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theuncurrentdispatch · 4 years

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“Will they tell your story?”: Power and Complicity through Hamilton

I know Lin-Manual Miranda and Hamilton have fallen out of favor. The Trump era’s disenchantment with the quintessential Obama era musical coincides with a disenchantment with the Obama era itself, as we realize that black and orange presidents alike can create ICE detention centers (x), send the National Guard to protests (x), remotely bomb civilians in the Middle East (x), deploy troops to the US-Mexico border (x), etc. I support the Hamilton backlash and would love to read Ishmael Reed’s Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. That said, I think it’s valuable to examine how Hamilton calibrated its message for the white world of theatre in 2014.

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In the last year of Obama’s presidency, I saw Penumbra Theatre’s Milwaukee production of Fences. The direction was solid, the actors were talented, August Wilson’s script still smoldered 30 years on. None of these elements is the reason I considered the evening a failure. The fault lies with why I’ve given up on theatre as both an audience member and degree-holding actor: The theatre world is perpetually shaped by and for middle class white liberals, a demographic that resists self-scrutiny at every turn. The Milwaukee Rep’s crowd let loose like a studio audience. Whenever Lyons entered to ask for money, we cracked up like a funky 70’s sitcom bassline had played him in. Rose’s tearful monologue was greeted with sassy whoops of “Tell him, sister!” And after the show, we poured onto the streets of America’s most segregated city, a city that would see a racial uprising three months after the production’s close, to laugh about how good the show was while circumventing homeless people of color with a practiced blindness. This ostensibly progressive audience turned Fences into white savior back-patting reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird, in which comfortingly familiar black characters struggle against comfortingly familiar black problems like poverty, infidelity, and a carefully ostracized racism the white audience needn’t examine itself for.

Enter Hamilton. Just as Fences capitalized on the Reagan era white savior complex that spawned Live Aid and “We Are The World,” Miranda’s hip-hop musical hit white Obama era liberals right where we were vulnerable. But 35 years on, white theatre has defanged Fences’ deeper implications to provide the audience an easy pat on the back for supporting black art. Instead of telling a comfortingly familiar non-white story to a white audience (or, like Wilson’s later plays, steeping it in unapologetic blackness at the cost of mainstream success,) Lin-Manuel Miranda took one of America’s whitest narratives and colored outside the lines. Such a maneuver would be unthinkable in a more conservative lower-class medium like television: Take the 2008 episode of 30 Rock in which Tracy Jordan proposes to play Thomas Jefferson in a movie. The idea is shown as laughably idiotic even though Jordan is genuinely inspired by the discovery of his ancestry to Jefferson and, like Miranda, desires to reclaim the nation’s founding with a non-white lens. Hamilton calculates for white theatre’s resistance to scrutiny by embedding its central message in a Trojan horse of non-white culture that white liberals want to coopt.

That message, the one our demographic constantly resists, is that even the most passive and well-intentioned observers are complicit in the narrative they’re observing. Hamilton challenges a “color-blind” audience that favors itself free of implicit bias by demanding constant scrutiny of the show’s storytellers-- who are themselves actors of color portraying America’s whitest figures. Caricatures like King George embody the obvious bias white liberals scapegoat to avoid their own culpability (i.e. Bob Ewell or southern conservatives). But even likable and seemingly reliable witnesses like Eliza and Angelica invite scrutiny when “Satisfied” pulls the rug out from what the audience accepted as true in “Helpless.” Hamilton also demonstrates how much an observer reveals without discussing themselves, a point proven by Leslie Odom Jr beating Miranda for the Best Actor Tony in a musical that could just as easily be called Burr.

Miranda worries about Alexander Hamilton’s likability as much as he worries about the musical’s veracity-- which is to say, only insofar as being seen to possess both those things helps to deliver the show’s actual message. Cherry-picked blunders like the Reynolds affair mainly serve to draw attention to the power of the storyteller. Up to “Say No To This,” Burr has been Hamilton’s biased but faithful narrator, but when his enemy makes his first fatal error, Burr demures to “let Alexander tell it.” The audience loves to see Burr hate Hamilton, but even Hamilton’s lifelong foe recognizes the injustice of denying someone their own voice: If Burr sang the events of “Say No To This” in third person, his narration would garner far less sympathy than Hamilton’s. The show again emphasizes the importance of controlling one’s own narrative a few scenes later when Hamilton elects to “write his way out” rather than letting someone else spin the facts. If after all this the audience finds homewrecking Hamilton likable, Miranda’s succeeded-- Not in redeeming the Founder’s infidelity after 216 slutty slutty years, but in demonstrating the power of someone controlling their own story.

The musical is built from these parables on narrative. Getting the audience to like and believe Hamilton (both the man and the musical) is merely one necessary step toward Miranda’s central objective of exposing his power as a storyteller and the audience’s power as observers. Miranda fills the show with cherry-picked inaccuracies and biases (including his own) because he’s not contrasting truth with slander, but representation with anonymity. Thomas Jefferson is Hamilton’s arch-enemy but always gets to represent himself (as in the “Thomas claims” section of “Room Where It Happens”), while John Adams never speaks for himself and is dismissed by the audience as a completely forgettable part of America’s narrative. Audiences love or hate Jefferson, but Adams is consigned to apathy, the worst possible fate for any figure hoping to remain a part of an historical narrative.

Hamilton is designed to deliver its postmodern point by not just lecturing the audience on their power, but getting them to demonstrate it. The larger the figure of Alexander Hamilton becomes in 21st century America, the more white liberals are proving Miranda’s central message-- even if they don’t know it; even if they don’t believe this message; even to people who haven’t seen the musical. The Hamilton revolution demonstrates the immense power of observers over the historical narrative: Will they tell your story?

#hamilton #alexander hamilton #lin manuel miranda #narrative #essay #fences #august wilson #tkam #to kill a mockingbird #musical #theatre

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cresselian · 7 years

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Wizards at Broadway

Young Wizards Winter Anon Secret Santa Gift for @ohthewhomanity. I hope you like it!

Nita didn’t blame anyone except herself for this little trip down the spell diagram rabbit hole.

She had been checking the Unfavorable Instigation again with Bobo’s help, to see if there was anything she could do to refine it, make it more energy efficient, and an accidental page turn to “N’hzzrt’s Zoetrope Animation” had caught her attention. Nita had paged back all the way to “Mjlliaeouyinaeian Transcription Convention” since then.

So it was possible that she didn’t want to write a reading response on Hemingway.

The kitchen door crashed open, and Nita started at the sound. “I say no watching a musical tonight!” Dairine sang. “I do say yes to Star Wars, though.”

Nita checked her watch. Ten PM already. That was three hours spent in the manual this time.

Kit slipped out the kitchen door and waved hello as Roshaun said, “I don’t find it enjoyable to spend a portion of my day disagreeing with how your authors mangle the laws of physics.”

“They’re good movies.”

“I know. You sleep on pictures from them. Stars also don’t work that way. I should know, as I spent a while inside of yours.”

Kit widened his eyes and sighed loudly. A long argument, then. One of their circular ones.

“I’m glad to know that you would prefer a movie about a giant space-firebird who got trapped inside a family of humans.” Penn leaned out the kitchen door to wink at Nita, then retreated. Nita heard the back-door slam as he headed to the usual thicket to travel home.

Nita thought she heard Roshaun grumble something else about accuracy before Carmela forced him out the kitchen door and into the dining room. “There! Go pick a movie now!” she ordered, shoving him toward the TV. “I don’t even care what it is!” She dropped her purse and fell into the chair across from Nita, a hand across her forehead.

Carmela and Roshaun wore their theatregoing best. Well, theatregoing best that wouldn’t get laughed out of the theatre. Carmela had given Roshaun’s ceremonial robe a hard no, no matter how bejewelled it was, and forced him to wear one of the button-ups she had convinced him to buy on a trip to the mall, then given in to his need to be somehow bedecked by doing his hair up in a braid wrapped around his head. She was wearing a Hamilton T-shirt under a pastel shawl, and her hairdo matched Roshaun’s elaborate knot hair for hair.

“No luck?” Nita ran a finger on the bottom of her open manual page.

“Twelve times, Nita. Twelve times I have taken seven people to the lottery, and not gotten in once!”

And that was why you stopped going, Bobo commented.

“We went to the library instead. ‘Mela got a Latin book, Dairine scared everyone away from the chess tables.” Kit came to stand behind Nita’s chair, looking over her shoulder at her manual. “Why were you reading about the ways that they transfer a gestural language into stone in the Pleiades?”

Nita yawned. “I got distracted.”

Dairine carried out mugs and the teapot as Carmela spoke again, “Distracted? We were all of us waiting with bated breath on Broadway while the girl who said she had too much homework read about magical writing techniques? What would Lin say?” She grabbed a mug and attempted to fling a tea bag in with vigour. She missed.

“Did Ronan already go home?”

“It’s 3 AM in Ireland by now. He headed to Grand Central.” Dairine managed to collect her mug and tea bag with rather more grace than Carmela.

By now it was a point of pride for Nita to keep her page while she gathered up mug, tea bag, and hot water and moved to join Roshaun in the living room. She did her best to look studious as she stole the most comfortable chair. Roshaun shot her a dark look from where he was paging through DVDs, but kept his silence.

Kit almost jumped into the chair beside her as soon as she put her tea down. “Still working on that optimisation stuff?” he asked.

“It’s really just a pet project.” Nita reached for one of the couch’s throw blankets. “I never want to use that spell again, but if I do…” She shrugged. “It would be nice to have as many charges as possible.”

Carmela continued to moan something about unattainable Hamilton tickets.

“Didn’t she use her worldgate to get backstage at the theatre?” Nita asked.

Kit gave a gusty sigh. “Yes. She did. Sker’ret had to stop half the Crossings from following her once they realised where she had linked them up to.”

“What happened to Carmela?”

“Papa heard the sounds of the show coming through the gate before she got back. He closed the gate while she was sneaking into the wings. She had to pull out that call-for-help spell I put on her so I could come save her.” Kit smiled wickedly. “She’s never gonna hear the end of it.”

“I heard that!” Carmela yelled. “And it was worth it!”

Roshaun sniffed. “On Wellakh, we wouldn’t be hosting a lottery for something like this.”

“No, you’d just order a performance at the Sunplace.” Dairine rolled her eyes as she marched into the living room.

“It was rather enjoyable to be in that crowd, I suppose. It must be very exciting to sit in the audience.” Roshaun held up Tangled for approval.

Dairine responded with a glare. “I just spent hours in the cold outside a theatre, hoping that I would get to see a live musical. That just can’t hold up.”

“And what a musical.” Carmela floated into the room, holding up an untranslated edition of The Aeneid. “The lines, the beats, the words. What that man does with English almost makes it sound like the Speech.” She struck a pose in the middle of the room.

Roshaun, Dairine, and Kit all sighed in unison. “We know.” Nita could have sworn she heard a chuckle in the back of her head.

Nita idly turned the page back one more time, and took a cursory glance at the spell diagram on the page. Wow, that’s impressive, she thought. That’s got to be a couple of dozen lobes, and each one looks like it’s in poetic form…

There was a diagram underneath the spell diagram as well, a series of concentric circles. Nita turned to look at the facing page while Carmela continued to wax poetic on Hamilton.

So, the circles turn within each other while the lobes are recited, rearranging the spell to connect different words and increase functionality. Nita mimed a few of the motions with a frown. That was some of the most intense artistry she’d ever seen in a spell. She would have to check the name to ask Carl about it next time she saw him. She flipped back a few pages.

“Miranda’s Poetic Re-Enervation”, huh? Poetic is definitely righ…

Nita took a closer look at the spell diagram, then paged to the detailed transcription of the spell she’d barely glanced at before. Kit looked as she leaned forward to mouth a few words to herself.

“Bobo…” she said out loud.

Yes? The voice of wizardry sounded definitively cheeky.

“You didn’t feel any need to mention this because?”

You hadn’t asked. Bobo stopped talking, but Nita felt its presence in the back of her head, watching with glee.

“Nita?” Kit didn’t look concerned yet, which was good. He looked at the spell diagram as well, and started to grin. “’Mela, you might want to sit down.”

“Why?” Carmela darted over and made grabby hands at Nita’s manual. She turned it around. “Uh, that’s a pretty diagram, but… oh my god.”

Nita would later inform Ronan that the noise Carmela made could have shattered glass, which might have been a slight exaggeration. As it was, Roshaun and Dairine both jumped nearly a foot in the air, and Carmela snatched the manual out of Nita’s grip and started to page through it with manic intensity.

“What’s up?” Dairine asked.

“Hamilton is a spell Hamilton is a spell HAMILTON. IS. A. SPELL!” Carmela ran a finger down the page as she skimmed through the description.

Roshaun craned his neck to try and see it. He held a copy of Chicago in one hand. “What do you mean?”

“The entire musical is a spell, and the stage is the spell diagram,” Nita explained. “Not sure what its functionality is, but-“

Carmela cleared her throat dramatically. “’The spell is meant to create a feeling of rejuvenation in the audience, encourage their openness to new ideas, and instil in them what Miranda feels are the ideals of the Founding Fathers, these being perseverance, belief in good, and a drive toward improvement.’” She continued to read greedily.

Dairine blinked. “That’s a lot of psychotropics for one spell.” She looked a little shocked. “Making it have a lasting effect without hurting people would be a job.”

“My question is how it can be a spell when it’s not performed in the speech,” Kit said.

“There is a technique for that,” Roshaun told him. “It’s usually reserved for big public workings on a sevarfrith planet like this one. One of the clauses at the beginning of the spell will define terms for the spell and inform it that it’s going to be read in another language, and then it may be performed. It usually requires Galactic-level dispensation to use, because of how hard it is to use any other language to replace the Speech.”

“And how do you know about that?” Dairine sipped her tea after speaking.

“A ceremonial ritual on Wellakh uses the technique. It’s older than the naturalisation of wizards on the planet, and it helps to calm Thahit down. One of the Sun King’s duties is to recite the first clause before it’s performed.”

“Guys guys guys guys.” Carmela surfaced. “At least one cast member has to be reciting the spell all through intermission! They define some more terms for Act 2! And the turntables, they turn the spell back on itself every time, but change how the words line up so they’re always different.” She looked up at Nita. “Can I borrow your manual?”

I’ve given Kit’s manual complete access to the spell, Bobo informed Nita. But you might want to warn Carl before Carmela goes over there to ask for Lin’s précis.

“Just use Kit’s when you get home.”

Carmela nodded and dove back into the book.

“Well, I know why he’s so particular about every staging, now,” Dairine pointed out, giving Roshaun a thumbs up for Lady and the Tramp. “That spell must be a beast to rewrite for each of those stages.

#hamilton #young wizards #excuse my fandoms #my writing #fanfic #crossover #i just really love hamilton a lot #this is playing fast and loose with how wizardry is a metaphor for creative work #the metaphor is gone #it's dead #notyoudd

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