فصل 09

Chapter 9

ON THE PERFECT UNION OF ACTOR AND ROLE with Allusion to RENE ELISE GOLDSBERRY

Casting offices can be bad for morale: Actors contort themselves to become something they’re not; writers and directors pretend it’s working. During a casting session for Hamilton, though, one audition left Lin, Tommy, and Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, looking genuinely stunned, as if lightning had flashed through the room.

“She’s–so–fast,” said Lin, eyes wide. Tommy agreed. “It’s from doing all that Shakespeare,”Oskar explained. “She” was Renée Elise Goldsberry, who had just auditioned for the role of Hamilton’s sister-in-law and possible love interest, the headstrong and quick-thinking Angelica Schuyler. Renée had indeed performed Shakespearean roles as part of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park seasons. She had also appeared on Broadway four times, sung in a top-40 band, and done some TV. It sounds like the kind of cross-training that might prepare somebody for a role in this intensely demanding show. Still, she came very close to not auditioning for it at all. Twice. The first near-miss was because Renée and her husband had just adopted a baby girl from Ethiopia. Any job that she accepted, they believed, “had to be something that felt as monumental as what we were building in our family.” Lin’s joking-but-actually-pretty-accurate description of Angelica in the casting notice–that she was a combination of Nicki Minaj and Desiree Armfeldt–left Renée cold. Neither the raucous female rapper nor the heroine of A Little Night Music were her type. She decided to stick to her self-imposed maternity leave, and stay in Harlem with her son and baby girl. But the casting agents at Telsey + Company persisted. They sent her the demo recording of Angelica’s big firstact song. One listen to “Satisfied” convinced Renée that Hamilton might indeed be monumental–so monumental, in fact, that it led to another almost-miss.

“Satisfied” was the fastest and most brilliant theater song that she had ever heard. It retraces the ground covered in “Helpless,” but from Angelica’s perspective. (As staged by Tommy and the choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, time itself seems to wind backwards, giving the show another chance to suggest that history looks very different depending on who’s telling it.) She was dazzled by the song’s intricacies, but was supposed to perform it for Lin and Tommy the very next day.

“I just remember thinking, Oh no. This is the motherlode, and it’s tomorrow. I can’t learn it in a day. In a night, actually.” She showed up without any real hope of landing the part, but thought she might convince Lin and Tommy to take her money and let her invest in the show.

If Renée had stuck around after her audition, if she had seen the expression on Lin’s face after she left the room, she would have known how right for the role she was, and not because of how she had crammed the night before.

“Renée was the first one who came in and made us say, Oh, she thinks exactly that fast,’” he recalls. Her whirring brain made Angelica come alive in a new way. “It was the first delivery of Satisfied’ that didn’t make me think for a second about the delivery that was happening.” This was, he thought, the key to the song. He hadn’t written a rapid-fire rap so an actor could show off, as in a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. Her velocity expresses her brilliance, and her distress: “She’s demonstrating that Angelica read Hamilton the moment she saw him, but it didn’t stop her from falling in love with him, and didn’t stop her calculating in a moment to yield to her sister’s love for him.”

Renée acknowledges that she does indeed think pretty fast–“too fast to have good handwriting.” But the snug fit between singer and song is also due to the way Lin wrote it. “The way I memorize is, I memorize a thought process,” she says. It’s one reason why Oskar thought of her Shakespeare roles. His plays stick with us because his language–in fact, any verse, if it’s written sharply enough–gives form to our formless thoughts. It’s Hamlet debating suicide, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” and it’s Scarface having nightmares, “At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn, / Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned,” and it’s Angelica Schuyler choosing her sister’s happiness over her own.

“If a song is written well, you know what you have to say,” says Renée. “Even in this instance, this woman is talking very fast, and making decisions in an instant, but she is extremely analytical. The path is very clear. The path is so intrinsic.” She insists that other actresses will have no trouble singing it in future productions. Lin can’t wait to see them try. “I want to fast forward to when high schools do Hamilton & the girl playing Angelica Schuyler gets to spit the HARDEST BARS IN THE SHOW, “ he tweeted during the run at the Public.