#12.22.2016

1.   (These numbers are all out of order.)  Of course there's only a few of them; the play's mostly about men, and I don't know if it counts as passing the Bechdel Test.  (Second verse of "The Schuyler Sisters": people shouting in the square / bad enough there'll be violence on our shores / new ideas in the air / Angelica, remind me what we're looking for.)  Cause the play's about Alexander Hamilton, and a lot of it's about "the rooms where things happened," both in peacetime and war.  But within those chosen parameters - and working with recorded history - I appreciate the choices the play makes to try to include women's stories.

2. Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy!  (~the Schuyler Sisters.~)  And Maria Reynolds, too…. the sisters are incredibly important to each other.  Eliza's the most important person in Angelica's world; and Angelica’s incredibly important to Eliza too.

3. The love triangle in this play is so much more than that.  Because the sisters choose each other over it - they refuse to be rivals.  Because Angelica's attachment to Hamilton is used as a device/excuse to make her more present, not vice versa!

4. And because of how much it's about women finding ways to live within the constraints set upon them.  "I'm a girl in a world in which my only job is to marry rich," sings Angelica, and that's why she has to be single and immediately smitten when she meets Hamilton; it's so she'll be faced with that trade-off, and make her choice.

5. Her marriage, sailing off to London, was the only way she could be in "the room where it happens."

6. And Eliza's "Helpless" when she meets Alexander both because she's in love and that's what love does to you; but also because she's a woman, too, and even rich to Alexander's poor, there's not much she can do about a marriage if Alexander doesn't propose, or her father doesn't allow it; and also not much she can do inside the marriage, if (when!) it doesn't go how she wants.

7. (SERIOUSLY, notice how Hamilton sings "I've never been so" but DOESN'T sing "helpless" at the end, it's amazing.)

8. One thing I love is how much agency Eliza claims with regards to her personal life.  Which - women being confined to that sphere - is oppressive, in general, and Angelica, for example suffers from it greatly!  But Eliza keeps pressing Hamilton to come/stay home, look around, that could be enough, she defiantly says "I'm not sorry" for not writing to Alexander about her pregnancy.  This is her life, and her choice!, to value the private domestic world above affairs of state.  It's not for everyone, but it's just as valid as the reverse.

9. And she does value her privacy, that line of separation - they don't get to know what I thought.

10. Even her public works are personal and domestic, in some ways, The Orphanage; but maybe her family is more important to her than anything else, and why shouldn't it be.  Family is important.