I saw Hadestown this week on broadway. A friend was nice enough to take me. If you don’t know this beautiful musical, it’s an American retelling of the story of Orpheus and his trip into the underworld to save his lady love. Hades and Persephone are there having some martial problems (unusual for their myth as they have the most solid marriage of the Greek gods). The Fates are spinning around and around. Then there’s Hermes narrating the journey.
The band is on stage. The story told as a series of songs. Seems right for a story about Orpheus. Though the setting has been changed to the hard times of the early nineteenth century America. My friend and I weren’t sure if it was New Orleans, Tennessee, or West Virginia, but the atmosphere felt southern, poor, and like the old mining communities we have a bad habit of romanticizing.
Do you guys know the story of Orpheus and his lady love Eurydice?
The original tale is cautionary, about how the dead should stay with the dead. This telling is a little different, has a different message to give. But the ideas are still there and the ending stays the same, no matter how much I or anyone else might wish it would change.
Why do we tell tragic stories? Why do we like tragedy?
History is full of tragedy. There really aren’t happy endings in real life. Nothing falls into place like how our modern fairytales go. Everybody dies. Everybody has a perspective and the popular one might not be all that right.
If we live in constant tragedy, why do we keep telling these stories? Why tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice again and again like Hadestown? What do we get out of it?
A lesson?
An emotion?
A warning?
I love the music of Hadestown. It’s very American - jazz and blues. Perfect for many reasons, first and foremost because of the subject matter. I think it’s also appropriate that the 20s are just around the corner and it’s time to bring back jazz.
One song in particular seems like it was written for this this year, but it was actually written in 2006. “Why We Build the Wall” is intense, creepy, and cultish. Hades leads the song by asking his followers why “they build the wall, my children” and his children answer that they “build the wall to keep [them] free” and keep out the enemy. And who is the enemy? Poverty.
They make a few changes here and there to the myth. Traditionally Hades isn’t hell, but in this musical it is. And Hades doesn’t tempt people with death, he doesn’t really have much to do with the act of dying at all (that’s Thanatos for the most part). He just rules the underworld and keeps the dead where they ought to be.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice doesn’t have much to do with poverty or have any capitalistic analogies. It’s actually about how the poet and artist Orpheus goes into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife. The play has Eurydice’s selling her soul to Hades because she’s hungry. In actuality she dies. Hades allows Orpheus the chance to rescue Eurydice (both in the play and myth) after he proves himself as a musician. In the myth it’s to bring Eurydice back to life, whereas in the play it’s to free her from slavery.
But the changes, like the music and the setting, are appropriate for the overall feel of the play. It’s very American. Did I mention that? It’s a new incarnation of an old story, an old song that’s been told again and again and again.
Tragedy.
The one change not made is the ending. The myth and play end the same way. Orpheus fails.
No matter how many times or different ways we tell the story, Eurydice doesn’t escape the underworld. The dead stay dead and Eurydice is never free.
We hope to never experience it. We wish for happiness, but there can be no happiness without the biting taste of despair at the back of our minds. We hear a tragic story and we’re just a little more grateful for the good things in our lives, as short as they are. We might even learn what not to do or learn that there’s nothing we can do to prevent tragedy.
Is there a sad story that you keep coming back to? Do you go back and watch a movie like Titanic or read The Fault in our Stars? We know how these stories end. Why read about a doomed relationship or watch a terrible series of events?
Because we tell stories to help us deal with the emotions we feel and tragedy is one of the hardest to process.
We hope for the story to change. It never does. Yet we tell the story again anyway.
Until next week.
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