Hamilton, Heartache, and Art That Tells the Truth without Destroying Hope

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, is featured in the NYT, and he tells us about what drives him to make art: “The mission that I feel like I have is to figure out how you can tell the truth about how tragic and unfair life actually is without destroying hope.”

After the death of his sixteen-year-old son, Lin-Manuel Miranda sent him a demo recording of “It’s Quiet Uptown”–“For me, the beautiful thing about ‘Quiet Uptown’ is, it serves a ritualistic function—it takes us into the grief, and then it takes us out of it. And there’s nothing, there’s no other ritual that I know of, that can do that for me.”

I’m reminded of Lionel Trilling’s words, on the occasion of Robert Frost’s 85th birthday:

“And I hope you will not think it graceless of me that on your birthday I have made you out to be a poet who terrifies.  When I began to speak, I called your birthday Sophoclean, and that word has controlled everything I said about you.  Like you, Sophocles lived to a great age, writing well; and like you, Sophocles was the poet his people loved most. . . .  I think that they loved him chiefly because he made plain to them the terrible things of human life; they felt, perhaps, that only a poet who could make plain the terrible things could possibly give them comfort.”