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XXVIII

A GRIEVING CHAPTER: ON LOSSES BEYOND WORDS

There a re nearly 24,000 words in hamilton. That is a lot of words. It is more than than an audience hears in a performance of The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, or The Taming of the Shrew. It is significantly more than in Macbeth. Alexander Hamilton speaks, sings, and raps more words in the course of a show than King Lear does.

Hamlet dwarfs Hamilton–it dwarfs pretty much everything–but there’s a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare’s longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It’s not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible.

Hamilton is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: “I will never understand you,” says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, “What is it like in his shoes?”

“Actors cried while singing it, the production team cried while listening to it, Andy couldn’t bear to choreograph it.” Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. “What’d I miss?” asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. “Would that be enough?” asks Eliza in the song that defines her. “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton’s drive, and all but declares that there’s no way to explain it. Hamilton, like Hamlet, gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with words words words, only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend.

The idea that some things lie beyond even the most articulate expression is the subject of “It’s Quiet Uptown.” Lin wrote the song in part to solve a problem. A workshop in January 2014 had ended with “Burn.” At a notes session in the Public’s conference room afterwards, everybody laughed at how he seemed to have written himself into a corner: How would an audience believe a reconciliation between Alexander and Eliza after hearing her sing “I hope you burn”?

Even more daunting than patching up their marriage, Lin would need to dramatize their grief over their son Philip’s death. Unlike the boyish camaraderie that he could recall for “The Story Tonight” or the relentlessness that he depicted in “Non-Stop,” the overwhelming sorrow of losing a child is something he had never felt firsthand. “I can’t know what this is,” he remembers feeling.

He sequestered himself in a quiet corner of the Public, composing music, scribbling verses, occasionally wandering the halls. The staff got used to seeing him pacing in his slippers. One day he realized that his inability to grasp the enormity of Alexander and Eliza’s loss wasn’t a barrier to writing the song, it was the song.

“Once I got the line, There are moments that the words don’t reach,’ I had the song,” he says. He wrote it in a day.

The power of “It’s Quiet Uptown”was intact from its first day: Actors cried while singing it, the production team cried while listening to it, Andy couldn’t bear to choreograph it, not with his daughter, Sofia, fighting cancer, and getting sick on the way to school, and the whole family hoping the next round of chemotherapy would work.

The most affecting part of the song, curiously enough, always tended to be its one consoling moment: Alexander and Eliza’s reconciliation, which turns out to be more convincing than anyone dreamed possible that day in the conference room. Lin credits Lac’s orchestration with the moment’s beauty. The music moves down, down, down for much of the song, creating what Lin calls a “hypnotizing” effect. Then, a moment before the reconciliation, the band plays Lac’s quick, bright upward flourish. (If you want to be technical about it, they play the song’s root chord with an added ninth tone–the sound of yearning, of seeking release.) When the full company sings the word “Forgiveness”–men higher than the women, voices blending to form the song’s root chord–you don’t need to understand a word of English, or a bit of music theory, to grasp that Alexander and Eliza have found their way home.

“The song is loss, and then it’s being able to forgive the loss,” says Lin. “There’s some kind of magic in that, too.”

The mystery of what lies beyond words, the unfathomable action of grief, are things that everyone associated with Hamilton reckoned with, and not just because the show explores them. On November 16, 2014, Oskar and Laurie Eustis’s beloved son, Jack, died. He was 16 years old. The shock of the news, the enormity of the loss, left family, friends, colleagues, and the Hamilton company devastated and bewildered. Everyone thought, first, of what could be done to help the Eustis family, to ease even slightly the pain they were feeling. Everyone thought, second, about a cruel coincidence of the schedule. Dance rehearsals were set to begin the very next day, which meant that Oskar and Laurie were about to spend half a year or more in the world of a show that pivots on the loss of a child. “It’s Quiet Uptown”had been wrecking people who weren’t grappling with the death of an only son. What would it do to people who were?

Two weeks later, the full company assembled for the first sing-through of the show. The actors stood at music stands. Lac presided at the piano. Tommy, Andy, Jeffrey, Jill, and a few members of the Public staff were situating themselves in folding chairs when Oskar and Laurie walked in. Only a few of the people in the room had seen them since Jack’s death, so there were greetings, hugs, condolences. Hearing “It’s Quiet Uptown”for the first time since their unimaginable loss was bound to be wrenching. It was wrenching, for everyone. When the sing-through ended, we offered words of consolation that were heartfelt but inadequate before a grief larger than anyone could comprehend.

There was one thing that the Hamilton company didn’t know that day. When Lin had learned of Jack’s death, he had sent an email to Oskar and Laurie expressing his deepest condolences. He also sent the demo recording of “It’s Quiet Uptown.”

“If art can help us grieve, can help us mourn, then lean on it,” he wrote. If they preferred to delete the song, he would understand.

Oskar and Laurie did lean on it. In the rehearsal studio that afternoon, nobody knew that “It’s Quiet Uptown” was the only song they had listened to in their first week of mourning. They had listened to it every day.