3 hours ago ... 'Hamilton' Duel: Addressing the President-Elect on His Own Blunt Terms ... When I read that Donald J. Trump had tweeted those words on ...
‘Hamilton’ Duel: Addressing the President-Elect on His Own Blunt Terms
Video
‘Hamilton’ Cast Sends Message to Pence
On Friday night, Mike Pence attended
the Broadway musical in New York. After the performance, the actor
Brandon Victor Dixon delivered a message to the vice president-elect.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date November 19, 2016.
Photo by Andres Kudacki/Associated Press.
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“The theater must always be a safe and special place.”
When I read that Donald J. Trump had tweeted those words on Saturday morning, my gut response was to wish that the great American playwright Edward Albee had been alive to respond to our president-elect. Not that Mr. Albee, who died in September,
would have objected to the “special” part, or not on grounds other than
semantic, “special” being a word of such promiscuous overuse these
days.
But
it was Mr. Albee’s credo that theater — or theater as an enduring art,
as opposed to an evening’s entertainment — should be anything but safe. I
loved him for insisting on that belief, and for consistently acting on
it in everything he wrote for the stage. Theater, as the ancient and
exalted public forum that Mr. Albee wanted it to be forever, exists to
challenge complacency, to make us uncomfortable with our assumptions.
It
is a place where conversations of momentous moral, philosophical and
political significance can and should be initiated. Such exchanges have
been started by dramatists as different as Sophocles, Shakespeare,
Arthur Miller, Vaclav Havel, David Hare, Tony Kushner and, yes, Mr.
Albee. And even when the plays were written decades, if not centuries,
ago, the dialogues they began have in many cases never ceased to
reverberate.
Of
course it was a more literal kind of dialogue, one that broke the
commonly agreed-upon wall between actors and audience, that antagonized Mr. Trump into
a series of admonitory tweets. On Friday night, his vice
president-elect, Mike Pence, attended a performance of the Broadway hit “Hamilton,”
a historical (and historic) musical that, among other things, makes the
case for the United States as a nation founded and shaped by
immigrants.
Photo
Edward Albee, whose credo was that theater should be anything but safe.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
After
the final curtain calls that night, Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor who
portrays Aaron Burr, stepped forward with a microphone to directly
address Mr. Pence, who was leaving the theater. “We, sir — we — are the
diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration
will not protect us,” he said. He added that he hoped “this show has
inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all
of us. All of us.”
Mr.
Trump quickly made it clear on Twitter, his social medium of choice,
that Mr. Dixon and the “Hamilton” team had been “rude and insulting” and
owed Mr. Pence an apology. At first, a part of me could see Mr. Trump’s
point, or at least feel a shudder of embarrassed empathy for Mr. Pence.
If someone were to single me out for a direct plea from the stage in a
large theater, I would no doubt want to run home, dive into bed and bury
myself under the covers. (Mr. Pence, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,”
said he was not offended by Mr. Dixon’s words.)
Thinking
more rationally, I believe it can also be argued that a great work of
art — a distinction for which “Hamilton” easily qualifies — should be
sufficient unto itself. Though Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-laden
show has been embraced as Broadway’s favorite feel-good musical of the
moment, this portrait of a revolution is in itself revolutionary, with
the provocation and defiance that such a characterization suggests.
“Hamilton”
makes a sustained and vibrant case for the virtues of an American
melting pot. This is as true of its form (which melds rap and hip-hop
into the classic book musical) and its casting (which uses black and
Latino men and women to portray the white founders of the United States)
as of its content. (Don’t forget, this is a show in which the title
character, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Lafayette exult on the
battlefield: “Immigrants, we get the job done.”)
The
very presence of Mr. Pence — whose views on immigration, like those of
Mr. Trump, are anything but celebratory — at this particular show (one
previously embraced by the Obamas and Clintons) would seem to signal
that an unspoken debate was going on that night. In that case, wasn’t
Mr. Dixon belaboring the obvious in delivering the statement prepared by
him and his associates (including Mr. Miranda)? Was what he said a
condescending equivalent of supertitles for the inferentially
challenged?
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Any
inclinations I might have had to think that way evaporated in the face
of the succeeding barrage of Mr. Trump’s tweets (which were still
continuing on Sunday morning).
They underscored for me just how much we are living in a world that
demands overstatement, in which italicized capital letters are required
to highlight sentiments that might otherwise go ignored.
Woe
unto those who believe that the meanings between the lines will be
widely read. Much of the success of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign
had to do with his awareness of that reality of contemporary
communication.
In
delivering his plea to Mr. Pence, Mr. Dixon wasn’t just emphasizing
that a play is more than a self-contained work of art, that it’s a cry
of thought and feeling pitched to an audience, a city, a nation, a
world. He was also addressing Mr. Trump (through Mr. Pence) on his own
blunt terms, albeit in a more eloquent (and, yes, polite) style. He was
meeting directness with directness, carefully spelling out what his show
had to say.
If the recent past is anything to go by, it is fair to assume that Mr. Trump will encounter more direct salvos from theater artists once he assumes the presidency. Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, George W. Bush (Remember Will Ferrell in “You’re Welcome America”?) and Barack Obama have all been the subjects of theater satires while in office. Those portraying Johnson
and Nixon — created in a time when the nation was as contentiously
divided as it is now, the 1960s and early ’70s — were especially savage
in their attacks.
So
will the political theater of the future prove a match for all the
president’s thumbs? In any case, disagreement and dissent should
energize art, not paralyze it, and provoke responses to match. I look
forward (though perhaps with a wince) to whatever Mr. Trump has to say
about whatever is said about him on this country’s stages. The main
thing is that the conversation — all sides of it — be allowed to
continue.
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