Hamilton! on Television: A Chance for All to See!

 

Five years ago, two friends proposed that we get tickets to a show about one of the founding fathers when we were in New York for the annual Psychoanalytic convention.  We often go to plays, operas or musical performances when we are there, and their suggestion that we plan ahead seemed to be a good one.  Boy was it ever.  I read a text about Hamilton (not the Chernow text the play was based on – that would come later), but refused to listen to the soundtrack or read the libretto – I wanted to experience the musical without preconception.  We bought the tickets at face value – they were incredibly expensive.  By the time the show rolled around, they were selling for five to ten times face value – the show was HOT!  But what was surprising was that it was actually better than the hype.

 

We went to dinner with our two friends afterwards and talked about it – and all four of us were stunned at what we had just seen.  It was a musical – yes, but it was unlike any musical we had ever seen.  It was truly great theater.  We were moved by the story, by the singing, by the emotional tone – the first act was about the excitement of engaging in something new and the second act was about the unimaginable losses that can occur to a tragic character – but also about how that character can be rehabilitated – including by the very musical that was celebrating him.  It was a tour de force.

 

In any case, I returned from this sojourn energized by the play and excited about its possibilities.  I started using the soundtrack as the lead assignment in my history of psychology class – requiring students to listen to the music (with libretto in hand – there are more words in this musical than in all but the longest Shakespearean plays) of Act I before the second class and Act II before the third class.  I then had them write about the ways that forming a country might be like forming a new science – and about the ways in which hubris (pride) in our accomplishments and what we might accomplish might interfere with being able to realize what we hoped for in whichever endeavor (founding a country or founding a science – or maybe starting a business, or forming a committee) we might undertake.

 

This might not have been the best idea.  I got comments, along with the papers, that said things like, “Best assignment ever!”  I let the class know that not all of the assignments for the course would be that inspiring, well written, or earth shattering, but people did seem to get excited about history in ways that I had not seen them do before.  Not everyone did – some people wanted to return to 1776 as the musical record of the founding of the country.  These were a small minority of students – and these students also tended to have difficulty with the later parts of the class that dealt with the inclusion of women and people of color in the science.  And with the information that the Clark’s Doll Studies papers were the first ever social science papers cited in a Supreme Court decision – and not just any decision, the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education, arguably the most important case of the twentieth century.

 

So, watching Hamilton again on Friday night was both a return to a wonderful night, and a very different experience than seeing it the first time.  Not only did I now know every word, but the world has been, in the words of the musical, turned upside down since we saw it then.

 

Though the casting of the play and the references to slavery in it helped set the stage for the multicultural portion of the history class – I did not see the musical as primarily or even secondarily a play about institutional racism.  We had a black president at the time.  I (super) naively thought that the power of the play was that it was a post-racist play –  and further that we could, inclusively, use a black vernacular (hip hop) to celebrate a founding of a country that we all embraced as an ideal. 

 

Watching the musical now, in Trump’s America as Black Lives Matters has evolved from a marginal protest against police brutality to a shared awakening to the depth of entrenchment that institutional racism continues to exercise, this becomes a very different piece of art, even though Lin Manuel-Miranda, in the accompanying interview claims it is not. 

 

My experience of the musical initially was a kind of pride – as if Lin Manuel-Miranda was, strangely, my son.  It was as if he and I and the cast were all one – sharing in this tremendous love festival about this amazing city and this amazing country and gosh wasn’t it great that we all have a part in it.  I experienced that as an identification – as a narcissistic owning of the play. 

 

What becomes clearer at this moment, and this is very uncomfortable, is that I was appropriating the play – making it mine through the identification with the author and lead actor and, by extension, with the rest of the cast.  It was appropriation and not identification because it is, as Manuel-Miranda says, the same play now as it was then.  Manuel-Miranda explains that it is a play about flawed people working together to create a flawed system whose ideals – ideals that are not yet realized – are worthy ideals.

 

The play is, then an attempt on the part of African Americans and immigrants to appropriate those ideals as their own – not to have to disown them as Frederick Douglas did in his 1852 oratorical What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? when he said, “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”  This musical, released on the Fourth of July weekend – is an attempt to claim for the African American, but also for the immigrant – and for all who have been marginalized - the Fourth of July celebration – as their own.

 

They want to make this country ours – a shared ours – not the ours that I enjoy as a “white” man.  Their appropriation of “my” holiday and the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence as I believe it should read for all people – realizing that we have not yet achieved that, but continue to work towards it – I welcome this – because the document is not mine and never should have been – it should have been ours – though, of course it wasn’t, and we are still working to make it ours. So they cannot appropriate but, should they choose, identify.

 

I must admit that it is hard for me to identify with this nation – though not its ideals.  Would that my appropriation had been an identification.  I hope that such an identification, when it can be legitimate, will be welcomed.  In the meantime, I hope that my appropriation, intended as an identification, would be received as I hope it will in a time when that will be possible.  My apology is that I did not see how much work we have yet to do to be able to achieve something that resembles the state that is outlined in the Declaration.

 

In that sense, I suppose, the second act of Hamilton – a downer after the first triumphant one – is, perhaps, the road to sharing our heritage.  It suggests that mourning – together – both the transgressor – Hamilton who publicly wrote about his affair without consulting with his wife and he was also the person who caused his own son to die in a duel – needs to mourn these things - the violation of his wife not once but twice - and the violation of himself - failing to be the man his son needed him to be – to feel the loneliness of what his ambition brought him – to truly feel remorse – a terribly evasive feeling – but one that, when it comes home to roost, actually sits quite comfortably in the chest.  It is not a bad feeling – it is a heavy and powerful one.  One that fills us with a sense of something greater – with an awareness of the impact of our actions – and with a sense of what those actions have caused in another human being – they help us bridge the gap between us and actually expose the feelings of love that generally lie latent within us.  Perhaps it is only loss that allows us to most fully feel our feelings of connection with each other – to realize how essential we are in each other’s lives.

 

The downer act – filled with the losses that Hamilton brings on himself and then onto Eliza, his wife, humanize him.  They bring him back into her good graces and it is she who lives to tell his story.  As Lin Manuel Miranda reminds us in the conversation accompanying the musical – the white population will not be the majority for long.  Those who live to tell our story will paint it based on our actions – not just what we have done in the past, but what we do from here forward.  Will we come to terms with ourselves and therefore with each other? 

 

 Here is the original post on Hamilton!

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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