THOMAS KAIL directed the musicals Hamilton and In the Heights, as well as the plays Lombardi and Magic/Bird,
on Broadway. Off-Broadway, his credits include Kings, Tiny Beautiful Things, Daphne’s Dive, Dry Powder, When I
Come to Die, and Broke-ology. ANNE KAUFFMAN’s directing credits include the revival of Marvin’s Room on Broadway, and Belleville, Detroit, Maple and Vine, Marjorie Prime, Mary Jane, Hundred Days, and The Lucky Ones Off-Broadway. They met to talk in the SDC offices in June 2018; this is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.

 

ANNE | When did you first start doing theatre?

THOMAS | My junior year at Wesleyan, I had a friend, Anthony Veneziale, who asked me to come and assist him on this play that he was doing, which was Hamletmachine.

I didn’t really know what ‘assisting’ meant. I didn’t know what expressionism was. I knew plays because I saw them every now and then. But I was not steeped in them. He said, “I’m going to do a very free version of it, where we’re going to improv and use some of the text as a sort of jumping-off point.” It was very collegiate and very Wesleyan.

I got pulled into this rehearsal, and even earlier than that, I got pulled into this first audition. I had been protesting, “You don’t want me, this is not what I do. I’m an outsider.” He said, “Good, then you’ll have a point of view that’s different than mine.” We started auditioning people, and I realized that it was like the tryouts that I knew from playing sports. Once we got into the room, I realized that rehearsal and practice were the same thing. Preproduction and preseason were the
same thing.

So I started to understand very quickly that my relationship to being inside an organism, which I had done as a young athlete and then ultimately transitioned to coaching, had prepared me for this, because directing and coaching have so many similarities. Once I got into the room, it was a really open environment where if you had an idea, you could share it.

ANNE | I love that you had to fuck up Hamletmachine, which is already super fucked up.

THOMAS | Trust me, it was.

I had that experience at Wesleyan and then I went away to Dartmouth on an exchange program for two trimesters. And when I arrived at Dartmouth, I didn’t know anybody. The day before my 21st birthday, August Wilson came and lectured in one of my classes. We had read Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and he came and talked about it for an hour. I’d never
heard anyone speak that cogently or clearly or powerfully about anything. I often had really great professors, but I never met the person who actually made the thing. I just sat there, and I felt all the hair on the back of my neck go up. It was like, “What is this?” Especially him. He was such a convincing orator that I just got really swept up and I thought, “My God, if you can write plays, and you can speak like that, you can do anything.”

“I believe that the best things are made from harmony. I learned early on that the cauldron/crucible idea—that great art comes from a tense environment—was untrue.”

I had this one burning question, which I was too nervous to ask in front of anybody. I found him outside after the class as he was lighting his cigarette or his pipe, just as snow started to fall in Hanover. It was just the two of us, and my heart was beating absolutely through my shirt, and I asked him, “Is the outhouse really an outhouse? Or perhaps it symbolizes…” I had, like, four paragraphs of junior year nonsense in my head. And he said, “Sometimes an outhouse is just an outhouse.” I was floored.

He walked off into the snow with a puff of smoke, and I thought, “I have to write a play. I have to take this feeling and try to do something with it.” I went back to my dorm room, I flipped open my computer at noon, and I started typing. The next thing I knew, it was six o’clock. The only thing that had made time disappear for me in that way was when I was on the field playing sports. Or, more recently, when I was in rehearsal at Wesleyan—those times, I’d look up and say,
“How is it midnight? We just started.”

So I was seeking something that could make time disappear, and I found it there again. Next year, back at Wesleyan, I directed what I’d written—because no one else wanted to direct it—and I understood it so instinctively that I felt I should go and try to do this.

ANNE | Did you realize what you were doing before an audience came in? You know how it is when you’re directing and you’re just doing what you want to do. And then the first time an audience comes in, you’re like, “Holy shit. What was I thinking?”

THOMAS | I don’t think I was conscious of that then, because now I look back and I’ve done enough stuff to say, “All right, so my job is to be the audience until there is an audience.”

ANNE | When did you come to learn what a director does versus what a writer does? I also liked this idea that you created something and then you just continued to create it. Right? As the director. You’re doing that with Tiny Beautiful Things. How different are the jobs?

THOMAS | What I didn’t realize I was missing at that point was the conversation with the writer, which is everything. Billy Wilder talked about liking to co-write because then you can have someone you can pull on the other side of the rope. I was very clear about what I wanted to do when I was directing and that’s because no one was saying, “Or maybe you should try that.”

When I got to New York City, Estelle Parsons was a very early mentor of mine. I met her through The Actors Studio, a very random occurrence. She invited me out to breakfast one day in the summer of 2001. I drove into the city, and in the restaurant she said, “What does it mean to direct? What does that mean to you?” I gave an answer for about four minutes. She responded, “Okay, so you don’t know. But I think maybe if you watched other people do it, it could help you focus that and understand what it means. Come and hang out at the Studio and watch other people do it.” Because I had no idea.

Now, when someone asks me what do you do to direct, I say it’s making sure that everyone knows what we’re focusing on and where we’re trying to go. Make sure we’re all telling the same story in the same way. You, Anne, know how that can be complex. You also know that when you find some kind of harmony that makes it possible, and it’s humming, there’s nothing like that. There’s nothing like the rehearsal room that’s just going, and the good ideas are coming from all over the place. Your job sometimes is to identify the idea or to edit it or to shape it or to supply it.

I hope my sensitivity to writers allows them to know that I never try to fix anything. I’m just trying to remind them of what they told me in the first two or three meetings, “That’s the thing you told me about. How do we get back to that? What was that impulse? Why did you write it?” That’s what I crave. That’s why most of the projects I’ve done have been new work. I want someone in there with me to sit in the dark and stare at it.

ANNE | I’ve come to realize over the years that it’s best when engaging with a new work to assume that it’s perfect. I think the perception is that we’re supposed to go in as a dramaturg because, let’s face it, dramaturgy is what directors also do, and tell the playwright what’s wrong with the play. In fact, it’s most useful to go in and say, “This thing is working,” and then work on it live in a rehearsal room. After all, it’s one thing to look at it on the page and a completely other thing to watch it on its feet, the way it’s actually meant to be seen.

THOMAS | Before you go into rehearsals—at the very beginning, on something new—what is your relationship to the work? How do you get from zero to the first day with the writer?

ANNE | For me, it completely depends on the writer instead of where I’ve come in on it. But I will tell you, my collaboration with designers—that is my preproduction work because they’re the best dramaturgs, in my opinion. They’re the ones who are asking the practical questions, the questions that we’re not even really thinking about. They’re asking questions about it not as a piece of literature but as a piece of performance.

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  Hamilton<br>Richard Rodgers Theatre <br> Photo by Joan Marcus

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  Dry Powder <br> The Public Theater <br> Photo by Joan Marcus

I don’t read the play a million times. If I get too attached to an idea before I get into rehearsal, I’m not actually watching what’s happening with the people I’ve gathered, with the temperature of the room, with this live thing that’s happening. I’m holding on to something and not seeing what’s right in front of me. So it’s a real balancing act for me trying to figure out sort of how much I know the piece and how much to let them open.

THOMAS | I have so many questions for you. This is the kind of discourse that I wish our jobs allowed us to do more.

ANNE | Les Waters, Ken Rus Schmoll, and I were hanging out during 10 Out of 12, and we were having dinner at Anne Washburn’s place. And I just turned to them and asked, “You guys, how do you give notes to your designers after a run. After everyone’s super tired, do you just go through all your notes? Or do you write them out? Do you let the production team go, or do you do all the notes and you’re there till three in the morning?”

THOMAS | Well, I found very early on from working on the production side of things, before I started directing, when I was on run crews and stage managing, that when you say it and how you say it matters more than what you say. I just knew there was a point when no one’s receiving any more information. So I just told myself, I won’t be someone who keeps people late.

I tend to keep my production meetings very short and try to let people leave so they can go home, or walk outside and breathe some air and then start over the next day. I’m a big believer that when the day is done, the day is done. It’s diminishing returns.

But there are times when I’ll be watching a rehearsal and might have an idea, but my job is to keep it in and then, often, I’ll be surprised when I realize it just worked itself out and I was completely wrong. I’m also very comfortable saying, “I don’t know, let’s figure it out tomorrow.” and creating an environment where it’s okay for me to say that because it’s also okay for them to feel it.

ANNE | I also try to respect people’s time. I feel there’s an interesting sense of time that we must understand, because we have such little time to do anything. You have to keep thinking about time as being expansive, that you actually do have enough time to do all of it. You don’t have to cram this down someone’s throat right now

THOMAS | There’s a quote that I remember hearing about when Fiddler was out of town in Detroit, and Jerome Robbins was at the bar. It was in real trouble out of town. Austin Pendleton was playing Motel, and he said— apocryphally, I’m sure—to Robbins, “What are we going to do?” And Robbins said, “Ten things a day.” That resonated with me. Chip away at it. The challenge is to keep moving it forward. And don’t go sideways. Don’t go backwards.

ANNE | I always tell my companies, “This is all great what we’re doing in the rehearsal room. But once we get into previews, that’s when the work really begins.”

THOMAS | I’ve found myself recently trying to take less time in the rehearsal studio to get more previews.

ANNE | It totally depends on the project, right? I think some need much more preview time. Sometimes we need to know right away how the audience is interacting. I completely agree with that. It would be really nice to be able to decide based on a project what we get more of: rehearsals or previews.

THOMAS | I often find if you go to a theatre—or your producer—and say, “I’d like to have more previews,” it’s a chance for them to make more income too.

ANNE | It’s hard the other way around.

THOMAS | I very rarely ask for more rehearsal time. I would rather have three more previews than those last three days in studio.

Especially when I’m doing a play. With a musical, I’ll say to the actors early on, “This is going to go a little faster than you think and you’re going to look up all of a sudden and be like, ‘What do you mean? We’re already heading into the theatre?’ And those first couple days in the theatre are going to be scary because you look down and realize how high up we are, but we’re going to have time on that side. So let’s just go like heck and see what happens.”

ANNE | You already started to distinguish between musicals and plays. Do you have a preference for one or the other?

THOMAS | The Venn diagram overlaps so much with them. But there are some opposing muscle groups that get worked in different ways. Now, this is not a perfect analogy, but if this were track and field, a play is like a 10K race and a musical is like a marathon. A play, even from when you first get asked to do it, it’s going to probably be a couple of years or a year and a half of work. Something like that. With a musical, you can say this is day one, and it could be six years all of a sudden. So it’s just something that I try to be conscious of: because each project deserves the right amount of energy and attention.

“I realized that I needed to identify myself as a director fully. And to do that, I had to say it myself: ‘I’m a director.’”

Basically, the way I think about directing—especially how you move between projects—is like running a kitchen. There’s some stuff that’s defrosting. There are some things that are further along, already in the oven. There’s something that’s already being stirred, and there’s something on the counter and you’re not quite sure what it is. And two of those things will go away: you didn’t know what to do with it or you burned it or it never happened. And, even if some fade away, it was worth it. I like the focus and efficiency it forces—when you have to balance your time and energy.

ANNE | It’s kind of a painful day when you realize you can’t do everything, right?

THOMAS | Yes. When did you realize that?

ANNE | Pretty early on. Probably in grad school, when I totally flopped. Did you assistant direct for anyone?

THOMAS | I AD’d at this theatre in New Jersey called the American Stage Company. I AD’d for a few of the directors, and then I assisted a couple of times after that. I liked it, and I was a pretty good assistant. But I had to try to figure out who I was. I got worried that I wouldn’t get a chance to find my voice because I was a pretty capable assistant. I was good at anticipation, though I had way too much energy—I must have been quite annoying. It was great to sit and listen and absorb. I loved that part of it. But because I started theatre later in life, I felt like I was behind. I thought, “You’ve got to
start making your own stuff. What’s your voice?”

ANNE | When I AD’d, because I AD’d a lot of people, too, I really loved it and it was really helpful. But I say this to my assistants all the time: “Don’t keep assisting me because, you know, you’ve seen what I can do.”

THOMAS | I got to the city in March 2001. I lucked into this situation at The Drama Bookshop. Allen Hubby, who ran the bookshop, had seen a couple short plays that my pals from college and I had done and said, “I want to have a resident theatre company.” We walked down to that little basement on 40th Street in the summer of 2001. And he said, “If you paint this black, it’ll be a black box theatre. Get some chairs and just make things in here.”

We jumped at the chance. We had a desk, we had a phone, we had a computer. We didn’t have enough bandwidth to keep the theatre busy 52 weeks a year. So it taught me how to produce.

We were coming up at this time where other people needed a place to work out—a theatrical gym. And we said, “Hey, can you take this week and this week because we don’t have anything. But maybe you could do it.” It taught me how to support other people’s work. My job on one show might be to set up the chairs, and the other show might be to direct, and the other might be to stage manage. That became very much like my grad school. It was a crucial moment in time for me.

ANNE | I was temping a lot when I first came to New York, and I had my first show at HERE. It was a 15-minute play, part of this anti-war festival, and I did this Lanford Wilson piece. Fifteen minutes. At the time, I worked at NBC as a secretary, and my boss had a huge office, and he would take two-hour lunches. And I’d ask, “Hey, can I…is it okay if I use your office for rehearsal while you’re at lunch?” So my actors came in and, for two hours a day, while he was at lunch, we rehearsed. You have to see opportunity in every corner.

THOMAS | Exactly. When I was at American Stage Company, they were doing The Glass Menagerie on the main stage. I went to my boss and said, “Can I pick one weekend to do For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls on the same set? If the audience wants to stay, they can stay. If they don’t, that’s no problem.” He graciously agreed. Then, one weekend, we made an announcement in the program, and 100 people stayed and watched our show. They’d just seen the Williams play. Every reference was so fresh. And the director of Menagerie was like, “What is happening? You’re doing a parody of the play that I just did?” I said, “I’m so sorry. [pause] But did you think it was funny?”

I spent so much of my life sitting back and not putting myself out there early on—when I was in high school. And then, once I started doing theatre, I just felt like, “You’re late. You’re behind.” So I would do it wherever.

ANNE | It’s helpful to hear. I feel sometimes it’s such a hard road.

THOMAS | I would do all these other jobs to support my theatre life. Then, when I had just turned 28, I realized that I was walking into meetings with people that I knew from my day job as a personal assistant. And they would say, “Oh, why are you here?” And I was like, “This is the other thing I do. I’m also a director.”

Then I realized that I needed to identify myself as a director fully. And to do that, I had to say it myself: “I’m a director.” Now, this is perhaps completely my own issue, but I didn’t feel comfortable saying I was the director while I had this other job. But, until I said it, no one else was going to say it. So I told my boss, “I’ll find you someone to replace me. But I think I have to try fully to be a director.” This was in early 2005. I had been working on In the Heights since 2002, but at that point, we had no idea when there would be a production. But I needed to take that leap.

ANNE | Do you think being a producer helped you along the way?

THOMAS | Producing for me became very simple: what do I need to do to get from an idea to rehearsal? And then, once it was in rehearsal, I could be a director because I was producing all my early projects with my friends—I was doing both duties. So getting to rehearsal allowed me to just direct.

I think being a producer gave me an appreciation for how many people are needed to make anything. I was also informed by the other production jobs I had—being a stage manager, being on a run crew, or running a spotlight. When I got into the room as a director, I knew the trickle-down from the things I would decide. I knew that I could say yellow or 42, and we’ll do it tomorrow. And from that decision until the next morning, someone—or a group—had to make it happen. From my earlier experiences on production teams, I knew what it was like to try to implement someone else’s idea.

ANNE | I recognize the fact that that’s what you are doing inside the rehearsal room, that you are producing as a director.

THOMAS | That’s right. Over the past couple years, I’ve had the great good fortune to become friends with Harold Prince. Hal started as a stage manager and produced, and then started directing. In my tiny way, I relate, though I certainly wasn’t producing Damn Yankees, West Side Story, and Pajama Game. I started as a stage manager. I had this micro experience of that. I find that equips you once you get into the room as a director. Your job is to put yourself in a position where you’re having a conversation with every department head as if it was your personal responsibility. Because it is. My feeling is—and this is a generalization—it’s never their fault. I should have been there for them. No one ever designs a show that the director didn’t approve. So when someone says they don’t like the design of the show, that’s not on the designer. That’s on the director. These things are not happening in some sort of vacuum.

ANNE | How has your taste in material changed over time?

THOMAS | I would hope that it’s evolved in some way. But now that there are more dots on the graph, I can see that here’s a pattern. But I think I’m often telling the same kind of story.

A lot of my work is about who we are when we’re here and what we leave behind, and changing roles within a small group or family or a small community. It’s something that I find myself drawn to.

I think what’s probably changed the most is I’ve been able to silence the noise around my instincts that prevent me from hearing it. So I think my gut has probably always been my gut, but I just didn’t know how to listen to it. Or I could get distracted, or it could get drowned out. Now I know that anytime I feel it in my stomach, if it’s a left or if it’s a right, if it’s yes or if it’s no, and I don’t listen—99 times out of 100, if I end up in trouble, it’s “Yeah, you didn’t listen
to yourself.”

I trust my gut so much more. I feel like that’s probably the most significant change over the last 10 years. Once I got into my thirties, and especially in these last five or six years, I want to try to do work that pushes me and is not in my wheelhouse.

ANNE | I completely agree. It’s such a relief, finally, to listen to yourself and let the noise go away. But how do you feel you were able to do that? For me, I think it was that I just had to do it a million times.

THOMAS | I agree. I think it’s about accumulating experience. Maybe, for me, it was as simple as that. You need to have enough time and experience behind you and then trust that.

ANNE | Was there something that you learned on a certain production that has changed the way that you worked

THOMAS | I believe that the best things are made from harmony. I learned early on that the cauldron/crucible idea—that great art comes from a tense environment—was untrue. I don’t know how to work like that. And so I thought if I can make things of high quality, where people can come out of them whole, for the next show, when they tell you you’re crazy to expect something, or to have a certain standard, you look at them and can say, “But I just had it. I was just listened to. I was just respected.”

The amount of times someone has told me that an actor was difficult, but when I investigated more, I discovered, “Oh, you mean because someone insulted them or made them afraid or didn’t hear them? How do you think they’re
going to react?”

I became very conscious at a certain point that if I had an opportunity to be in the front of the room and lead a group, then I have a responsibility to do it in a certain way. That’s what emerged. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing a play with two people or a show with 35 people on stage—it has to be that. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of tension, but directors can control the temperature of the room in such a full way that it’s on us. I just try and take more and more responsibility. And I know how to distribute and delegate, but I also know that it’s on us. That’s okay. ‘On us’ is not an onus. Wow, look at that: Wordplay!

ANNE | It is interesting to think about shaking up your own process. Do you feel like you need or want to shake up your own way of doing things, or do you feel you have a method that works?

THOMAS | I think both things are true. I think I have a method that I find is effective and enjoyable. And yet I try to shake it up and should shake it up. I think about my rehearsals—they tend to have the same kind of cadence. One of the things I stopped doing a little while ago—maybe four, five, six years ago—is I stopped reading the play out loud on the first day. I just found, “Why don’t we do some work and then come back to exploring the text specifically?”

That came from working on shows that have a lot of music in them, where you actually can’t read on the first day—we haven’t learned the score yet. There’s nothing like being a director the first two days of musical: “I’m just going to
go into this room and listen to these talented people sing some things.”

ANNE | That’s why I want to do musicals.

THOMAS | I thought, “Why do we just read through it?” I want the first day of school to allow us to get to know each other a little bit. So, sometime on the second day or the third day, we’ll all read through. And then I tend to like to
get up on our feet pretty quickly.

Something that I value so much about what we do is that you can be surprised many times in a day. I love that our business allows us to make new friends at any stage of our lives. That happens all the time for us. We get to meet
someone and say, “We should be friends.” That’s what comes out of it.

I do find that saying goodbye to shows is getting harder for me. I know I’m not in the company—I’m very clear that that is not my role, and that at the best, I’m like a cool uncle. So I know when to go home. I’m the first one to leave the party, all
that stuff. But that’s hard. I’m so aware now that this group of people will be in this place for this finite amount of time. I think that my awareness of this has been much more elevated over these last few years.

ANNE | I find it painful to go back and watch my work during a run. I feel like I’m so close to my own work on it that it’s hard for me to watch it at all objectively. How often do you go back and look at Hamilton?

THOMAS | If I’m in town, I go back once a week or so. Mostly, just to be around. Often, being there is not about me watching and noting the show. I believe that being backstage and available for the hour before curtain matters equally on a show as me watching and noting. It’s actually more about knocking on dressing room doors. I’m constantly thinking about the fact they are there eight times a week.

I don’t know what it means for them—I hope it’s useful that I’m there. I do know what it means for me. It makes me feel connected to it.

ANNE | That’s how I feel.

THOMAS | There’s something about knowing that the show is happening that I find is a comfort. That I can look at my watch at a certain time and [think], “Oh, it’s that moment.” I think about the effort of the actor and the production
team. The people that are making it together for every performance.

ANNE | With Hamilton, you’re now opening all these different companies all over. How do you manage the work in a way that maintains the show’s integrity but allows for variations?

THOMAS | Well, you know, it started very early with our original company, which was as extraordinary a group as you could ask for. About four or five months before people were going to start making decisions about whether they were going to stay or go, I said to the group, “You’ll never hear me use the word replace because I can’t and I won’t. I’m going to find somebody else who might play the role that you played.” If you gathered up all the people that have played, for example, Angelica or Eliza or Thomas Jefferson or Hamilton, the unifying factor has nothing to do with physicality—it has much more to do with essential qualities. It was really important for us in those early cast changes and new companies to address this notion. That was something that [costume designer] Paul Tazewell and I talked about a lot with Lin-Manuel, Andy Blankenbuehler, and Alex Lacamoire. That was quite liberating for us.

One of the greatest joys of this show has been that I have been able to work and assemble this group of directors that are all working on the same show. We all have specific jobs that are different within, but there are six resident or associate directors who all go to work on Hamilton every day. That has been such an unexpected joy for me.

Patrick Vassel, who is now the supervising director, was with me as my associate for a couple of years while we were developing the show and, initially, he looked after the Broadway company. So he knew the show from the inside also. Then, when we mounted the Chicago company, we eventually hired a resident director who lives in Chicago—Jess McLeod. Hannah Ryan, who was out on the road, is now on Broadway, freeing up Patrick, who is flying around a lot. Taylor Holt is with another company, Zi Alikhan’s with another company, and Stephen Whitson is in London.

We share a common language, and each of them has spent significant time in our rehearsal process. I try my best to empower them all because they’re going to be out there living with the company. My relationship to each company will be quite different than theirs. So it shouldn’t be me giving all the notes. It shouldn’t be me as the only interface. I really try to divide and conquer with them on things. They all have their own respective relationships with their companies. Nothing makes me happier than watching their own set of jokes that I don’t understand with the company. I say, “Oh, right. They have their own language.” That’s exactly how it should be.

ANNE | That’s amazing, Tommy, that you’ve created a directing corps.

THOMAS | I find that exhilarating. I’ll get a performance report at the end of the night. I read it and think, “Wow, all that happened?” No one is asking me, “What should I do?” They all know what to do. That means that we made it right. It’s like getting a satellite to space. I’m a booster rocket. At a certain point, I should fall away, and it will be in orbit. If it still needs me to power it, then I failed. If I take away the scaffolding and the building can’t stand unless I’m there every night, then I failed the company. I failed all of them. And so I try to make a thing that can exist without me. And I have this incredible resource now in these directors who can be there day in and day out and report back from the front. They’re essential parts of it.

ANNE | I think about what you’ve built with Hamilton—what I think of as a responsibility, given its particular kind of success. It is so meaningful for this country, for our art form, for where we are right now, where we were when it first started. It’s got such a wide reach. Can you just talk a little bit about how you approach that responsibility?

THOMAS | It’s really been at the core of what we all believed in since the show was at The Public Theater. And we have tremendous producers that support us—even our strange ideas. Like Ham4Ham. The Ham4Ham shows that what Lin was doing outside of the Richard Rodgers started in a very simple way. At our first preview on Broadway, we had about 500 people that gathered outside to play our ticket lottery. I watched Lin out there that day talking to the crowd, and the people gathered were so excited that he was there. I knew we’d award 20 tickets from the lottery, so I thought 480 people are going home without seeing the show. But when Lin was out there, everyone there had a fun collective experience—it wasn’t about winning the lottery. Five hundred people are [saying], “Guess what I saw? Lin—or later, others from the cast—came out and tell this joke, or read this poem, or sing this song, or do this thing.”

It became a way for more people to have access to Hamilton, the same way our cast album gives you access. The same way the book by Jeremy McCarter gave you access—or the documentary. These were things that allowed more people to participate and feel connected to the show because we were aware that, especially early on, it was playing only in one place and only 1,340 people a night could see it.

Now we go into cities and bring the show to more people. And it expands our education program, EduHam. I’ve seen EduHam in New York, and Denver and San Francisco and Chicago. You watch the courage of these students who stand in front of 2,000 of their peers and say, “This is a song I wrote about Phillis Wheatley,” “This is a rap that John Adams would have said to his wife, Abigail, if he had the chance.” They’re cultivating their own voice.

In those moments, when some student forgets their words, forgets their lines, or can’t remember something, there’s this moment of quiet. I’ve seen this happen often. Then, all of a sudden, from the audience, a group of 2,000 peers they’ve never met, just start cheering in support, “I got you. We’re here.” It’s empathy. It is an intensely moving example of what it means to support another. And those are the moments when I think we’re all going to be okay. Even though most of these students will never see this other student again, in that moment, they unify and let them know: “We’re here for you.”

So there’s a very deep sense of responsibility on this show we all feel because there’s an opportunity when your voice is amplified to try to use it for something that can bring us all together. 

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