فصل 18

Xviii

AN ACCOUNT OF RAPPING for the CHILDREN WHO WILL ONE DAY RAP FOR THEMSELVES

Hamilton opened at the public Theater on February 17, 2015, earning the kind of critical acclaim that theater artists dream of receiving. The popular reaction was even more jubilant than the reviews: The demand for tickets was so oppressive that at least one member of the cast changed her name on Facebook to duck the requests.

A few weeks after opening night, Lin nevertheless tweeted that he was terrified about what the next day would bring. Teenagers from New York public high schools would be in the audience the following afternoon–they would, in fact, be the entire audience. “Kid, like Shakira’s hips, don’t lie,” he tweeted.

The students would be attending Hamilton as part of the Public Theater’s partnership with the Theater Development Fund. Since 1995, the TDF Stage Doors program has brought more than 62,000 students to see plays and musicals at theaters around New York City. Because TDF tries to create opportunities for schools that lack resources, the students tend to be a vivid mix of races, religions, and national origins. They are much closer to the face of the new 21st-century America than, say, your typical Off-Broadway subscriber audience. Perform a musical for one of those conventional audiences and you know what to expect: Put it on for a couple hundred kids who have never set foot in a theater before–which is true of many TDF participants–and there is no guessing.

The teachers and TDF teaching artists had started preparing their classes to see Hamilton weeks before that matinee. Bill Coulter, who teaches a sophomore English class at (wait for it) Fort Hamilton High School in southwestern Brooklyn, had his class read the Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even the Haitian Declaration of Independence. They delved so deeply into these documents that the students started to wonder if he was teaching a social studies class.

At John Adams High School in Queens, the TDF teaching artist Joe White had read his class the first lines of Hamilton–about “a bastard orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman / Dropped in the middle of a forgotten / Spot in the Caribbean”–then asked the students to describe what kind of person that might be. They said he sounded Dominican (“There are a lot of Dominicans in the class,” White says), or West Indian. They guessed that he had come to New York because he had a bad life.

“Then I read the line about the ten-dollar Founding Father without a father, who got a lot farther by being a self-starter,’” White recalls. “They said, He worked his way up. He started as an immigrant, somebody who wanted to make something of himself.’ But they said, What is a ten-dollar Founding Father?’ So I showed them a $10 bill and said, This is the guy–this is who we’re talking about. He couldn’t believe it.”

On the day of the show, the students arrived enthusiastic and stayed that way. “Excited isn’t the right word,” says Ginger Bartkoski Meagher of TDF. “They were engaged, moved, amazed.” She tries to avoid the word transformative because it sounds so corny, but concludes that it’s the best description. “It’s theater telling them a story about themselves, a story that they didn’t know. That’s huge–that’s amazing.”

“They went absolutely crazy,” says White. “It was like the feel at Shea Stadium. The play is in language they understand. Most of these kids have earbuds and listen to music pretty much 24 hours a day, so they totally got it.”

Onstage, the actors rode the wave of adolescent energy as best they could. The mood was particularly electric during the Cabinet rap battles. Chris Jackson says that when he stepped to the front of the stage to announce the first one, he could feel a sense of delight and surprise radiating from the crowd.

“Battles are definitely part of youth culture now,” says Daveed. “There are YouTube channels for rap battles.” That means that the kids felt empowered to let the competing rappers know what they thought. As Hamilton and Jefferson traded arguments (and insults), the actors heard a lot of OHHHHHs and cheers. Daveed loves to perform for audiences that don’t know the rules, but says that it was painful to play Jefferson in the Cabinet battle that day: “They’re so vocal, it hurts so much more when I lose.”

After the show, the kids waited in the lobby for the actors to appear. Lin signed autographs and posed for pictures. He accepted a Fort Hamilton High T-shirt from Bill Coulter’s students. “The student matinees are, it turns out, the highlights of my life,” he tweeted later. “I can’t begin to describe how it feels.”

For the kids, the show wasn’t over. Back in their classrooms, in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, the students followed the TDF approach, which asks them to devise performances based on the plays they’ve seen. The Hamilton script had made Joe White mull some ideas for his students: “What political issues are important to the students? What are we dealing with now that would be open to debate? I thought it would be cool to have them do rap battles with each other.” He paired up his students, and asked them to come up with pro and con positions on some tough issues, like gun control and same-sex marriage. Then they turned those arguments into raps, and squared off in front of the class. He even asked them to incorporate a line from the show.

At Fort Hamilton High, Susan Willerman asked students to choose an issue they were passionate about, then improvise words and movement that allowed them to present different views on the issue to their classmates. “Having seen the show, they had a much greater sense of what this could be. I was pretty much blown away by the creativity.” A hearing-impaired student who usually shied away from getting in front of the class was excited to take part. “Seeing how much energy and enthusiasm those performers had must be very inspiring for anybody who has stage fright,” says Willerman of the Hamilton cast. “The kids must have thought, They’re really putting themselves out there–maybe I can do that, too.”

Bill Coulter’s class in Brooklyn spent their last session talking about the connection between Hamilton and the work they had done. “Some of them were just absolutely blown away,” he says. “They were saying, George Washington wasn’t black, Mr. Coulter!’ I said, Obviously he wasn’t, guys.’” He asked the kids how the casting affected them. “They said, It just made me really proud, and feel good about being American. Like I belong here.’”

Daveed has more stinging defeats in Cabinet battles ahead of him. A few months after those student matinees at the Public, Jeffrey Seller announced a radical expansion of Hamilton’s outreach to students. Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, 20,000 students from New York public schools– specifically, schools in which a high percentage of kids qualify for free lunches–will get to see the show on Broadway in 2016. That is 35 times as many who saw it via TDF at the Public. They will pay a Hamilton–that is, $10–to attend a matinee, and to participate in educational programming designed by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Daveed doesn’t mind. On the contrary. When the news was announced, he called it “the most important and exciting moment in the journey thus far.”

The sheer size of those numbers means that reckoning with Hamilton’s impact now, in the first year of its public performances, is a bit like judging your harvest in the middle of May. Jeffrey plans to expand a version of the program to other cities when the show begins to tour. What will happen when hundreds of thousands of kids, all around the country, have the experience that Bill Coulter’s students did?

Lin doesn’t know, but he is very familiar with the power of plays to shape young minds. “I know how deep in the DNA musicals get because they’re deep in my DNA,”he says. At the press conference for the announcement of the student program, he evoked Les Misérables, the first Broadway musical he ever saw: “I know that show like I know my family tree.”

Sometime early in the next decade, give or take a few years, Hamilton’s influence on students will take another big leap–bigger by order of magnitude. The show will be licensed for student and amateur productions. So in addition to watching from the dark in vast numbers, college and high-school kids will get to learn it and perform it for themselves. Executives at two organizations that lead the field of theatrical licensing, Theodore S. Chapin of the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization and Drew Cohen of Music Theatre International, say that Hamilton will almost certainly be one of the most licensed musicals in the country when it becomes available. Its subject matter will appeal to history teachers, its array of juicy roles will appeal to young actors, and its mélange of musical styles will appeal to almost everybody. In a given school year, they imagine, that might mean 600 or 700 student productions around the United States.

What will it mean when thousands of students step into these roles at age 15 or 18 or 20–roles that have changed the lives of the original cast members, who encountered them at a significantly later age? Leslie says that playing a Founding Father has made him feel newly invested in the country’s origins, something that always seemed remote from his life as a black man in America. “The empathy that requires, the connections you make, the lines you draw between the things you want and the things they wanted, that you love and they loved, I never found all that connective tissue before this show.”

Lin hopes those student productions will strive for the diversity of the original production, the ethnic mix that makes Hamilton look like a message beamed back from Future America. It means that whatever impact the show might have on Broadway, and however long it might run, the biggest impact won’t be in New York: It’ll be in highschool and college rehearsal rooms across America, where boys learn to carry themselves with the nobility of George Washington, girls learn to think and rap fast enough to rip through “Satisfied,” and kids of either gender (Lin isn’t doctrinaire) summon the conviction of John Laurens, the freedom-fighting abolitionist, who sings, “Tomorrow there’ll be more of us.”