“When art imitates life, you get Hadestown:” the acclaimed musical by Anaïs Mitchell that won eight Tony awards and a Grammy for the original cast recording album (Yoe). This show creates a story based on the ancient Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone. Orpheus (Reeve Carney), a poor boy with a gift for music, falls in love with Eurydice (Eva Noblezada), a young girl who seeks security in the guarantee of food and warmth every day. There’s a strong sense that the world is a dangerous place, and when Hades, king of the Underworld (dubbed the titular “Hadestown” in this musical) offers Eurydice what she desires in exchange for her freedom, she agrees to go live in Hadestown and work for him. When she signs her contract, she does not realize that it’s a permanent arrangement, and when Orpheus discovers what she’s done, he makes the perilous journey to the Underworld to demand that Hades let her go. He agrees to free Eurydice if Orpheus can lead her out of Hadestown without looking back at her… and the ancient Greeks weren’t known for their comedies.
Hadestown touches on many themes, but one of the main ones – a choice rarely tackled by composers – is climate change. According to director Rachel Chavkin, “the image of the climate being out of whack has been a core one for Anaïs since she started writing the show” (Living on Earth). While they were composing, forest fires were ravaging California, the East Coast was facing major floods, and Florida’s panhandle was hit by Hurricane Michael, one of the strongest storms on record. These natural disasters heavily “impacted the lyrics and imagery of the show” (Living on Earth). The songs contain many allusions to them, and the relationship between Hades and Persephone is heavily metaphorical for the way industry is taking over our planet. Mitchell writes Hadestown, the classic Greek Underworld, as an industrial wasteland “of oil drums and automobiles, electric grids and fossil furnaces” with steadily increasing temperatures (Yoe). The original myth tells how Hades kidnapped Persephone (the goddess of flowers/spring/agriculture) to the Underworld to be his bride, and after negotiating with her mother Demeter, agreed to let her spend half the year with him underground (fall/winter) and the other half with Demeter in the above-world (spring/summer). In our world today, the marriage between industry and nature is a precarious one, and Hadestown highlights the imbalance in Hades and Persephone as their respective personifications.
In Hadestown, Hades brings Persephone back to the Underworld earlier every year, cutting summer short, and keeps her late, delaying the appearance of spring. When she goes down in Act I (“Chant”), she is horrified to find the artificially hot, bright factory Hadestown has become, singing about how “it ain’t right and it ain’t natural.” There’s the implication that it’s responsible for the problems up above, specifically climate and weather related, which Eurydice complains about in several different instances before her descent. Hadestown twists the original myth a bit, in which Hades married Persephone against her will, to imply that she was initially more in love with him. Their relationship deteriorated as Hades became more jealous and possessive, wanting more than she could give, bringing back the picture of the marriage between industry and nature. Industrialization is not evil per se, but it’s falling rapidly out of balance with the natural resources it consumes and pollutes.
Warning: this paragraph contains spoilers! Finally, we find one of the more obscure references in the last song, “We Raise Our Cups.” Persephone sings “Some birds sing when the sun shines bright / Our praise is not for them / But the ones who sing in the dead of night / We raise our cups to them.” Orpheus fails in his goal of retrieving Eurydice. It’s not the typical hero story we as a society are used to hearing over and over again – it’s a tragedy, as Hermes (Andre De Shields) informs us in the first song of the show. And yet, Persephone praises Orpheus for trying anyway. He was challenged to a feat with highly unlikely success, and faced it with courage, even though all the odds were against him. “It’s easy to fight when you know that victory is assured, but when you are facing impossible odds, that’s when the struggle is perhaps the most important” (Mell-Taylor). This “impossible fight” is a metaphor for climate change. Hadestown is a mirror image of a post-apocalyptic world, the vision of the world that may come to pass if pollution and industrialization continue to consume the earth as they do.. Although scientists say the future of our Earth seems grim, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make an effort to change things. Hadestown is a brilliant lesson on fighting for what you believe in, putting in the effort to fix broken relationships, and how to “see how the world could be / In spite of the way it is.”
Works Cited
Yoe, Suzanne. “Hadestown: Putting the Climate Centerstage.” Denver Center for the Performing Arts, 29 Aug. 2022, https://www.denvercenter.org/news-center/hadestown-putting-the-climate-centerstage.
Mell-Taylor, Alex. “Hadestown Is Thee Musical to Listen to for Climate Anxiety.” Medium, Fanfare, 6 June 2022, https://fanfare.pub/hadestown-is-thee-musical-to-listen-to-for-climate-anxiety-43889dc4a6b0.
“‘Hadestown’ Brings Climate Change to Broadway.” Living on Earth, 19 July 2019, https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=19-P13-00029&segmentID=5.