Plus, how it pushes itself beyond Hamilton.
Sit down, John… because it’s someone else’s turn to speak.
It almost transports the words into a place of poetry.
Joan Marcus
How can these words be something new?
We are great believers that the audience can hold these two realities at the same time.
Instead, she prefers to interrogate a work and give it new life.
Joan Marcus
When she first read1776,she was shocked at the potential within its dramatic scenes to do just that.
Have we ever been aUnitedStates of America?
How are we understanding what is our common ground in this country?'"
Joan Marcus
“Because the theater is about the present moment and the theater is about what we experience now.
It’s not just a nice theater show.
It’s got to feel necessary.
Joan Marcus
It’s got to feel vital.
It’s got to feel that you have to see it right now.”
“I remember us coming together and really asking, ‘What are we attempting to do?
Are we attempting to replicate and rebuild some memory that’s deep in our head?
“You are beholding every actor on that stage and their identity that would’ve been blocked and barred.
You are holding it at the same time that you’re holding this historical text.”
“What are the shoes and the coats [of the founding fathers]?”
“In my mind, the shoes and the coats are a masquerade, an enactment.
I’m bringing everything that I am with respect to African dance structure, African-American folklore to the table.
But Page and Paulus are quick to stress the differences in approach.
A large part of that rested in not only staging, but also casting.
“We must have heard it over 500 times,” says Paulus.
“But it was profound and it was deep because people would come in and start crying.
They would throw things; they would get so upset.
“Thinking about these founding fathers and upholding democracy, the slightest thing could have gone awry.
Our cast is now complicating our ideas of the binary that has held this particular society together.
That feeling is a spirit that shifts.
It is a spirit that is transformative and goes from form to form.”
“How can we look at American history not as an affirming myth, but as a reckoning?”
Nobody owns American history.
1776opens at the American Airlines Theatre Oct. 6 and runs, in a limited engagement, through Jan. 8.
