So this was different from the jazz nights. There was no music, in contrast to the rap-infused lyrics of “Hamilton,” one of the biggest critical and commercial successes in Broadway history.
The play, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” was written by Ishmael Reed, 80, a prolific and often satirical writer who, as a critic reviewing one of his books once said, “has made members of every constituency angry” during his long career.
Reed’s most recent work should prove to be no exception.
“The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” targets “Hamilton,” the play, and “Hamilton,” the best-selling biography by Ron Chernow, which inspired Miranda. The program handed out at the reading said, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” was “about a playwright who is misled by a historian of white history into believing that Alexander Hamilton was an abolitionist.”
“He takes no prisoners,” Neal said of Reed, who was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1998. Miranda also received a MacArthur in 2015. (The fellowships are often referred to as genius grants.)
In “The Haunting,” there is a character named Lin-Manuel Miranda who is visited by ghosts. They help Reed accomplish his main goal, which he said in an interview was “to give the voices that were left out of the musical some speaking lines.”
But Reed also wrote in some digs at Miranda. Midway through “The Haunting,” a character says he expected Miranda to be “busy rehearsing for his role in ‘Mary Poppins.'” (Miranda plays a London lamplighter in the Disney remake of the beloved 1964 movie-musical.)
“By directing it, I was standing up for Ishmael Reed’s work,” said Neal, who has directed eight of Reed’s plays. “He rights wrongs with his plays. He brings light or understanding to the situation that’s going on.”
Miranda was in Puerto Rico last week for a three-week run of “Hamilton,” and a publicist for the show said he was unavailable to talk about “The Haunting.” Another publicist connected with “Hamilton” said that Chernow would not answer questions that had been sent by email.
But Neal said he believed that Miranda was aware of the reading, because he had sent Miranda a direct tweet and also a flier. Neal said he had not received a reply from Miranda.
The issues raised in “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” involve questions that scholars have debated about “Hamilton” — “Ishmael Reed revives an old debate” was part of the headline on an article about the reading on The New Yorker’s website. Among some historians, the discussion has touched on whether Miranda’s play — which moved from the Public Theater to Broadway in 2015 — overstated Alexander Hamilton’s opposition to slavery and whether it devoted enough attention to other, less appealing elements of Hamilton’s legacy, such as arguing that the president should be more like a monarch and that senators should serve life terms.
Last year, for example, Rutgers University Press published “Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past,” with chapters by 15 scholars who look at how Miranda’s play has changed the general public’s perspective about colonial history.
Chernow’s book was widely praised for its portrayal of one of the Founding Fathers when it was published. The historian Edmund S. Morgan called it “a superb study” of someone who had a voice in the new nation but “who was himself uncertain of who he was and of what he and his colleagues did.”
Toward the end of the book, Chernow called Hamilton “a fervent abolitionist.” Earlier, he wrote, “Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton — a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged.”
“The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” treats Hamilton and slavery far differently.
“Probably Ishmael is right. ‘Hamilton’ has been given a free pass or there’s been an exaggeration of Hamilton’s anti-slavery,” said Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “It’s a legitimate outlook that he has. It’s not the only outlook, but it’s within the realm of legitimacy.”
Alexander Hamilton “did not like slavery, there is no question about that,” Foner said. But he added that anti-slavery “was low down on Hamilton’s list of priorities compared to other things,” including “uniting this nation, which required compromise on slavery.”
Economic development, another Hamilton priority, was also complicated by slavery. “He wasn’t interested in disrupting the plantation economy of the South, which was producing a lot of the wealth of the country.”
Foner, who said he had seen “Hamilton” but did not attend one of the readings of “The Haunting,” also mentioned Hamilton’s own ambitions. “He married into a slave-owning family,” he said. “That’s where the money was, people who owned slaves.”
Lyra D. Monteiro, an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark, who wrote one of the chapters in “Historians on Hamilton,” said that “The Haunting” was “entirely correct to bring attention” to Hamilton and slavery.
“The Haunting” also imagined conversations between Miranda and Native Americans — “Chernow doesn’t even mention us,” a Native American character declares. Monteiro said the history of Native Americans was “even more erased in our imagination than slavery is.”
When the time came for the reading, Reed was in the cast, playing the role of Miranda’s agent in imagined conversations about celebrity endorsements and, in Act 2, an offer to write a musical about Christopher Columbus, a heroic figure discredited in recent decades by those who say his voyages opened the way to the destruction of native culture and the importation of slaves.
Neal said he had not seen “Hamilton” or read Chernow’s book. He said he had not gone to “Hamilton” even though Jasmine Cephas Jones, the actress who originated the roles of Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds, had appeared at one of his jazz shows at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
“I didn’t see it at the Public Theater,” he said of “Hamilton.” And when it went to Broadway, he said, “I just didn’t want to spend that kind of money. I try to get people to come into the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for $15, $20. I admire Broadway productions, but not out of my pocket at this point.”
Money for the reading came from Reed — $5,000, he said. “That’s like lunch money for the investors in ‘Hamilton.’ This is a David-against-Goliath effort.”
Now Reed and Neal are trying to raise $50,000 (Reed said they already had $20,000) toward a staged version at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in May. “It’s going to be marvtastic,” Neal said. “It’s going to be marvelous and fantastic.”
“The Haunting” ends with the Miranda character promising to give away money he made from “Hamilton” in the future to organizations in New York like Medgar Evers College. (The production in Puerto Rico is a fundraiser for a Miranda family effort to support Puerto Rican artists as the island continues to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Maria.)
“That’s not likely at all, but he could have remorse,” Neal said. “But it’s water under the bridge. Now it’s time for Ishmael Reed to have his say.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.