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OF OSKAR EUSTIS

HIS POLITICS, HIS EVENTFUL CAREER, HIS THOUGHTS on VERSE DRAMA, AND HIS STEWARDSHIP OF THE PUBLIC THEATER

w i t h a Wo r d A b o u t THE PHARCYDE

T hree d ays after lin and tommy returned from their week in Poughkeepsie, on July 30, 2013, they met producer Jeffrey Seller at Café Luxembourg on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to eat lunch and talk strategy. What should The Hamilton Mixtape’s next move be? Or, more to the point, when and where?

Lin and Tommy said that they were ready to plunge ahead. The week at Vassar had been fruitful, the audience effusive. They wanted to go into rehearsal on a full production before the end of 2014.

That seemed aggressive to Jeffrey. Theaters often get booked years in advance. Also, he pointed out, they still didn’t have a second act.

“Don’t worry,” Lin said. “I’m going to your house in September.” Meaning Jeffrey’s home in the Hamptons, where he would churn out the remaining songs.

So much for the question of when. But where would that production be? Everybody agreed that New York was the best city in which to develop a hip-hop musical about a Founding Father. But there are dozens of theaters in the city–which one offered the best fit?

A week later, they arranged to visit the three Off-Broadway theaters that seemed like the most promising places to prepare the show for a Broadway run. The “college tour,” as they called it, led to a unanimous favorite.

“I want to go to the Public,” said Jeffrey. “We’re gonna do A Chorus Line: It’s a new musical, nobody knows anything about it, nobody cares about it–yet.”

The Public Theater was indeed the birthplace of A Chorus Line, as well as the process that made Michael Bennett’s unheralded, unprecedented musical possible: a series of workshops that gave the creative team a chance to refine their show, away from the glare and commercial pressure of Broadway. A Chorus Line marks the pinnacle of the Public’s half-century tradition of adventurous, socially conscious musicals, including Hair; Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk; Caroline, or Change; and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

The inheritor of that tradition is the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis. If he were king of the forest–a phrase Oskar uses a lot–life would be what Gonzalo dreams of in The Tempest: There would be no riches or poverty, “All things in common nature should produce / Without sweat or endeavor.” Like Lin, he had a father involved in Democratic politics; unlike Lin, he had a mother and stepfather in the leadership of the Communist Party of America. To bide his time until the proletariat rises, Oskar develops and produces plays, particularly scripts by new voices. The last theatrical work to do what Hamilton has done–leap off the arts pages and become central to the country’s cultural conversation–was one that Oskar commissioned and developed 30 years earlier: Angels in America.

His work with Tony Kushner is a big reason why he is regarded, by people who track such things, as the greatest dramaturg alive.

Oskar already knew Lin, Tommy, and Jeffrey when they arrived for their tour. The Public had hosted a series of developmental concerts for Sting’s musical The Last Ship, which Jeffrey had produced. And Oskar was two years into an artistic love affair with Lin. At first, his feelings about the young composer weren’t exactly cheerful: In the Heights had won its four Tony Awards at the expense of Passing Strange, which had premiered at the Public.

But Oskar liked Lin as soon as they met, and his reaction to the half-dozen demo recordings that Lin sent afterwards was immediate and fierce. Lin seemed a little overwhelmed by this enthusiasm. Oskar is a big man, with a big heart, and at that early stage hardly anybody had heard Lin’s Hamilton songs, let alone raved about them. “I should do these meetings more often,” Lin said after one of those effusions. “They make me feel like a better writer.”

Choosing the Public gave Lin and Tommy what they wanted. Oskar and Patrick Willingham, the Public’s executive director, scheduled the show for the 2014­’15 season, exactly the time frame they had desired. It gave Lin a year to finish writing the show and Tommy a year to figure out how to stage it. The Public put a couple of workshops on the calendar, intermediate deadlines that Lin and Tommy could work toward. Lin grabbed his dog and his notebooks and headed for the Hamptons, where Jeffrey’s upright piano awaited.

Jeffrey got what he wanted, too. Later, when somebody asked him about his marketing campaign for Hamilton, he said that going to the Public was the marketing campaign: He wanted to brand the show by associating it with what he called “the quintessential New York down-town theater laboratory.”

And Oskar got what he wanted, in double measure. From his earliest encounters with the show–listening to Lin’s demos, attending the American Songbook concert, making the trek to Vassar–he saw that Hamilton could do more than extend the tradition of great Public musicals: Its use of hip-hop would allow it to build on the tradition of Shakespeare in the Park. He calls the show “a perfect example of verse drama.”

“Lin does exactly what Shakespeare does,” he says. “He takes the language of the people, and heightens it verse. It both ennobles the language and the people saying the language. That’s precisely what Shakespeare did in all of his work, particularly in his history plays. He tells the foundational myths of his country. By doing that, he makes the country the possession of everybody.”

You can see what he means in “Meet Me Inside,” Washington’s angry confrontation with the hotheaded Hamilton. Music accompanies the dialogue, but the language has a rhythm that strays far from the beat. The exchange shows why, until about 200 years ago, virtually every playwright in the Western tradition wrote in verse. It has lift, concision, drive. It demands, and rewards, your attention.

Here is another Hamilton paradox: Half a century after verse storytelling–the technique that worked so well in Medea, Tartuffe, and Othello–was declared dead on the American stage, it has been revived by someone who learned it not in a textbook or in a drama school but from listening endlessly to “Friend or Foe,” “Everything Is Fair,” and the first album by The Pharcyde.