فصل 31

XXxi

HOW THE D U E L WA S F O U G H T, and REWRITTEN, and FOUGHT AGAIN, AS THE CLOCK RAN OUT

Two bullets flew. that much is clear. One made a harmless journey through a cedar tree 12 feet off the ground. The other opened a hole two inches wide in the abdomen of Alexander Hamilton. Every other important aspect of his duel with Aaron Burr is a murky matter of speculation. Who shot first? Who aimed where? Why?

In script meetings throughout the show’s development, brisk conversations about the best way to stage this or that scene would slow and sometimes halt when those few seconds in Weehawken came up. Then the room would begin to sound like a history seminar, as people compared diverging accounts, weighed evidence, and began a lot of sentences with, “Or, maybe . . . “

Lin and his collaborators could draw on two eyewitness accounts to the duel–accounts that don’t agree. Nathaniel Pendleton, Hamilton’s second for the duel, said Hamilton only pulled the trigger reflexively after being struck. That is why, on the boat ride back to New York, the stricken Hamilton warned people to be careful with his gun: He thought it was still loaded. But Burr’s second, William P. Van Ness, said that Hamilton clearly fired first, and of course he aimed at Burr–he just missed. If that is true, then Hamilton got what he had coming at the hands of a deadlier rival.

Lin decided to ignore both these accounts, and listen to Hamilton himself. In a letter to be opened after his death, he explained that he didn’t want to fight Burr. He claimed to have a religious scruple against dueling, and was only going through with it because of a “public prejudice” in favor of the practice. If he refused, he would lose his usefulness in future crises that were sure to threaten his beloved Union. He had to go to Weehawken, and he had to hold a loaded gun, but he didn’t have to fire it at Aaron Burr.

But this only cracked open another, more vexing set of questions. How could Hamilton be so cavalier about his possible death? Was the duel an elaborate way to commit suicide, as some historians believe? He was grief-stricken over Philip’s death, a tragedy that also drove his daughter Angelica mad. Or maybe he saw the duel as a way to secure his legacy–a final expression of what Lin called his “martyrdom death wish.” Or maybe Hamilton was playing a badass game of chess, wagering that his death would take the dangerous Burr off the board forever.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, Lin’s collaborators waited to learn which of these theories he would endorse. His decision would determine how they would depict that baffling morning in Weehawken, which was sure to be the climax of the night. When Lin finally made up his mind about the question, he picked an option that nobody expected: He wasn’t going to answer it.

“It’s not a whodunit to me, this story,” he says. “I’m not interested in weighting pros and cons. And I don’t think we really think that way as humans. I don’t think we go, This, this, this, and this, and so I’m going to fire into the air.’ When you’re in that adrenalized state, I think there’s a lot of things at play.”

Just before the run at the Public, Lin wrote lines for Hamilton that traced a thought as it “pinged around in his brain.” Time would stop, and Hamilton would think about the prospect of imminent death. “I don’t run or fire my gun; I let it be,” he would say. And though he wouldn’t explain his decision, he would announce it: “I’ve got to throw away my shot.” The lines would rhyme, but there would be no music behind them. In other words, at the climax of the show, Lin veered away from hip-hop, and revived the old methods of verse drama, the same ones that Shakespeare used to give shape and order to jumbled thoughts.

Lin said that he was “very happy” with how it played Off-Broadway. Most people were. Oskar wasn’t.

“Lin has a resistance to wrapping it up neatly, or explaining things, or closing it off. And I admire that,” he says. “I told him at one point, You know, I have the same notes for you I have for Shakespeare.’ He refuses to tell you.” The problem, as Oskar saw it, is that a character who defined himself in Act One by his refusal to throw away his shot needed to tell the audience what changed in him that made him do the opposite when his life was on the line.

Once the show got on its feet at the Public, Lin and Tommy began having regular meetings with Oskar and Jeffrey to discuss script revisions. Jeffrey brought to the conversation his expertise with Broadway musicals, knowing how certain moments needed to pop for an audience of 1,300 people. Oskar brought his expertise as a dramaturg, his insistence that characters define themselves through their choices. He used those meetings to stay on Lin about the duel. Both of them used the same phrase to describe his dramaturgical technique: “pushing and pushing.”

Oskar kept it up throughout the spring and into the summer, even after the Broadway run began. In late July, he tried one last approach. He asked Lin, “What if it’s not a fait accompli at the top of the duel?” That is, what if Hamilton goes into the duel intending to throw away his shot, but still wrestling with the decision?

Lin perked up. “That to me is inherently more dramatic,” he says.

A few days before the critics arrived, Lin rewrote a half dozen lines that changed the whole song. Statements turned into questions. Instead of merely reviewing his life, Hamilton now searched it for the answer to his newly stated dilemma: “Do I run or fire my gun or let it be?” Lin’s performance changed along with the text. At the Public, he had sounded defiant when delivering his final line, “Raise a glass to freedom.” Now he sounded vulnerable, unsure. When the bullet struck, people in the audience gasped.

“That’s exactly what you want when you’re producing Romeo and Juliet,” Lin says. “Juliet, just wake up before he drinks the thing!’ And we know what’s gonna happen! We know they’re both gonna die! But if it’s a good production, you gasp anyway. And that’s what we’re after here. By Oskar pushing and pushing, he got us to a place where we get the audience gasping.”

Of course, Hamilton is only half the duel. Burr, everinscrutable, presented his own puzzles. Did he go to Weehawken to scare Hamilton, or was he carried away by rage, or was he really a sociopath, seeking to murder a rival in cold blood? Just as Lin decided to leave some of Hamilton’s motivation unexplained, Leslie made no ultimate decision about Burr. In fact, Leslie isn’t sure, from night to night, which version of Hamilton’s killer is going to show up. “If I’m not shocked by the way the show ends, I’m not happy,” he says. “I want the thing to feel off the rails. And alive.”

After six years of writing and rewriting, and staging and restaging–a process that ended mere days before time ran out–Hamilton and Burr’s duel remains mysterious even to the actors performing it.