals, drug addicts, and homeless people—would never have been produced for lack of financial support. Despite his faith in Larson, Seller suggested significant changes to the musical. Larson’s sudden death after final rehearsals hit everyone hard; that night, the cast did a reading instead of a first preview, but by the song “La Vie Bohème,” they began performing the full choreography. Even while grieving, Seller recognized that Larson’s death would help publicity. The show moved to Broadway, albeit to a decrepit theater (the Nederlander) “one block south of the porn houses.” He devised a $20 ticket lottery, making the show affordable and filling seats. Attending a reading of AvenueQ, Seller was impressed by how the puppets in this “Sesame Street for adults” uttered unspoken truths. He then connected the creators with a playwright and director to help turn their sketches into a full musical with a plot. Its slow, steady success prompted a move to Broadway, where it was promoted using clever ads to overcome the assumption that the show was for children. Their campaign for the Tonys featured the puppets welcoming each new musical on its opening day and included a new song about voting. Up against the hugely popular Wicked, AvenueQunexpectedly won Best Musical, shocking Seller. Seller next became transfixed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and its “eclectic score that wrapped rap music around salsa, merengue, and Broadway pop” and the show’s story, which reminded him of his mother working a minimumwage job to provide for her family, and he found a book writer for the show. A catchy commercial shot in Washington Heights featuring the show’s best songs helped grow audiences, which were unusually diverse for a musical, including Latinos and bar mitzvah parties. Seller was annoyed that In the Heights was compared to West Side Story just because the latter includes Puerto Ricans (not Dominicans), seeing it as more like Fiddler on the Roof. Taking a cue fromFiddler, Miranda shaped his song “96,000” into its showstopper answer to “To Life.” Miranda originally wanted to releaseThe Hamilton Mixtape only as an album, which Seller says he was content with, as a producer’s role is to give the artist space to create, then provide suggestions at the right time. Seller saw the work’s potential as a musical and suggested that Miranda “write the whole thing,” not just the songs. For him, Hamilton reflects America’s highest values. When Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance just days after the 2016 election, Seller drafted an address to Pence to be read afterward, expressing fears for the forthcoming Trump administration. Anticipating the publicity this would generate, he invited the media. Pence remarked afterward: “That’s what freedom sounds like.” _________________________________________________________________ Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland. ANDREWHOLLERAN The Oedipal Woman STEPPE: A Novel by Oksana Vasyakina Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter Catapult. 222 pages, $27. STEPPE OPENS with a description of the great Russian sea of grass as seen from the window of an airplane, but most of this short but haunting novel takes place on a highway—a highway the narrator, a young lesbian poet, shares with her father as he drives a load of pipe in his truck from Moscow to Volgograd. The narrator, who has a scholarship at a literary institute in Moscow and is extremely well-read, has decided to spend some time with her divorced, alcoholic, HIV-positive father in order to get to know him better. The father, who loves driving across the steppe, seems happy to have her along, though before too long we learn that the narrator is afraid of this man whom her mother divorced years ago for domestic battery. Nevertheless, throughout the journeys they take together, he treats his daughter with generosity and consideration. And she meticulously describes the way he does his work, and the places they spend the night, often beside streams in which they can bathe and cool off, and then prepare a meal before turning in under the enormous sky, in or out of the truck, depending on the insects. The first trip we take, like all their long-haul drives together, blurs with the others, because, while the narrator is a scrupulous observer, the chronology of these journeys with her father is never established. Steppeis a ruminative book in which the narrator is sifting through memories in an attempt to understand the story of her family. She often refers to her father’s death from AIDS, even though he is very much alive on the page until just before the book ends. This leads to a somewhat static quality in the first chapters, but that changes to suspense as we get more of the story of her father and mother before their divorce. The narrator’s father is a product of the blatniye—the system of Soviet labor camps and prisons that released a plague of petty thieves, smugglers, thugs, and criminals during the breakup of the Soviet Union. His friends are other men like himself, criminals loyal only to each other; his mistress is a woman he infects with HIV; and his favorite singer a man who sings about Russians like himself, an independent trucker and petty thief who feels happiest on the road. As for the steppe itself, the narrator’s description is at times so metaphorical and at others so granular that I had to Google to see just what it actually looks like. The Russian steppe stretches from Ukraine to Mongolia and is mostly a flat horizon of high grass whose repetitious immensity is somewhat terrifying. Comparison with what another lesbian writer, Willa Cather, did with Nebraska is inevitable. Cather’s people had their tragedies too, but nothing quite as sordid as the father’s very existence or the unfolding revelations about the failed marriage of the narrator’s parents. One is reminded at times of those novels by James M. Cain that inspired Hollywood film noirs. While 46 TheG&LR Jeffrey Sellers.
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