Mike Pence goes to the theatre – and lights up the cuture wars all over again

As governor of Indiana Mike Pence has pursued a range of anti-gay legislation, including efforts to prevent gay marriage and to divert funding from HIV-prevention programmes towards conversion therapy.

As the incoming vice-president of the United States he rode the wave of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment, giving enthusiastic support to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims and the promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. An ultraconservativeof the American right, Pence does not strike you as a fan of musical theatre.

Yet there he was, last Friday night, at the Broadway smash Hamilton: An American Musical, a visit that prompts three obvious questions. First, what on earth was he doing at a hip-hop musical about the first US treasury secretary, performed by a proudly diverse cast, which champions the contribution of immigrants to the birth of the United States? Second, how did he swing tickets? And, third, what sort of reaction did he think he was going to get?

The atmosphere in the Richard Rodgers Theatre, in a solidly blue New York City that had seen street protests since the election, was tense from Pence’s arrival: the vice-president-elect was met with both applause and booing. Throughout the performance, moreover, both Lin-Manuel Miranda’s script and the audience’s reaction to it became more amplified.

The flow of the performance was interrupted a few times, when the line “Immigrants – we get the job done” was met with a midperformance standing ovation and George Washington’s observation that “Winning is easy, young man, governing’s harder” drew sustained applause from the audience, some of whom had paid thousands of dollars to be there.

But the most significant act came with the curtain call. At the end of the show the cast lined up on stage and Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor playing Aaron Burr (a former vice-president, himself, who killed Hamilton in a duel) read out a statement that directly addressed Pence.

“Vice-President-Elect, I see that you’re walking out, but I hope that you will hear us for just a few more moments,” Dixon called while also calming the audience (“There is nothing to boo here”).

“We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us. Thank you for seeing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women, of different colours, creeds and orientations.”

Earnest, overly optimistic and achingly sincere, such a statement could be construed as untoward harassment only if you happened to be a thin-skinned autocrat in need of a distraction from a $25 million out-of-court settlement over allegations of running a fraudulent university – having also spent a week filling top government positions with unrepentant racists – who had just been put back in control of your own Twitter account.

“The Theater must always be a safe and special place,” Trump tweeted the next day. “The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!”

Let’s start with the first assertion, an uncharacteristic foray into artistic policy but typical of Trump’s troubled – and now increasingly troubling – relationship with free speech. Leaving aside the obvious irony that Abraham Lincoln fared far worse in a theatre, the theatre was never intended to be a safe space, either on the stage or in the auditorium. Live performance is always a risk: in the broadest sense that anything can happen; in the understanding that conflict provides the engine of drama; or in the challenge that new work, new approaches and new forms present to the audience, either in modest advances or in radical leaps.

More to the point, all art is inherently political. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude," George Orwell wrote, in a neat irony. Any gathering of people in the same space is an assembly with political potential. Last Friday during Hamilton it became more overt.

Perhaps Mike Pence's new, publicly approving acquaintance, Taoiseach Enda Kenny – who spoke to Pence shortly before the Hamilton performance and who had recently emphasised putting the arts "at the centre of public policy" – would tell him about the Irish example: a history of political performances, whether on stage or in the auditorium, whose provocations and riots and accord have always been reflections of nation, rarely making the theatre a safe space. Even during this commemorative year the better theatre that engaged with the Rising was defined by questioning, searching and vigilance, not by safety.

Cynics are already dismissing the Hamilton farrago as a smokescreen, a diversionary tactic from graver political affairs. But it matters. Miranda's first showing of Hamilton was, as a work in progress, at the White House, in 2012. In portraying the American forefathers with black and brown performers, the musical asserted American diversity as inseparable from the national fabric, informed in no small part by President Obama's United States. (Obama has seen it twice, Hillary Clinton just once, during the Democratic primaries, when she was booed.)

Now that Trump supporters have begun mobbing the theatre while calling for a boycott (some chance: have you tried getting a ticket?), Hamilton, an effusive tribute to a progressive United States, has become part of a vicious rekindling of the culture wars.

But it will doubtless also herald a return to a more politicised American theatre, one that had been both aggravated and energised during the George W Bush years but found less traction with the government during Obama’s presidency.

If that makes theatre sound like the preserve of the American left there's at least a grain of truth in it. On a recent visit to Belfast the New York performance artist Taylor Mac suggested it was difficult to associate art with the American right, because "the only things Conservatives ever created were God and the Die Hard movies".

Hamilton, though, is a model of inclusivity and dialogue. Its narrative of America, from revolution to self-definition, is guided by unceasing political debate, sometimes expressed as battle raps, and resulting either in social advances or, more than once, in fatal duels.

As the vice-president-elect’s eventful trip to a hit musical developed into its own ongoing display of political theatre it was hard not to think back to the famous joke about Mrs Lincoln.

Apart from that, Mr Pence, what did you think of the show?