Where the fun went

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

A quick browse on YouTube shows just how far the reach of Ham4Ham is. In fact, the August 15, 2015 Ham4Ham featuring Miranda and the late Kyle Jan-Baptiste performing “Confrontation” from Les Miserables has over 315,000 views and the October 24, 2015 show featuring the Schuyler Sisters—Jonathan Groff, Brian D’Arcy James, and Andrew Rannells—has over 275,000 hits (another version has over 252,000 hits). Somehow, Lin-Manuel Miranda has re-invented the pre-show lottery and created a product that has been seen—in person or online—by more people than Hamilton itself. Put simply, Hamilton is a game-changer in many ways, but, as Rae Votta claims, the show is “changing how fans interact with and consume the fandom around musical theatre.” Revolutionary, huh?

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Ham4Ham follows a long tradition of Latina/o (or the ancestors of present-day Latina/os) theatremaking that dates back to when the events in Hamilton were happening. As Nicolás Kanellos describes, there is evidence that as early as the 1790s, while Alexander Hamilton was going toe-to-toe with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, professional Spanish-language theatre companies were performing in community settings in California. This continued throughout the nineteenth century as Spanish-language theatre companies frequently traveled throughout the country performing for the public and, later in the 1920s-1940s, Mexican-American duo La Bella Netty and Jesús Rodríguez traveled the Southwest performing short skits in public spaces. These are but a few examples. In fact “taking it to the streets” was a central principal of early Latina/o theatre movements in the United States, most notably El Teatro Campesino beginning in 1965 in the grape farms in California’s Central Valley to as recently as their October, 2015 collaboration with Center Theatre Group to present Popol Vuh: Heart of Heaven in downtown Los Angeles’s Grand Park.

The philosophy behind this is simple. If the people won’t come to the theatre, then take the theatre to the people. While El Teatro Campesino’s “taking it to the streets” originated from a place of social protest, Ham4Ham does so to create accessibility, tap into social media, and ultimately generate a free, self-functioning marketing campaign. In this way, Ham4Ham falls into a lineage of accessibility as a Latina/o theatremaking aesthetic—what I call an “aesthetics of accessibility”—that finds its roots in El Teatro Campesino. Others see Hamilton’s taking it to the streets as a tribute to the collaborative roots of hip-hop.

This is a pure expression of the conservative doctrine of federalism: States handle things better than the feds because they are closer to the people.

But then came the debacle in Flint, when Michigan authorities embraced cost-saving changes in the city’s water supply and caused mass lead poisoning. Now members of Congress are blaming the EPA for failing to stop the problem — oblivious to the irony that they and their predecessors were the ones who denied the federal government the ability to enforce drinking-water standards in the first place.