"How the World Can Be" - Lessons for a Revolution from 'Hadestown'

(© Matthew Murphy)

(Contains some show spoilers)

It’s not hard to catch on to the fact that Hadestown is an analogy for 21st-century social concerns. At least two of the elements are fairly easy to decipher: one is that “mean old boss” Hades represents a capitalist system that forces people to be overworked and underpaid for the sake of feeling secure, and at the expense of their freedom; the second is that climate change – for which Hades is responsible – is causing hunger, displacement, catastrophes, and instability.

Because these concerns are so current, it’s only natural that we, as an audience, pray that Orpheus’s motion for a revolution is successful. I mean, if he can do it, so can we, right? So, even though we know how the original myth ends, and even though we are warned from the beginning that what we are about to witness is “a sad tale” and a “tragedy”, it is still harrowing to get to the end of “Doubt Comes In” and see that it fails.

However, as hopeless as it feels every time, there might be something hopeful to take away from it, if only we shift our focus from the fact that the revolution fails, and instead try to answer the question: why does the revolution fail?

First, it is important to understand that music, love, and the revolution, besides being central themes in the musical, are inseparable for Orpheus. The revolution is the endgame, music is how he plans to achieve it, and he often conflates the effects of his music with the effects of his relationship with Eurydice (“A song so beautiful/ It brings the world back into tune/…/ And all the flowers will bloom/ When you become my wife”). But we’ll get back to this.

Then, if this show is an analogy, we need to go through with deciphering what each element stands for. Hades is the oppressive boss, Orpheus represents the resistance, and Eurydice is a climate refugee who decides to go to the underworld, persuaded by the illusion that she will have a chance at a better life there.

Persephone is the toughest one to break down, not necessarily because the metaphor is more subtle, but because she is a well-liked character, as is the thing she stands for, but she is, in part, responsible for the revolution failing.

From the very beginning, we know that this story is set in “hard times”. Eurydice reinforces that idea when she sings about her hardships in “Anyway The Wind Blows”. But when Persephone appears with spring and wine, she asks, “who says times are hard?”, and comments “some may say the weather ain’t the way it used to be”, as if it were up for debate. But she provides temporary solutions for everyone’s immediate needs, and, more important than that, she is a mighty good time. So, even though everybody knows she will leave soon and they will go back to living in misery, they willfully forget that fact for a moment and adhere to her philosophy that “when you’re down you’re down, and when you’re up you’re up”.

Back in the underworld, Persephone runs an illegal business in which she sells the workers little pleasures from up above. She says that “what the boss don’t know, the boss won’t mind”, but it’s very possible that if Hades did know, he would turn a blind eye because what Persephone does is precisely what is needed to keep those workers under control: give them just enough to numb their suffering, but not so much that they become aware of their oppression.

It is naïve to believe that Persephone would truly be in favor of the revolution because her business would die with it. So, even though she is moved by Orpheus’s music, when she tries to persuade Hades to let him and Eurydice leave, she is only advocating for the two of them. In fact, she downplays Orpheus’s intentions to lead a movement, claiming that “it is only for love that he sings”, when, as we’ve seen, the revolution cannot be separated from the love and the singing. Put simply, Persephone’s support of the revolution is akin to a Zara t-shirt that reads “GRL PWR”, or a woke Disney movie, or a black square on an Instagram feed.  

But Persephone is not the only obstacle to the revolution. The other one is Orpheus himself, and not because he made one fatal mistake towards the end of the story. He was, by default, an unfit leader.

Although he is described as a “poor boy”, he is also “touched by the gods”, cared for by Hermes, and his gift for music is basically a superpower that grants him advantages that otherwise he wouldn’t have. In other words, Orpheus is privileged in ways that other poor people, like Eurydice, aren’t.

It then follows that he should be oblivious to her repeatedly calling him, begging for shelter and food: in his search for a long-term solution, he ignores her, and others’ immediate needs. He is unable to empathize enough with that urgency, because it is not his reality. Similarly, he is not the best choice to lead the underworld workers to freedom when he himself has spent very little time in Hadestown, and has never personally worked there or experienced any of the hardships that come with being an underworld employee. Eurydice, or any other worker, would have been a more fit leader than him.

Finally, the revolution fails due to a belief that history, narratives, and movements are made by individual heroes. Hades understands this quite well, which is why he hinders any feeling of comradery among his workers, and which is why he makes Orpheus leave alone. But even without Hades, the workers had already doomed themselves by putting all of their faith in a single man, and by perceiving his failure as proof that the entire movement should fail. Hades says that “bravery can be contagious when the band is playing loud”, highlighting an important fact: music, the music that can actually change the world, is a community effort. As is love, and as is the revolution.

When Hermes says that we must sing the song again and again, in hopes that “it might turn out this time”, it feels as if the outcome will always be the same: Orpheus will always turn to look at Eurydice, she will always be dragged back to the underworld, and the revolution will always die there. But the failure is not in the moment Orpheus turns to look – the failure is in envisioning a new world based on the structures of the old world.

So, when Orpheus and all of us have the chance to begin to sing it again, we must sing it, from the star, in a different tune.