Here's the story: A self-involved East Village performance artist dumps her male lover for a lesbian social activist, leaving the guy in a funk, and creates a performance piece that targets an avaricious landlord and causes a riot. All around them, people are dying of AIDS and neglect. Their best buds, a gay male couple in which one of the guys is HIV positive, is eventually consumed by the disease. His death adds new meaning to the lives of the survivors, who are redeemed by love.

Sounds like "Rent," Jonathan Larson's multi-million dollar Broadway smash that opens in Chicago on Tuesday night, right?

Except that it's "People in Trouble," a 1984 novel about AIDS and activism penned by Sarah Schulman, a New York fiction writer. Schulman is convinced that Larson, now dead, pirated her novel in the creation of "Rent."

While she's talking to lawyers about filing suit (she's not yet done so), Schulman has written a book about what she claims is Larson's plagiarism, "Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and Marketing," coming out next year from Duke University Press. In it, Schulman claims that Larson, who died of a brain aneurysm on the night of "Rent's" final dress rehearsal in 1996, couldn't have written the play without being familiar with her work.

Schulman says Larson employed her storyline, characters and even certain details such as the watch alarms used by people with AIDS in the early and mid-1980s to remind them to take their medication. "He ripped me off," she says.

At least one person - Michael Korie, an opera librettist who worked with Schulman on a stage treatment of "People in Trouble" - claims Larson told him in 1994 that he read Schulman's book while he was developing "Rent."

"We were at an awards presentation and we were both seated at the same table," says Korie. "To the best of my recollection, he described (what he was working on) as a love triangle set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the lives of people who were grappling with issues of AIDS, arts and homelessness; he described it as a `La Boheme' for the '90s."

But to Korie, Larson had just described Schulman's novel. "I asked Jonathan Larson, `Did you ever hear of "People in Trouble"?' and he responded with surprise and said, `It's funny you should mention that -- I didn't think too many people were familiar with it.' He said it had influenced his ideas on his own show. I don't remember the exact words. At the time, I didn't think anything of it."

Although Korie believes Larson used Schulman's book -- or possibly the treatment of "People in Trouble" that made the rounds of New York theaters in the late-1980s -- he doesn't attribute the similarities to deliberate plagiarism.

"Sometimes ideas get in the air," he says. "I admire Jonathan's work, and I also admire Sarah's. This is just a terribly unfortunate situation."

The attorneys for Larson's family and estate dismiss all of Schulman's allegations. "I've never heard of Sarah Schulman and I've never heard of Jonathan being familiar with her book," says Orin Snyder, a lawyer and spokesperson for the Larson family. "No one has copyright over AIDS, the East Village, homosexuality, performance art or watch alarms."

A number of similarities

Both "Rent" and "People in Trouble" share the same milieu: an apocalyptic New York in which artists and poor people, at the mercy of ever-more-greedy real estate developers, are being driven out of their homes. Both Larson and Schulman's characters are surrounded by homeless street vendors and junkies, and are in constant danger of having nowhere to go.

In both the show and the novel, there's a heterosexual coupling that's ruptured when the woman artist has an affair with a lesbian social activist. Also in both works, the male lover and the lesbian interloper meet by accident and end up liking each other and chatting about their common lover.

In the novel, Molly, the lesbian, and Kate, the artist, become involved with an AIDS activist group that targets a greedy landlord trying to evict poor people, artists and people with AIDS. In "Rent," the group of friends, including Joanne, the lawyer, and Maureen, the artist, organize against a landlord who's trying to evict poor people, artists, and people with AIDS.

In "People in Trouble," Molly and Kate attend to a gay male activist friend as he lay dying from AIDS, which inspires them to fight for their beliefs -- including the right of people to food and shelter. In "Rent," a friend's death from AIDS -- attended by Maureen and Joanne, among others -- confirms the group's belief in love.

In the novel, Kate creates a performance piece -- an installation goes up in flames -- which causes a full-scale riot. In "Rent," Maureen creates a performance piece -- the audience ends up mooing en masse -- which also leads to a riot. The outcomes, however, are different: In Schulman's story, the landlord is killed during the riot. In "Rent's" sunnier version, the landlord repents.

One inspiration: `La Boheme'

Most of the similarities with Schulman's novel lie within the first act of "Rent." The second act, which is much shorter, more closely parallels Giacomo Puccini's opera "La Boheme," which Larson acknowledged as inspiration from the start (and which coincidentally just opened over the weekend at the Lyric Opera, even as the Chicago road company is in previews for "Rent"). "La Boheme," which premiered in 1895 in Italy, depicts artists, composers and their friends leading a life of romanticized poverty. The biggest difference between Puccini's opera and Larson's musical is that "La Boheme's" Mimi dies, and "Rent's" Mimi does not.

In "People in Trouble," the action is seen through the eyes of Molly, the lesbian protagonist. In "Rent," the story is told through Mark, Maureen's heterosexual filmmaker boyfriend who mostly stands back and watches. (In fact, at one point, he's chastised for his passivity by his best buddy, Roger.)

By changing the point of view of the story, Schulman asserts, Larson also subtly transformed the meaning of the story. "Now -- in `Rent' -- straight people are the heroes of the AIDS crisis, which is just not true," says Schulman, who was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, for seven years. "In `Rent,' straight people never have to deal with the guilt of having abandoned gay people during the AIDS crisis."

There are other specific points of commonality in the two works beyond the story line. In "People in Trouble," an AIDS activist group steals credit card numbers to feed the poor. In "Rent," Tom, a gay man, uses an ATM machine for similar purposes. In both plays, watch alarms play a symbolic role in alerting people with AIDS to take their medicines on time.