Your Obedient Servant : Thoughts on '1776' & Authenticity

Clara Tan, Guest Editorial

Editor’s Note: The following is a response to our editorial arguing for authentic casting for any production of 1776. We stand by our editorial but publish this response to help advance the conversation.

Dear Sir,

What is the nature of authenticity? Is it a commitment to the delivery of truth? Or verisimilitude?

The theatre, in and of itself, is one of those liminal spaces where reality and artifice combine to create a truth greater than the sum of its parts, an understanding that transcends the mundane. In this particular case, I believe the editorial misunderstands the meaning that both Hamilton and 1776 create, both within their original contexts and upon re-evaluation in 2024.

Let’s start with Hamilton. The show is a product of its time, a remnant of the hope the average liberal felt during the waning presidency of Barack Obama, the idea that any man could be president, even a black man in America, at the root of the play.

It’s not a mistake to draw this comparison when one of the Hamilton remixes of “One Last Time” had Obama performing Washington’s speech intercut with Christopher Jackson’s singing. There is a “started from the bottom, now we here” vibe permeating all of Hamilton. But as the country moved into the Trump years, theatergoers and theatremakers were faced with several reckonings surrounding race, slavery, and its place in the building of American society.

There is a long tradition in American popular culture, namely one of appropriating and re-packaging the work of Black creatives and talent and making them palatable for white audiences. Without Black musicians, the American cultural project would not exist on the level that it does today. From rock and roll, which would not exist without the influences of jazz, blues, gospel, and folk music, to rap and hip-hop, which draw from the same cultural well, these forms were pioneered and refined by people of color and particularly Black musicians before being co-opted into the more palatable white hegemonic cultural expression with white front men and vocalists as the delivery mechanism.

There has been much more scholarship than mine that covers the way Hamilton whitewashes the actions and behavior of Alexander Hamilton himself or the juxtaposition of a quintessentially black art form (rap and hip-hop) being used to tell the story of white slaveowners. In 2024, enjoying the music and art that went into creating Hamilton consciously also requires a cognizant theatergoer to grapple with the contradictions that led to its creation.

Hamilton is absolutely a masterpiece, a tour de force of creativity, that also tells the story of a slaveowner through rap. Much like 1776, both shows act as hagiographies that, while leveling some minor critiques of the characters being portrayed, ultimately re-construct the dominant narrative and view of them as figures that are larger than life, and due to that, worthy of admiration and praise.

All this preamble, and now we come to 1776. In 1969, this would certainly ring true as an analysis:

“Even if you do what Hamilton did and have the villains (Dickinson and Rutledge) played by white actors, you lose one of the story’s morals: two identical people of similar means come to different conclusions about the value of freedom to everyone.”

However, in 2024, more factors are at play here than an analysis of freedom and what that value entails.

Since its founding, American capitalism has been built on the backs of slaves and their exploitation. My thesis is that by casting people of color in 1776, one must consider the meaning behind American capitalism and the drivers of wealth in this country. There is a lyric in “Molasses to Rum” that encapsulates this perfectly:

“'Tisn't morals, 'tis money that saves”

There is scholarship that argues that the original American Revolution was not intended to bring about the highfalutin values of freedom they claimed to bring but to preserve the capital and slave ownership of the Founding Fathers and those who would continue to run the newborn country. Of course, I am not the first to notice this; even British writers in the 1770s commented on the quintessential contradiction of slaveowners who wanted to be free.

So what message in 2024 is sent by a colorblind or color-conscious casting of 1776? Namely, capitalism, while having the potential to uplift certain individuals within a minority, ultimately still functions by exploiting the labor of the majority. The same message can be read through Hamilton as well. America might’ve had her first Black president, but life for the working class in this country has not meaningfully improved since the end of his presidential term.

In fact, the backlash to Obama’s failure to deliver on the promises of hope and change can be directly tied to the ascension of Trump and the downward slide into fascism we find ourselves in.

An individual black person who succeeds under the capitalist framework might find their material conditions significantly improved, but that does nothing to uplift these communities. To quote Fred Hampton,

“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism, not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”

In summary, to answer the original editorial, while an original production of 1776 does convey a certain meaning by adhering to an all-white cast, we’re not living in 1969 anymore. America has moved past the naivety and optimism of that time. Instead, it is the theatre’s duty to shine a light on the systemic injustices that exist within and without our society. If it makes some commenters uncomfortable seeing, they shouldn’t be going to the theatre.

I have the honor to be,

Your obedient servant,

C. Tan