The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda

Reed wrote a critique of the musical Hamilton shortly after its debut for the August 2015 edition of the magazine CounterPunch, titled "Hamilton: the Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders... and It's Not Halloween."[5][1] In it he accused Lin-Manuel Miranda of whitewashing Alexander Hamilton's role as a slave-owner and his involvement in the genocide of Native Americans.[1] He followed it up with a second critique for the magazine in April 2016, titled "Hamilton and the Negro Whisperers: Miranda's Consumer Fraud."[1] Reed likened the casting of a black actor in the role of George Washington to a scenario where Jewish actors would portray Nazi officials Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, and Adolf Hitler.[4]

The play offers Reed's critiques of Hamilton, which include "turning a blind eye to the Schuyler family's ownership of slaves and soft-pedaling Alexander Hamilton's elitist politics and his attitude toward slavery."[3] Reed stated that his goal for writing The Haunting was to "be a counter-narrative to the text that has been distributed to thousands of students throughout the country."[2]

Reviewers noted that Reed's perspectives are shared by many historians, who levied numerous critiques about the historical accuracy of Hamilton after its release.[2][3][4] Critics also noted that The Haunting fits with Reed's long career of questioning white supremacy in cultural institutions, such as in his well-known novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972);[5][1] Nawal Arjini wrote in The Nation that "[b]oth works attempt, with varying degrees of success, to reimagine the history taught in school as one in which people of color have power."[5]

After taking Ambien given to him by his agent, Lin-Manuel Miranda is visited by the spirits of the historical figures George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and spirits representing those who speak for those left out of his musical, Hamilton, including enslaved Africans, Native Americans, a white indentured servant, and Harriet Tubman.[1] In a dream, Washington and Hamilton reveal their contempt for Africans and Native Americans and then after Miranda wakes up, the other spirits appear to inform Miranda about their lives, while Lin-Manuel appears confused.[6][3] He continuously defers to Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton to justify the content of the musical.[1] After Lin-Manuel becomes convinced by the spirits' accounts of their lives and the consequences of the actions of Washington and Hamilton, he goes to confront Chernow, who is unapologetic. At the conclusion, Lin-Manuel's agent tells him he has been commissioned to write a play about Christopher Columbus,[1] which Miranda refuses to write. Throughout, the play critiques Hamilton's high ticket prices and "corny" songs.[5]

• Jesse Bueno as Lin-Manuel Miranda[5]
• Robert Turner as the spirit of the historical figure George Washington[7]
• Erika Pizarro as Venus, the spirit of the historical figure who was a slave owned by George Washington's sister-in-law, Hannah Washington, whose son, West Ford, is believed to have been fathered by George Washington
• Zachary Clarence as the spirit of the historical figure Alexander Hamilton[5]
• N. Allam Forster as The Agent[3]
• Tommie J. Moore as Ben, the spirit of a historical figure, a slave owned by the Schuyler family
• Pepsi Robinson as Native American Man, a spirit representing Native Americans living at the time of George Washington and Hamilton
• Vanessa Lovestone as Native American Woman, a spirit representing Native Americans living at the time of Washington and Hamilton
• Malika Iman as Negro Woman, the spirit of a historical figure known as Negro woman with child, who with her child was sold by Alexander Hamilton according to his expense account
• Roz Fox as Harriet Tubman,[5] the spirit of the historical figure
• Lisa Pakulski as Indentured Servant, the spirit of a female indentured servant, one of many who worked for the Schuyler family at the mansion in Albany, New York
• Monisha Shiva as the spirit of the historical figure, Diana,[3] a valued slave first owned by the Schuyler family, who, after being sold by the Schuylers, is known to have died running away from her second master
• Tom Angelo as Ron Chernow[5]

Reed hosted a debut reading of the two-act play at Nuyorican Poets Café in January 2019. Reed stated at the initial reading that the play is meant to critique Miranda for his "shoddy research" rather than portray him as a villain.[1] It ran for four nights and simultaneously served as a fundraiser for a full-length production.[1] It sold out each night.[4] The fundraiser was successful, and Reed stated in an interview that Toni Morrison made the second-largest contribution to the campaign,[8] with writer/activist Robert Mailer Anderson providing the bulk of the funding[9] as well as playing the role of historian Ron Chernow for the first four staged readings in January 2019.[10]

The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda premiered a full staging at the Nuyorican Poets Café on May 23, 2019[7] and ran through June 16, 2019.[3] It ran a second time, from October 4–27, 2019, in the same location.[11]

It was directed by Rome Neal. Similar to Hamilton, several of the characters are played by actors of different races, such as Robert Turner, a black actor who portrays George Washington.[5]

The play received mixed critical reception. Critics spoke positively of the acting, the "wit"[6] of Reed's script, and the "catharsis" of Miranda's character being dressed down in the play.[4][7] Nawal Arjini of The Nation commented positively on the quality of the acting, stating in their review, "Turning what are essentially history lectures into riveting theater is a tall order for most actors, but the cast is for the most part up to the challenge."[5] Critics also noted that the play ends by painting Miranda's fictionalized character with a sympathetic brush, as someone who has been taken advantage of by institutional powerholders, a notion Reed supported in an interview for Current Affairs.[1][5][7]

Negative criticisms of the play described it as overly didactic. In a review for The New York Times, Elizabeth Vincentelli stated, "The Haunting is classic activist theater—the haphazard acting is typical of the genre—that prefers didacticism to dialectic. Miranda merely submits to a series of impassioned monologues, a format that saps the show of the energy that would have been generated by back-and-forth exchange."[3] The play was mocked by Peter Sagal of NPR's quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, who expressed disbelief that anyone could dislike "the most beloved musical of modern times."[7]

It was also described as low-energy and "boring" by Jeremy Gordon of The Outline, who said "even though the reading couldn't be judged as a completed play—only a few of the actors were in costume, and there was no set nor action—it was hard to imagine how Miranda getting educated in long, unbroken chunks of dialogue could be staged in an interesting way."[4] Similarly, Hua Hsu of The New Yorker wrote, "Some of the history lessons were long-winded and meandering—and maybe slightly confusing without a basic grasp of the original musical... The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda is a minor entry in an important and sometimes overwhelming body of work."[1]

After the reading, Twitter users questioned the validity of the play after critics noted that Reed had not seen Hamilton. In an interview, Reed stated that he had "extensively studied" the script before writing The Haunting.[7] However, by the time the full production premiered, Reed was able to insert a joke in the script concerning how he had missed a mortgage payment to see the show, as performed by the national touring company in San Francisco.[12]

The Haunting was published in book form by Archway Editions (distributed by Simon & Schuster) on October 20, 2020.[13]