فصل 30

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FURTHER THOUGHTS ON AMBITION as It Pertains to THE PLAYWRIGHT and THE ENIGMATIC BURR

Lin the actor stood still, but Lin the Writer kept moving. One afternoon in July, he was holding a position on the walkway above the stage, hands on the railing. Howell Binkley needed to see him standing up there to adjust a lighting look. As Lin waited, he got an idea: a more compelling way for Burr to introduce Hamilton’s pamphlet about John Adams.

Lin called to Leslie, who was standing in his own pool of light downstage right, and proposed the new line. Leslie tried it a couple of times and liked it. Lac popped his head out of the orchestra pit, and Lin explained it again. Lac liked it too. The change was formally incorporated just as Howell finished his cue.

“Lin, you can relax,” somebody shouted from the audience.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

Even after previews began, and President Obama came through, work on the show continued. The company rehearsed in the afternoons and performed at night.

Those were long days for the actors, especially for the one trying to finish revising the script. As other items got crossed off the to-do list and the company drew nearer and nearer to press performances (the traditional dead-line for making changes to a show), Lin had one more big puzzle to finish: how to dramatize the final confrontation between Hamilton and Burr.

“The white whale,” Tommy calls their duel: elusive, monstrous, unknowable. It was the last part of the show that clicked into place.

Lin and Tommy had known from the start that for any treatment of the duel to be dramatically satisfying, Burr had to seem like a worthy adversary. That meant they needed to understand Burr and his motivations, which was no easy task. Before history labeled him a enigma, a man who puzzled even his associates.

“He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, insomuch that we know not what to make of him,” wrote one contemporary. Actually, that was written by Aaron Burr, describing himself in the third person.

The aspect of Burr’s persona that seemed most difficult to convey had come the most easily: his strange magnetism. Onstage and off, Leslie was soft-spoken, self-contained, charismatic. Even his dressing room was perfectly appointed. But Lin could see something beneath the savoir faire of the actor who castmates had nicknamed “Silky”: “Leslie’s very smooth, but he’s capable of real ferocity,” he says.

Leslie says he spent his early adulthood driving away the impulse to lose his cool; his serenity only seemed effortless. The two years he had spent mastering Lin’s songs and Andy’s choreography had also been spent learning how to unleash his anger onstage–and to enjoy it. In pre-Broadway rehearsals, Tommy worked with him on sharpening and simplifying what he did, finding small gestures that would have a large impact. This required plenty of trust between actor and director. “You have to hope you’re not whittling it to nothing, or turning the volume down to a whisper for the whole show,” Leslie says.

In fact, when Leslie began performing at the Rodgers, his depiction of Burr deepened and grew. He started to seem like Michael Corleone: a man whose power is intimidating precisely because it is held in check, one who doesn’t need to raise his voice to convey the emotions churning within. The wider the contrast between Lin’s volubility and Leslie’s restraint became, the more excited Lin got about finding ways to exploit its power.

In real life, the fatal animosity between Hamilton and Burr revealed itself in a series of letters in the summer of 1804. Burr, furious about a life of personal insults and political opposition, demanded that Hamilton explain the report that he had made a “despicable” reference to him at a recent dinner.

Lin set Burr’s peremptory challenge and Hamilton’s condescending replies to music in “Your Obedient Servant.” In the downtown version of the song, he and Leslie had sniped at each other in a quick waltz tempo, a musical counterpart to the bizarre formality of vitriolic letters that ended with “Your obedient servant.”Lin rewrote the song for Broadway. He cut Burr’s tempo in half, he made room for silence. At the Rodgers, Leslie delivered his side of the exchange at a writing desk, still as a cobra.

Burr looked and sounded ready to kill, but he didn’t seem like a cliché villain of melodrama. In the show, as in real life, Hamilton really had insulted him, giving him legitimate grounds for fury. Leslie won praise for humanizing Burr, and was gracious about sharing it. “Lin got inside his head first,” he says. “He saw Burr with love and compassion first.”

Lin’s identification with Burr mystified some people close to the show. His depiction of Hamilton’s killer was more generous than virtually any other writer’s. Even Gore Vidal’s novel about Burr, which takes a remarkably friendly view of its hero’s schemes, finds room to call him “a monster,” “a labyrinth,” “the slyest trickster of our time,” and a man who “makes even a trip to the barber seem like a plot to overthrow the state.” At various points during the development of Hamilton, people wondered if Lin might be overshooting the mark, and making Burr too sympathetic.

Lin hinted at an explanation in a profile for The New Yorker, when he told Rebecca Mead that he identified with Hamilton but had “equal affinity” with his killer: “I feel like I have been Burr in my life as many times as I have been Hamilton. I think we’ve all had moments where we’ve seen friends and colleagues zoom past us, either to success, or to marriage, or to home-ownership, while we lingered where we were– broke, single, jobless. And you tell yourself, Wait for it.’”

You don’t expect to hear that kind of frustration from somebody who won a Tony at 28–an artist regarded as a valued collaborator by Stephen Sondheim, an esteemed fellow craftsman by John Kander, a respected fellow MC by Black Thought and Talib Kweli, a happy husband and father.

“Why do you identify with Burr so much?” The question (asked over coffee, a few weeks before Broadway opening night) takes Lin back to his school days. “Hunter is a very Whadju get?’ place,” he says. He looks into my mug as if it were a freshly graded paper. “Whadju get? Whadju get?” He remembers when a friend started taking high-school-level math classes when they were still in middle school–something Lin couldn’t do, no matter how hard he tried.

“But after Hamilton, you can retire the Burr perspective, right?” “No!” he says. “It’s not like a jacket I can take off.” He is smiling but he is serious.

“Yeah, but you wrote Hamilton. I’ve read your press.” “I have so much to do!”

High-octane strivers don’t operate in a vacuum: There are all those other high-octane strivers around. Until the country has enough brass rings for everybody to grab (and maybe even then), being Alexander Hamilton, the all-American overachiever, also means being Aaron Burr: restless, watchful, unsatisfied.

“So you’re still going to write like you’re running out of time?” “Because I am.”