You Can Star In âHamiltonâ And Still Fear For Your Life As A Black Man (HuffPo):
Carvens Lissaint is tired of having to prove he belongs in his own building. Heâs a 6 foot 3, 29-year-old black man, raised in Harlem, and he lives in a new upscale glass residential tower in downtown Brooklyn. He moved there in September, the same month he landed a starring role in âHamiltonâ on Broadway, one of the biggest hits in musical theater history. But again and again â five times in all, by his count â the rotating cast of security desk attendants treats him like an outsider.
âI come here with some Trader Joeâs groceries, about to cook my wife some dinner, and theyâre like, âIâm sorry, deliveries are downstairs. You have to call up,ââ he said. âThey just see a black guy wearing Beats headphones, sweats and a hoodie. ⌠Iâm like, âI live here. These are my keys.ââ
Lissaint always struggled with traditional academics, knowing he wanted to be a performance artist. He enrolled in community college â mainly to have a dorm to sleep in â and flunked out after his first year. He wanted to be an artist and had already found some success as a spoken-word poet, despite his dadâs repeated warnings to ignore poetry and âget a job that pays the bills.â His dad went so far as to forbid him to attend poetry slams in high school, but Lissaint competed anyway and won the acclaimed New York Knicks Poetry Slam in 2007 at 18 years old. He won several more in the next two years and eventually began coaching slam teams and mentoring young poets.
Poetry wouldnât pay the bills, though, at least not yet. He crashed on friendsâ couches or rode the subway all night for about three years after community college. He would perform on the train to scrape together enough cash to see his favorite Broadway show, âIn the Heights,â again and again. The musical, written by âHamiltonâ playwright Lin Manuel Miranda, opened on Broadway in 2008, also at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, also starring Jackson, one of Lissaintâs heroes.
âIn the Heightsâ is a love letter to Washington Heights, a Hispanic neighborhood in upper Manhattan. Lissaint was transfixed. He saw the play 13 times. Sometimes his friends would give him a ticket, knowing how much he loved it. âChris Jackson is the reason I started acting,â he said. âI was a young black kid from upper Manhattan. To see a musical about Washington Heights and see a black dude onstage, that was inspiring.â
At 20, Lissaint had another terrifying encounter with the police. He was riding in a car with three black friends to an arts party in New Jersey, where people were playing guitar and rapping and making music together. A policeman pulled them over for allegedly making a turn that was too wide. The cop forced them out of the car and searched it, claiming there was a scent of burned marijuana in it, though Lissaint insists none of them had smoked or had any drugs on them. His friend Miles was angry at the injustice of the situation and started cussing, which prompted the policeman to call for backup, and five more squad cars showed up with dogs, Lissaint recalled. The officers approached Lissaint and his friends with guns drawn, though he and his friends were unarmed.
Lissaint had a sick feeling he could die that night. âI was sitting there, like, yo, they could kill us,â he said. âThey could kill us right now, and we can do nothing about it.â Â
He was homeless for two and a half years before he started auditioning at conservatories, hoping one of them might see his potential and give him a scholarship. He got a callback from Juilliard in 2010. New York Universityâs acting program had accepted him, but he couldnât get into the main school with his academic record. Ultimately, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan gave him a full ride and helped him with living costs, and he was able to enroll.
It was there that he began to understand that high art was generally considered to be art created by white people â and that black peopleâs art forms and aesthetics arenât as valued pedagogically or considered worth investigating in the theater and academic worlds.
âA teacher would say, âBring in a piece of high text,â and I would bring in a spoken-word poem or a rap. And theyâd say, âNo, we mean high art, like Shakespeare,ââ Lissaint said. âVoice and speech teachers told me, âYou should stop doing spoken-word poetry, itâs inspiring your regionalism and your dialect too much. Weâre afraid youâll never be able to work in the American theater because of your speech, because you do that rap thing.ââ
I asked Lissaint whatâs like to go from being homeless and sleeping on friendsâ couches to having this fancy apartment. âMy wife was trying to get me a gift, and she asked me what I want,â he said. âIâll tell you exactly what I want.â
He leaped from the couch, crossed to the wall and started flipping the light switch on and off, creating a strobe effect in the living room. âYou see that? The lights work!â he shouted, his voice becoming louder and more performative. âThatâs dope to me! I donât need much! That is dope! You see this? The lights are on! I donât need much!â
Instead of buying things, Lissaint has decided to use his new Broadway money and platform to make a five-track album and a book of poetry about racism and violence against black bodies. He realized while he was in grad school that performing art solely for entertainmentâs sake wasnât going to fulfill him. âIâm sitting in class doing Shakespeare monologues, and Trayvon [Martin] just got killed, and we see a Black Lives Matter march pass by our rehearsal. And Iâm like, what am I doing in here?â he said.
Lissaintâs new projects, both called âTarget Practice,â draw from his experiences and reflect on stories like that of Philando Castile, a black man who was pulled over by police in Minnesota and fatally shot in front of his girlfriend and her child in 2016. The poems pulse with outrage at the white ruling class, even implicating his Broadway audience.
He referred to an incident on July 4, when he posted a photo on Instagram of an 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass about âThe Meaning of July Fourth for the Negroâ and the fact that Americans were celebrating freedom while keeping African men enslaved. Douglassâ speech, one of the most damning pieces of oratory in American history, condemns the display of patriotism on Independence Day as âhypocrisy â a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.â
Lissaint now has 11,000 followers, and a white woman who described herself as a âHamiltonâ fan commented on his post, âThis would definitely make sense to an African American male in the 1800s. Not so much to an African American male who makes his money in 2018 singing in a play based on American history. You are very talented and one of my favorite actors in the play. This post, however, is offsetting.â
Lissaint points much of his poetry at people like her who seem oblivious to ongoing racial oppression in this country. âThere are âHamiltonâ fans who donât like black people,â he told me matter-of-factly.
He said white people after the show will demand that he pose with their kids or yank him around for pictures like heâs a prop, instead of just asking him. One woman in Houston grabbed the âHamiltonâ backpack on his body and twisted it around to show it to her friend, without ever acknowledging the man wearing it. âWhen youâre an artist, people feel like they own you,â he said. And when youâre a black artist â âthat has deeply rooted implications.â
Performing for an audience black and brown high school kids is his favorite thing to do; it gives him a special kind of energy onstage. He said he hopes that seeing âHamiltonâ can do the same thing for the next generation that âIn the Heightsâ did for him as a young black man. [âŚ]
read the entire amazing article & get tix to his book release [x]
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