فصل 19

XiX DID THEY or DIDN’T THEY? OR, SOME DISCOURSE ON AFFAIRS

Ron chernow saw hamilon more than 20 times at the Public. It sounds a little crazy, he realizes, but he had his reasons. During previews, he kept seeing it so he could give notes as the show took shape. After opening night he went back to witness history (a break from his day job, writing history), and to find new treats amid the dense complexity of Lac’s orchestrations and Andy’s dances. Also friends kept hitting him up to take them along.

After one performance, he and a guest greeted Lin, who told them how much fun he was having onstage.

“I get to be pure id for two and a half hours,” he said. “I get to have an affair.”

“Two affairs,” said Ron’s friend. Lin looked perplexed. There’s one affair in the show for sure: Hamilton’s tryst with Maria Reynolds in the middle of Act Two. The second affair, if it happened, was with his sister-in-law, Angelica. It was hot gossip at the time, furnishing John Adams with the last item in one of his lists of Hamilton’s misdeeds–his “fornications, adulteries, and his incests.” But conclusive proof never came to light–at least not after one of Hamilton’s sons tore passages out of their letters. The surviving facts establish only that Alexander and Angelica enjoyed what Ron calls “a subtle, delicate, ambiguous flirtation.”

One of the little pleasures that kept Ron coming back was Lin’s willingness to honor this ambiguity. Ron’s friend thought there was an affair, but plenty of other theatergoers didn’t. “I’m convinced that anyone else dramatizing the story would have Hamilton sleeping with his sister-in-law,” says Ron. “That would have spiced things up.”

Yet here is one place where Lin the Writer left a puzzle for Lin the Actor to solve. Writing an ambiguous relationship is one thing, but how do you perform it? Seven times a week, Lin and Renée had to do something up there. That meant they had to decide what really happened between Alexander and Angelica. Or did they? Ask Renée if the brilliant, alluring Angelica was having an affair with the brilliant, charming Hamilton, and she volleys back, Angelica-style: “So, what is an affair?”

“Even if it hasn’t been consummated, I’m 100 percent playing it as an emotional affair,” she says. “As a married person, that almost seems worse to me.”

“It’s an emotional affair,” Lin agrees. “It’s an intellectual affair.”

They were sitting on the couch in Lac’s dressing room one afternoon: It looked like couples counseling.

“It’s emotional and intellectual,” continues Renée, “and I think that the next step would definitely be sexual. But I don’t know that, and I don’t know that she knows that. I don’t think you tell yourself when you’re doing something so wrong.”

“It feels wrong?”

“It feels wrong–and right,” she says, laughing. “It feels wrong, but it’s also necessary and crucial for her existence. He gives her something that she gets nowhere else, and she has to have it. I don’t know that there’s a choice.”

“This is someone who has incredible intellectual curiosity, who’s desperate for news of America, and she’s stuck with a banker in London,” says Lin. “Her letters are not only, How are you doing?’ “and How is the family doing?’ but What’s the dirt?’”

Lin dramatized those letters in “Take a Break,” another express bus of a song, zipping its characters through seven or eight plot points in four and a half minutes. As preparation, he read all of Alexander and Angelica’s correspondence. He wanted to show that the flirtation didn’t end when she moved to London, that he kept trying to impress her, that the tension was real. He also wanted to underscore that she is the smartest character in the show, making her a political counselor to Hamilton as he fights to enact his debt plan, a woman who lavished her wit on flirty letters because the strictures of her era denied her other outlets.

Lin took his share of liberties: There was no upstate like the one Angelica and Eliza propose, and Angelica’s chronology has been shuffled around. (In real life, she eloped with her rich British businessman before meeting Hamilton–something Renée says she puts out of her mind.) But Lin thinks that his version, which gives the two of them a moment of acute mutual attraction before Hamilton meets Eliza, makes the rest of their relationship feel truer to life.

“You have a moment with a girl, then your best friend marries the girl. You might love your best friend, and hug your best friend, but you and the girl both know that you said some shit that you can’t unsay,” says Lin. “Everyone has a version of that in their life.”

“At least one,” says Renée.

And these sorta-kinda affairs, these wrong-yet-right, not-quite-relationships are much easier today than in the 1790s, Lin and Renée agree, thanks to technology. It’s easier to be present physically without being present emotionally when a beloved non-lover is a quick text message away. “This can happen really easily with wit, with flirting back and forth,” says Renée. “Why do you think I turned my instant messenger off in the ’90s, or whenever it was?”

If pushed, they both say they don’t know if Alexander and Angelica were sleeping together. Nor can they guess what would have happened if the characters had made that trip upstate. Renée doubts it would have been consummated. “I think that sometimes people do this kind of thing because you can’t go there, because it feels in some ways safe, because there’s something that would stop you.” The thing, in this case, is the love they share for Eliza.

For all of Angelica’s beauty and brilliance, Lin is sure that Hamilton married the right Schuyler sister. “Eliza ended up being this nonstop source of warmth and forgiveness and kindness. Also they had eight kids together, which is a pretty good testament that they liked being around each other.”

Renée, surprisingly, agrees that Hamilton was better off with Eliza. “To me, the best and most exciting surprise in the show is that Angelica’s the only one that always knew Eliza was the better woman. Every great thing that Angelica does in her life is because she knows what her sister would do.” In “Satisfied,” after all, Angelica decides to give up on Alexander–“this man she desperately loves, and needs”–because that’s what her sister would do.

“The love affair for Angelica really is Eliza,” says Renée, “and loving Alexander through her.”