Hamilton! Lin-Manuel Miranda Does the Reluctant Psychoanalyst Proud (Weirdly)

Hamilton – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hip hop musical interpretation of the life and times of one of our founding fathers most known for being shot by Aaron Burr and being on the ten dollar bill has been on the reluctant wife and my horizon for a while.  I read A War of Two (which I previously reported on here) in preparation for the musical in part because I was afraid that I would have trouble following the plot through the language – which I knew would come fast and furious.  I had much less trouble with that, but was unprepared for the emotional impact of the play.

Reading the playbill ahead of time, there was a brief article on the relationship between Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical and stars as Hamilton, and his father, an immigrant from Puerto Rico.  After writing a Tony winning play, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s father wanted him to go into something safe, like law.  So when Lin-Manuel was torn between an offer for a full time teaching gig and finishing the score for Hamilton, he consulted with his father.  Despite his wish, his father said to him that he should follow his dream as he, the father, had done when he moved from Puerto Rico where he had a good job at Sears to New York where he didn’t know the language.  I found this deeply moving – perhaps because I have had the support to follow various crazy dreams that have worked for me – perhaps because I am being confronted by my child’s wishes to go to a college of his own choice.  The other thing that caught my eye was a notation that when Lin-Manuel went to Hunter College High School in New York (the very place he was offered a job), where there were lots of very bright students – he said that he knew he wasn’t the brightest kid, so he would have to work really hard to do well.

So, Hamilton, the musical, this kid’s product, is hot.  It is the toast of Broadway.  You can’t get a ticket until July, and the crowd we went in with was Rock Concert ready.  And so, when the play started, and this overachieving kid playing an overachieving orphan (son of a whore, the lyrics claim) who somehow managed to get a ticket to New York where he became Alexander Hamilton, when this kid – who was both the artist and the person he was portraying – in the weird kind of mashup that happens when – in a biopic – the actor does not try to imitate the person’s mannerisms, but instead inhabits the role, as Will Smith did in Ali – the two characters resonate and reverberate with and across each other until you are seeing both simultaneously – and they are each both themselves and each other – and this was accentuated because this kid who was jamming more words into a minute of music than was humanly possible was playing a man who couldn’t not write endlessly, eruditely, and with just too many words – ultimately tragically - on the subjects that would shape the nation – and when an anthem played – a song about how wonderful New York is (the kind of song that a New York audience just loves to hear) – and about how the uptown girls like to slum with kids like Hamilton and Hamilton is celebrating New York and the audience is celebrating Hamilton and therefore Lin-Manuel Miranda – I was moved by all of that, and by something more – something that it took me a couple of days to figure out – I was moved by a weird paternal pride in the accomplishments of Lin-Manuel Miranda, as if he were my son and I was enjoying his triumphant emergence on this particular stage.

As wonderful as this experience was, it made it a little hard to track what was going on in the play.  Or, more precisely – the thinking part of my mind was clicking along – but in a distant place – the center of my experience was a powerfully emotion filled one that didn’t leave room to know why I was so moved.  During and after the intermission, I recovered a bit and began to make more sense of the play from the vantage point of the story.  By the end, I pretty much had it, but the next day I could recall very little of what happened and really had to work to piece it together.  In addition to pride, I think I was also feeling envy – or perhaps the pride was driven by the underlying but less conscious envy.  Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with the actors playing the other characters, made those characters that I had read about real – they came to life.  Hamilton is the brash hero – one who is frustrated at many points, particularly in his interactions with George Washington.  He wants to become a war hero by commanding a regiment, but Washington needs the skills Hamilton learned on the islands where he managed the ships of the sugar trade, to fight with congress to get needed supplies.  I probably wrote a sentence like this in describing the book – the difference on stage was that little Hamilton was arguing, arguing, arguing with Big Geoge Washington, until Washington issued an order and Hamilton, still clearly intent on his goal, lowered his eyes – all but pouting – but dutifully responding that he would do as ordered.

Did the interaction – one that took place between two men speaking in iambic pentameter (or some other carefully planned rhythm scheme) and in verse – one of them half Latino, the other African American – actually occur in this way?  Of course it didn’t.  But the essence of what took place – the human interaction – was much more clearly articulated here than in the play that I produced and watched in my head as I read the words on the page of the historical novel about the very same interaction.  I, who take pride in the vividness of my imagination, was trumped by this gang of kids strutting around on a bare stage with explosive rhythms and lighting that supported it.  The interactions in my head had been, by contrast, as dry as toast.

Similarly, Lafayette came to life as a preening, self-confident and slightly oily character, and the actor playing him went on to play a preening, self-confident and slightly oily Thomas Jefferson, who returned from France after the war, when Lafayette had been on stage, to ask what had happened while he had been away – as if something important might inexplicably have happened (like a revolutionary war) when he was not there.  Burr was both Hamilton’s foil but also the emcee – a sort of presence who knew what was going on – except at certain critical junctures where he cried, like a baby, that he wasn’t “In the room,”  one of many interactions that highlighted Burr’s envy of Hamilton, including also Hamilton’s admonishing Burr to stand for something, which seemed largely imaginary based on the biography, underscoring the increasingly tight circles these two men were winding around each other, circles that would trap them together as almost a single entity in our minds as a result of their duel.

The play, then, left history behind, only to find it – or a more authentic version of it – in the banter, in the singing, and in the unreserved dancing of a troupe playing at portraying history – but not tied to it.  Washington, dull as dishwater, wanted nothing more than to get one first down at a time.  Those that weren’t in power were eager to throw the long ball.  And into this mess waltzed King George – Lilly white and speaking (of course) the King’s English, his fey and clueless performance providing high comedy.  How could anyone be so completely unaware of what was boiling beneath and around him?  And, in the second act, when he was exposed as being the least mature of all the players, it was hilarious and somehow deeply true.

But this play turned on a much more classically tragic axis – Hamilton’s fatal flaw that was also his heroic strength – his ability to make an argument.  This was demonstrated in a series of rap battles where, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton soundly defeated Secretary of State Jefferson on a matter of state – whether to back the Brits, the French or to remain neutral in the war between our new ally France and our old enemy but progenitor England.  Hamilton’s second flaw was his womanizing – a flaw that he shared with Burr.  At a time when serving one’s country meant being away from one’s wife (and one’s wife’s sister, whom Hamilton had a pretty serious crush on), one might love the one whom one found oneself to be with – especially if that someone was a woman whose husband was mistreating her.  Ever the gentleman, Hamilton took up her plight, and took her into his bedroom.  The husband, however, turned out to be using his wife, and blackmailed Hamilton to prevent Hamilton being sued for “alienation of affection.”  When Jefferson and Burr catch wind of this they now know that they are in the catbird’s seat.  They can tell of the scandal whenever they want.

Hamilton reverts to type and tries to write his way out of trouble.  He clarifies to the world that he is the wronged one in this instance.  Well, yes, he was duped – but he was duped by the husband of a woman who was sleeping in his bed – and acknowledging his part in it put a damper on his relationship with his wife.  More importantly, his son is called to defend his Dad’s honor – and loses his life doing this.  Again, I am reverting to the facts, but what we see on stage is Hamilton functioning as the caring and compassionate father – the one who tries to prevent the son from taking the bait – and then the caring father who instructs the son in how to honorably engage in a duel – to fire in the air.  We get the father’s attachment to the son – and can now imagine that the estranged mother and father can come together in their shared grief for the son.  What we are shown is the father’s grief – perhaps most poignantly he does NOT articulate that grief – but walks, bereft, through the town, with others knowing, perhaps from his silence, how deeply he is affected by the loss.

The duel with Burr, when it comes, is drawn out – but time has folded over on itself throughout this play.  We have seen an introduction take place twice, and seen regret that one sister let the other have a man that may have been better suited for her.  Now we see the bullet travel in ultra-slow mo and get to hear Hamilton’s thoughts as he confronts his fate.  And then, in a move that surprised me (but shouldn’t have), we get to hear how his wife misses him and spends the next fifty years working to cement his place in the history of the United States. 

This should not have surprised me because the play plays fast and loose with race and gender roles.  Not having read the material that Lin-Manuel Miranda drew from I am handicapped, but this play brings humanness not just to the men, but to the women as well.  They are not passive pawns in the games that are being played around them by men – but active, engaged women with rich internal lives and public lives that are certainly less empowered than they would be if they lived today, but lives in which they are essential – both to themselves and to the nation.  The sister he does not marry helps Hamilton figure out how to move the nation forward through what looks like will be an impasse.  These women – and these men – built a nation – one that would be the economic and political envy of the world.  Hamilton provided the economic basis, despite Jefferson’s disapproval.

In one of the few overt references to race, Hamilton confronts Jefferson about the South producing the majority of the nation’s wealth through relying on the labor of slaves.  But this play has gotten all kinds of press about casting the Nation’s founding fathers as blacks and using hip hop as the vernacular for them to express themselves.  From the perspective of a psychoanalyst who portrayed all kinds of unwanted but vital and essential aspects of himself in black characters in his dreams, if we think of the stuffiness of the characters in the musical 1776 or a play with people wearing powdered wigs and speaking with haughty tones, this play allows the verve – the essential excitement and edginess of creating a nation – of building a culture – but also building the various selves that are part of that culture – and Hamilton’s self in particular, to come to life.  Having a rawer palate with which to work allows the artist to paint not what appeared to be happening, but what was happening, psychologically, between the major protagonists.  I was moved in my own particular way – we can call my feelings towards Lin-Manuel Miranda countertransference – meaning that I imagined him as one of the characters in my own internal play- at least in part as a kind of second son – but my feelings were also being stirred in the ways that everyone else’s in the theater were being stirred.  We were witnessing and being moved by great art – art that was propelled by the medium that best stirs feeling – music – and we were privy to a version of what happened – not on the outside, not in the historical narrative – but in the internal worlds of those men and women – and of the current version of that – what happened in this one man, Lin-Manuel Miranda as he became, before our eyes, both Hamilton and himself.

I posted on Hamilton on Disney during the summer of COVID and BLM here.

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