[What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are
unshakably true—the sort of stories that, once you’ve heard them,
won’t let you return to what you thought before.]
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WHAT ART CAN DO   [[link removed]]

 

Lin-Manuel Miranda
November 8, 2019
The Atlantic
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_ What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are
unshakably true—the sort of stories that, once you’ve heard them,
won’t let you return to what you thought before. _

,

 

All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current
moment—all art is political. But even during those times when
politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of
constant worry and anxiety, art is still political. Art lives in the
world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work
about the world in which we live without reflecting it. If the work
tells the truth, it will live on.

Public Enemy’s “911 Is a Joke,” George Orwell’s _1984_,
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s whole damn catalog—all are political
works that tell the truth.

Yes, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Consider _The Sound of Music_. It
isn’t just about climbing mountains and fording streams. Look beyond
the adorable von Trapp children: It’s about the looming existential
threat of Nazism. No longer relevant? A GIF of Captain von Trapp
tearing up a Nazi flag is something we see 10 times a day on Twitter,
because all sorts of Nazis are out there again in 2019. As last
spring’s searing Broadway revival of _Oklahoma!_ revealed, lying
underneath Hammerstein’s elephant-eye-high corn and chirping birds
is a lawless society becoming itself, bending its rules and procedures
based on who is considered part of the community (Curly) and who is
marginalized (poor Jud … seriously, poor Jud). Or consider your
parents’ favorite, _South Pacific_. At its center, our hero, Nellie
Forbush, must confront her own internalized racism when she learns
that the new love of her life has biracial children from a previous
marriage. Let your parents know if they forgot: Rodgers and
Hammerstein musicals form the spine of Broadway’s “golden age,”
and they also deeply engage with the politics of their era.

From The Sound of Music to the songs of Public Enemy, all art is
political. (Hulton Archive / Getty; David Corio / Redferns)

My first Broadway musical, _In the Heights_, is an example of how
time can reveal the politics inherent within a piece of art. When I
began writing this musical, as a college project at Wesleyan
University, it was an 80-minute collegiate love story with a promising
mix of Latin music and hip-hop, but it was pretty sophomoric (which is
appropriate; I was a sophomore). After college, I started from scratch
with the director Thomas Kail and the playwright Quiara Alegría
Hudes, and we shifted the show’s focus from the love story to
Washington Heights, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan where everyone
is from everywhere. In the 20th century, Washington Heights was often
home to the latest wave of immigrants. It was an Irish neighborhood;
it was a Russian Jewish neighborhood (Yeshiva University is up there).
If you take the Dominican store sign down you’ll see a sign for an
Irish pub underneath it, and if you take that down you’ll find
Hebrew. Washington Heights was heavily Dominican when I was growing
up, and it remains so, with a vibrant Mexican and Latin American
immigrant community as well.

We’re in an age when, for some, considering an immigrant a human
being is a radical political act.

As we wrote about this Upper Manhattan community on the verge of
change, we looked to our musical-theater forebears. In _Cabaret_, the
upheaval facing the characters in Berlin is the rise of the Nazi
Party. In _Fiddler on the Roof_, the town of Anatevka struggles to
hold on to its traditions as the world changes around it, and the
threat of pogroms looms. For our musical world, upheaval comes in the
form of gentrification. This is obviously different from fascism and
pogroms; it’s not even in the same moral universe. How you begin to
dramatize something as subtle and multifaceted as gentrification poses
some tricky questions. We threw our characters into the same dilemma
faced by their real-life working-class counterparts: What do we do
when we can’t afford to live in the place we’ve lived all our
lives, especially when we are the ones who make the neighborhood
special and attractive to others? Each of the characters confronts
this question differently: One sacrifices the family business to
ensure his child’s educational future. Another relocates to the less
expensive Bronx. Our narrator decides to stay, despite the odds,
taking on the responsibility of telling this neighborhood’s stories
and carrying on its traditions.

We received great reviews. If critics had a common criticism, it was
that the show, its contemporary music aside, was somehow old-fashioned
or “sentimental.” Gentrification, the businesses closing, the
literal powerlessness as the characters face a blackout that affects
only their neighborhood—these issues, always there in the material,
didn’t register with most theater critics in 2008. _In the
Heights _was considered a hit by Broadway standards. It didn’t leap
off the Arts page and into the national conversation
like _Hamilton_ would, but we won some Tonys, recouped our
investment, and had a wonderful three-year run at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre, where _Hamilton _now lives. We posted our Broadway closing
notice at the end of 2010.

What a difference 10 years makes.

Right now, Jon M. Chu is editing his feature-film adaptation of _In
the Heights_, which is scheduled to be released in June. We spent a
joyous summer shooting the film—on location, in our
neighborhood—and issues that were always inherent in the text now
stand out in bold-faced type. Gentrification has rendered Lower
Manhattan, Harlem, and much of Brooklyn unrecognizable to the previous
generations that called those neighborhoods home. The East Village of
Jonathan Larson’s _Rent_ is nonexistent, lettered avenues
notwithstanding. And the narrative of immigrants coming to this
country and making a better life for themselves—the backdrop of
everything that happens in _In the Heights_, across three generations
of stories—is somehow a radical narrative now.

Donald Trump came down the escalator to declare his presidential run,
and in his first speech he demonized Mexicans: _They’re rapists;
they’re bringing drugs; they’re not sending their best people_. We
young Latinos had thought of our parents and grandparents as the
latest wave making its home in this country, and we thought that we
would be the next group to make this place a better place, to prove
once again that the American dream wasn’t just a figment of some
propagandist’s imagination. And now we’re in a different age when,
for some, considering an immigrant a human being is a radical
political act.

Consider this rap, written 12 years ago and delivered by Sonny,_ In
the Heights_’ youngest character, in a song called “96,000”:

Your kids are living without a good edumacation,
Change the station, teach ’em about gentrification,
The rent is escalatin’
The rich are penetratin’
We pay our corporations when we should be demonstratin’
What about immigration?
Politicians be hatin’
Racism in this nation’s gone from latent to blatant

It was always political. It was always there. Donald Trump made it
even more true.

Trump uses language to destroy empathy. He criminalizes the impulse
and imperative to seek asylum, to seek a place to live thousands of
miles away because the alternative at home is worse. Through his lens,
these seekers are not people; they’re “animals” or “bad
hombres.”

What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are unshakably
true—the sort of stories that, once you’ve heard them, won’t let
you return to what you thought before. I think about the crisis on the
border constantly. I think about the famous photograph of a little
girl crying beside a Border Patrol truck. That picture went viral
because it seemed to capture the horror of family separations. But it
turned out that the girl wasn’t being separated from her
mother—her mother had simply been ordered to put her daughter down
while she was searched by agents. The family was in distress, and the
border crisis was real, but people used the details of this particular
incident to close themselves off from empathy. “Fake news,” they
said. A child is crying for her mother, but that’s not enough to
keep people from pushing empathy away. I believe great art is like
bypass surgery. It allows us to go around all of the psychological
distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable
among us.

At the end of the day, our job as artists is to tell the truth as we
see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it.
Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to
tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those
truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We
keep revisiting Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ because ruthless political
ambition does not belong to any particular era. We keep listening to
Public Enemy because systemic racism continues to rain tragedy on
communities of color. We read Orwell’s _1984_ and shiver at its
diagnosis of doublethink, which we see coming out of the White House
at this moment. And we listen to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s _South
Pacific_, as Lieutenant Cable sings about racism, “You’ve got to
be carefully taught.” It’s all art. It’s all political.

_This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the
headline “What Art Can Do__”_

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
[[link removed]] is a
Pulitzer Prize–, Grammy–, Emmy–, and Tony Award–winning
composer, lyricist, and actor.

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