What does Hadestown say about race and gender? (Hadestown 6/8, episode 35)

Are there crazy connections in the world?  In 1984 I was a 4th-year college debater at Cal. State Fullerton with aspirations of finishing in the top 16 in the country when my partner quit.  In January I was paired up with a sophomore, and we needed an argument nobody else was talking about…right when a change of power in Egypt put Hosni Mubarak in the geopolitical spotlight.  We based our entire argument strategy on how various government actions might mess up that transition and the global impact it would have.  In our sophomoric tone, common to 20-year-old males and strangely tolerated in the world of competitive academic debate, we labelled the argument “You hose Hosni.”  The basic claim was that the regime was fragile, and easily disrupted.

In what must have been very close to that same year, Anais Mitchell – who would go on to write Hadestown – had this experience, which she recounted in her book “Working on a song” – In college I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt.  May Arabic Lit professor was an older woman with dark eyeliner who took it upon herself ot introduce leftist, bohemian values to a generate of distracted young Egyptians.  She barely concealed her disdain for then-President Hosni Mubarak”

Both the Arabic Lit professor and our undergraduate drivel were proven right by history!  In February of 2011, Mubarak was ousted from power following violent protests…

Unlike Hosni Mubarak, both Anais Mitchell and, in a far less spectacular way, I understood that the world was changing.  The future would not belong to autocrats, but to those who explored the emerging concerns of that bohemian, mobile-phone using generation: Race, gender, the environment, and the working class.  This is where the revolution lies, and this is where it’s dangerous to light the match.  So we’ll use of phone flashlights as we look at race, gender, and the environment as the issues play out in this episode of THM.

Rosalind Henderson

https://medium.com/@rosalindhenderson_54321/toxic-masculinity-a-leading-cause-of-our-environmental-issues-d2e9d6fb58bf

Transcript

 Are there crazy connections in the world? In 1984, I was a fourth year college debater at Cal State Fullerton with aspirations of finishing in the top 16 in the country win. My partner quit and since the debate is a two person team activity, that was quite a setback. But then in January, I got paired up with this guy who was a sophomore and we needed an argument that nobody else was talking about. Right when a change of power in Egypt put Hosni Mubarak in the geopolitical spotlight, we based our entire argument strategy on how various government actions might mess up that transition and the global impact it would have. In our sophomoric tone, common to 20 year old males and strangely tolerated in the world of competitive academic fate, we labeled the argument you pose Hosni. 

The basic claim was that the regime was fragile and easily disrupted. In what must have been very close to that same year, a naïve smith who would go on to ride Hades town had this experience, which she recounted in her book Working on a Son. Quote, In college I studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt. My Arabic lip professor was an older woman with dark eyeliner who took it upon herself to introduce leftist bohemian values to a generation of distracted young Egyptians. She barely concealed her disdain for then president Hosni Mubarak. 

Both the Arabic lip professor and our undergraduate drivel were proven right by history. In February of 2011, Mubarak was ousted from power following violent protests. Unlike Hosni Mubarak, both a nice Mitchell and in a far less spectacular way, I understood that the world was changing the future would not belong to autocrats, but to those who explored the emerging concerns of that bohemian mobile phone using generation, race, gender, the environment and the working class. This is where the revolution lies and this is where it's dangerous to light the match. So we'll use our phone flashlights as we look at race, gender and the environment as the issues played out in Hades town in this episode of Theater, History and Mysteries. I'm John Brushke and you are listening to Theater, History and Mysteries where I take up musical theater production, go into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. I hope that this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons that the musical has for theater and for life and I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event or supernatural suggestion along the way because in the words of Dirk Jitley, it is all connected. As always, I hope that you can help me out by sharing the word about the show. The audience for this podcast is sophisticated, good looking, intelligent, I'm hoping wealthy, but also kind of niche. It's about musical theater and history and bizarre connections between the two and between all kinds of different forces on the planet earth. 

And so if you are interested in that connection of ideas, please share your thoughts with others. You could take an episode that you like and post it on your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed or wherever it is. You got social media that would help me out more than you know. I love doing the show to keep doing it. We're going to have to keep growing the audience and honestly the audience, yeah, that is you, is the most important factor in that happening. 

If you could help me out, I would really appreciate it. You can also drop me a line on the email which you can find on the Buzzsprout page or also just leave me a message on YouTube. Okay, on to our show. If you have listened to the past episodes, this is actually our sixth episode that talks about Hades Town, but the first two talk pretty extensively about Greek culture and the Greek stories that originated the Orpheus tale. And I commented there that there were some great tellings of that story. One was from the poet Virgil, one was from the poet Oed, and one is from Anais Mitchell. Mitchell has made some significant changes from the original Greek story. In Mitchell's story, there is definitely the environment as a central theme. Gender is definitely an issue that is treated differently. Race is an important consideration that many people have written about. And in our next episode, we are going to get to questions of class and economic divisions. 

And we'll talk about that more extensively now. There are those who will see each of these issues as absolutely central to everything that happens in the world. For example, if you were Karl Marx, you probably thought class was the single most important thing that anyone would ever talk about. If you are Rosalind Henderson, you think gender is the most important thing. Who is Rosalind Henderson? 

Well, Rosalind has written a very good post on Medium. That's a sort of interim. It's not quite a blog. 

It's not quite a news channel, but it's both. But what Henderson has is this really interesting series of concentric circles that talks about the problems the world's facing right at the center of that. Of everything else is patriarchy and feminism is at the center of Rosalind Henderson's diagram of possible solutions. For Rosalind Henderson, gender is the absolute center of everything and you have to talk about it all the time. Race is probably the most important thing if you were, say, Malcolm X or who we will soon meet, Neil Wilson, who writes about Hattie's Town in particular. 

That is for this group of thinkers. One way you can approach it is to say, you can talk about gender. You can talk about class. 

You can talk about race. You can talk about the environment, but at the core of all of it is a single central issue. A different way to look at it is to see all these issues as connected. For example, ecofeminism might say the environment and gender are central to the way we approach either issue. And the intersectional approach is to say that there are concerns and they overlap and they connect. 

Today, when we take on the environment, gender and race as they play out in Hattie's Town, it's not going to be to separate them out, but to see how Hattie's Town deals with each one. So they may indeed be overlapping. They might have some commonalities. They might even have some crazy unexpected coincidences, but we're going to treat them separately just to give each issue the depth that it deserves without taking any stance really on whether or not there is one that's more important than everything else. Although as we will see, there is more than one critic who thinks that they know what the central issue is. So we are going to take on the question of class and class struggle and maybe revolutionary potential in our next episode. 

That'll be our seventh episode of Hattie's Town. But today, on episode six, we're going to take on three of those issues. First the environment, then gender, and then race. All right. 

So our first topic is the environment. And just as way of quick review, there are some important plot points. In the ancient stories, the Persephonean Hattie Smith is that Persephone is abducted. She is attractive. Hattie's swings by in a chariot, sweeps her off, abducts her, probably rapes her, but then they become a couple. Devoner gets really mad about this treatment of Persephone by Hatties, Zeus intervenes, and eventually they work it out so that Persephonean will spend half the time in Hatties and the other half on earth. And that explains the difference in the seasons. That's the origin myth in ancient Greek culture for why it is the seasons change. 

In Hattie's Town, and according to Mitchell in her book, the climate is in chaos. And that is the start of the story. So that part has been adapted. The nature element is certainly present, but it's been adapted by Mitchell to our place and time. And the setting is bleak. 

It's no specific time, but it's definitely called a depression. It's sort of any nonspecific, post-apocalyptic, dust-bull era world. So it's fictional, but there's not a lot of food. There's not a lot of work, and there's not a lot of money to go around. 

There's definitely a problem with the human condition, and it definitely is affected by the environment. And the central plot is that Orpheus is going to sing a song to get nature back in harmony, but he fails. And the big thing is that you have to try again, and you've got to keep pushing forward in the face probable failure, because you've got to fight for the just cause. 

It is taking on a million impossible journeys that can eventually change the world for the better. Okay, that has all been covered extensively in our previous five episodes as kind of a summary of a lot of different things from a lot of different places, but it's worth putting them all together. That's sort of the way the environment is at the start of Hades Town. There are four different features of this environmental, the state of the environment, as it is portrayed in Hades Town that I want to talk about. And the first of those is that environmental issues are linked to the gods, and their relationship with each other is out of order. The gods are fighting with themselves, and so the gods who control the environment are messing everything up. And things are bad because Persephone and Hades are on the outs, the relationship is failing. Jared De Prado of the Sacred Heart University writes, quote, the revision process in Hades Town reveals the extent of the environmental issues stemming from the gods who are driven by selfishness. By watching the underdog on stage use his or her wits, not only to survive, but to live a better life, end quote. 

And then I realize that's kind of a sentence fragment. He's saying that we watch that happen on the play that the essential environmental situation is that there be powerful external entities with the Greek called gods that are responsible via their own relational selfishness and their own relational problems for the destruction of the planet or the the vacillation of the environment. And the solution to that is for underdogs, normal people to use their wits and whatever it is they got to try to restore order. Now, the particular problem that gods are having is that Hades is obsessed with consumption and production. And the problem Persephone is having is that she's turned to alcohol to kind of withdraw from the entire situation. De Prado definitely says that and another author that we're going to meet in a second Schrader, both Ron this theme. So that's sort of what's going on. And that's that's the explanation that Hades gives for why it is the environments of trouble. 

Now, this whole situation now over causes deprivation for humans and especially for Eurydice. She's trying to make ends meet. She's working as a server, maybe a worker or some other role in a new or New Orleans style jazz club, but it's definitely not enough. She cannot get by. She can't get the food she needs the shelters insufficient for the environmental degradation that surrounds her. 

Okay. Although Mitchell at various times has just said it's kind of post-apocalyptic. There is a reasonably without very being super specific, although there's no doubt that Mitchell thinks that the climate crisis and global climate change is really central to our current environmental crisis. It's not stated as explicitly as you might think in the show, given the amount of attention that that particular element of the show has gotten. But there's definitely a reasonably tight link between the show's plot and climate change. Valerie Lynn Schrader of Penn State was writing in studies in musical theater. 

That's the name of the journal and has this rather sense of quote that I think does a pretty good job of summarizing what everybody kind of sees in the show. Quote, climate change has long been a topic of debate. Well, some deniers insist that human made pollution is not impacting the earth in ways scientists claim. Most scientists and world leaders, as indicated by the Paris Agreement, recognize the dire consequences human made pollution is having on the planet. In September, 2021, the United Nations reported that even with all countries meeting their agreed upon emission reductions, the global average temperature will rise 2.7 degrees by the end of the century, resulting in deadly heat waves and rising sea levels. Haiti's town's audiences are likely to view the weather changes in the show through a contemporary lens that focuses on combating climate change. 

And quote, that just kind of shows. Yeah, the show is definitely not just about the environment writ large, but it has particular relevance to the topic of climate change. And climate change is pretty bad that everyone agrees that it's happening with the exception of some deniers who are pursuing their own agendas. But it's not just bleak. But even if the world does everything it is currently trying to do to stop global climate change, we're still in trouble. We are going to see some pretty bad environmental impacts. 

Climate change is also linked to global exploitation, in particular of the workers in general against the owners of corporate industry and then countries in the north, which tend to be wealthier against the countries in the south. This quote comes from Jason D. Lara Molesky. He's an assistant professor of English at St. Louis University by way of a PhD from Princeton Reading in 2023. Quote, no one risks oversimplification then in recognizing that Hades in the play represents a modern variant of what he has always represented. In effect, he is the brute paranoid impulse of capital for expansion and control the quintessence of the company town to which he has given his name. Dressed in a pinstripe vest and sharkskin boats, Hades appears half mafioso, half oil magnet. His works, he brags are fueled by the fossils of the dead, a phrase that refers in this context, not only to fossil fuels, but also to his exploited workforce of underworld shades. With this line, which Hades rumbles while the workers hand to mine the exertion, the play intimates that the extraction of fossil energy involves also the coerced extraction of labor, yet again linking climate chaos to the unjust class arrangements exemplified in the figure of the company town. And quote, so those are the two themes that you can easily find it as a Molesky says you can't oversimplify it by understanding that this shows about climate change. And then that climate change is linked to the exploitation of the workers and the exploitation of the environment. And you don't have to be a hard car Marxist to believe that, yes, they're the whole gilded age. 

The introduction of fossil fuels is generally driven by corporate profit, Inaugana muck, and without enough attention being played to the environment. Here I'm going to turn to Abigail Voss, who wrote a master's thesis for the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2023. It's a fairly extensive commentary on Hades Town and the environment. And for Voss, the show embodies the theme of environmentalism and anti capitalism and anti industrialism, and that the pain that Persephone and Eurydice and ultimately Orpheus are experiencing reflects the pain of the global south. Persephone represents the earth and that how it has been violated by a masculine industrialist, although she herself is partially to brain. It's sort of a personification of the earth and the inhabitants on it. 

They were all Persephone and Eurydice. And setting the thing in New Orleans says Abigail Voss is a callback to the hurricane Katrina incident. And that showed a whole bunch of connections because it was definitely an environmental impact. It definitely was probably linked to climate change. 

And it definitely had an impact on some racial groups where they did on others. Voss points out that in the show, there's a stone river and finds that to be a metaphor for industrialization and pollution. And Voss particularly identifies Persephone as a good eco feminist character because she embodies the intersection between women and divinity. 

And Eurydice comes to the play as a woman from the operatic tradition says Voss, who is undone by men. First by Hades. Hades kind of tricks her into coming to Hades. And then it quickly becomes clear that that's a bad deal for Eurydice. She will get to have some material wealth, but mostly she too will be oppressed. And then she is betrayed by her lover who famously orpheus gets to the edge of hell and then turns around and looks at her below in the deal and sending her back to hell for all eternity. 

Now I will say, and if you're interested, please go back most into the first episode here. It depends on whether or not you believe Virgil or you believe Ovid. Now in Virgil's story, definitely Eurydice is sold out and frustrated that at the orpheus looks back, but for Ovid, that's not the case. 

It's just an act of love and it's a very forgivable one. But for Abigail Voss anyway, Abigail looks into the show and sees a whole bunch of these connections that there is industrialization, which is linked to the oppression of women and that those two things are definitely intertwined. And that their race is also playing a role in it. And so those connections are at least easy to see in both Voss and Molesky Vosses. The show is drawing a straight line between capitalism and patriarchy and violence against women. 

And Molesky draws a pretty straight line to worker exploitation. So the story then is definitely about climate change and it's got some interconnections with those other issues that we talked about. But this ends up in my mind being kind of a big deal. What the show presses is the question of how do we not lose hope on the question of the environment, especially in the question of global climate change. Now climate defeatism is an issue. Now, I just want to highlight that term climate defeatism. Now that's the feeling that every time we set a tipping point, we just race right past it. The COPPA actions seems only to be getting worse. They quote, I read was from 2022. 

We just finished COPPA 30, I think, and it produced even less than everything up to this point had. In fact, the United States didn't even attend. The agreement itself did not include the word also fuels, which is a sign that we're probably rolling backwards. The promises that are made aren't kept. 

The other phrase I've seen sent people uses eco miserableism. Anyway, it's a real problem that people are just giving up hope. What do we have to do to stop climate change? Well, one thing is we have to not stop trying. And the messages that come out about the climate and by messages, healthy, healthy goals of them are just straight up facts. 

It's easy to give up hope and decide there's not that much you can do as one human being, your efforts are useless and fuel and all those connections probably just make it seem even more daunting. I go, did you want to address the environment? Well, first, I'm going to have to address all of patriarchy and all of capitalism and exploitation and elite power structures in the north south. 

Geopolitical matrix. I mean, all that's probably true and those connections do exist, but hearing all that can make it even more overwhelming. You know, just, you're not just fighting. 

Fossil, you're fighting much larger structures. Now, one read is that the Hades town story is hopeful. This comes from Voss and Voss finds that the relationship with Eurydice and Orpheus is based on their ability to heal nature. 

And the same is true of the relationship between Hades and Persephone. That if those relationships can be repaired, then nature can be repaired and music and poetry can play a part, maybe, maybe an important part. Maybe if there's just one song out there that's good enough, that can restore harmony to nature. 

Maybe if we can just get a couple of these relationships from toxic to functional, the world's got a chance. But the musical and Orpheus story itself does not end in a way that makes it clear that any healing is possible. Orpheus turns around, you're ready to see it goes back to hell. And then in the various Greek stories, Orpheus has some other stranger fates that I encourage you to listen to prior episodes to learn all about. 

But in the show, it's just kind of over. Orpheus fails and that's the end message. But we then, and by toasting Orpheus in the book, Mitchell's book, working on a song, there it very clearly ends at the last couple of pages that Cheetah votes in that book is that the point of the story is that there are significant benefits to trying that. Why is it we toast Orpheus at the end against the impossible odds? And even after he's failed, well, it's an old song. It's a sad song. But we're going to sing it again and we are going to toast Orpheus because he tried. He took on the impossible odds and maybe he lost this one. But that doesn't mean that everyone's going to lose all the time. And the message we are to take from that is not Orpheus, you're an idiot. 

Why did you turn around? Or failure is inevitable. It is that failure is constant, but that doesn't remove the value in continuing to try. And I will say that just seems prescient in a world where the climate situation started as bad when this story was being written in 2006, when Mitchell wrote the very first incantation of Hades Town to the year 2025 and 2026 by the time this episode is released. What's the main problem we face with the climate? It's people are giving up. They're giving up because it's too hard. And Mitchell's answer to that that has been in that show for the last 20 years is that there is value in trying. Don't give up is Mitchell's story. Now, there are others who take a look at that show and come to with less optimistic conclusions. Jean Alvarez and Patricia Salsman Mitchell were an article that appeared in a journal called Classical World in the year 2025. So it's on off the press. 

Just came out last summer. They both work at Montclair State University. Here is their quote, quote, At this moment, all humanity and our tragic condition is in sympathy with his failure of trust. Like the classical orpheus, our orpheus, abandons human community once so important to him whom he has failed. The lasting reconciliation with nature did not appear, although the seasons seem to regain their balance. 

And yet there is some further hope remaining, although it is difficult to figure out precisely where the hope lies. And quote, and then they cite Moleski, who says that the play is a desperate embrace of the Sisyphus futility. Sisyphus, of course, is the guy who has to push the rock up the hill for all eternity with no hope of success ever. 

So I'll just say, get where they're coming from. The story does not end with Orpheus does sing a song, beautiful enough to restore the balance of nature. It ends with Orpheus looks back and Eurydice goes back to hell forever. And presumably Orpheus just ends as an idiot's failure. So when when Alvarez and Salsman Mitchell write their quote, it is difficult to find out precisely where the hope lies. Yeah, I get it. But putting it all together, it ends like this. 

There's general consensus that our climate is in trouble. There are a tiny group of industrials. They would literally fit on two school buses who really don't care, but they're the ones calling the shots. They're the corporate CEOs of the big fossil fuel producing companies. And the core issue is that that small group of people have some sort of drive to consume and to dominate nature and to keep themselves in incredible levels of power, and that might just kill us all. 

This sounds a lot like a Greek tragedy and also very psychoanalytic criticism. Why is it a small group of people would be so power hungry that they're going to pursue things that are going to kill us all and then come up with weird ways to justify that they're doing it. You can't really justify that in rational terms. Maybe you need some kind of criticism or psychoanalytic analysis or some delving into the relationship of what allows this arrangement to exist, which we'll get to in a second. But that does seem to be the situation that we're in. And then the question is whether or not the rest of us can write a song beautiful enough to restore balance and harmony, maybe to address those relationships. 

And as I promise we will get to in the next episode, whether or not art is even the place to take that fight. Now, Anais Mitchell has an answer. Lift up the cup to those who try. What else are you going to do? You can't give up. Well, on our next episode, the seventh of this series, we're going to talk more about whether or not poetry and art can lead to healing. 

But I do think that it is insightful that Mitchell very honestly presents a very complex issue without flinching. The climate's a major issue. Exploitative relationships are at the heart of it. There are a lot of connections between different things. And the problem is so big, it both seems to be insurmountable and in fact might really be insurmountable. 

But true heroism lies in trying with the best part of you to do whatever you can. And in a weird twist, in her book, Mitchell talks about she keeps trying to take that thing at the end where they toast Orpheus out that as you know, she works with her creative team that put the show together. She's a constant advocate for a thing. Hey, don't toast Orpheus. But her book definitely ends by saying I have lost that fight. 

The audience definitely wants to see people race that cup. And the conclusion, the last couple of pages of her book, says the message of the show is you got to keep trying even in the face of insurmountable odds or maybe even in the face of complete failure. All right. So that is the first issue that is tackled on the show, which is the environment. The second issue that the show tackles is gender. 

Now, it is important to note and Molesky starts the article with it by saying this show is the first winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical that was written and directed entirely by women. And Eurydice embodies a young female person of color who doesn't have good choices in a neoliberal system where constraint passes for free choice. This is all according to Molesky and Persephone is presented as an older woman of color who is struggling with an ongoing and difficult relationship. So that is just to say there are definitely gender issues that you can see in the show and the creative team itself brings some of those a non-male perspective to what's going on. And I think that's why a lot of people have focused on gender going on in the show. 

OK, so what does the show have to say about gender? Well, issue number one is that the romances are told through navigating relationships. In the classic story, the classic female story, the females made whole in marriage. This is a point that Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell talk about in the ancient growth tragedies, what is the role of women? 

Well, they're objects of desire that men and chariots come by and swoop off with. They get mad about it. Sure, Demeter is not happy about it. Persephone is not happy about it. 

But what is their relationship with their male partners that is largely underdeveloped in the classical Greek story and centuries of literary developments have not changed that a ton. So that is sort of what happened as we entered our last century. That was that was definitely kind of the way stories were being told. But in Mitchell's story, in this version of Hades Town, romance is told through navigating relationships. Mitchell, in her book, talks about she had to find the right balance between Eurydice and Orpheus. It couldn't just be an Orpheus story. It couldn't just be a Eurydice story. It had to be about the two of them. And Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell have this this to say about Persephone and Hades, quote, Hades separation from Persephone, the woman he loves but can never fully possess leaves a hole in his heart. 

End quote. Hades compensates for these unfulfilled desires for Persephone by intensifying his toxic perceived material wealth. Persephone's reaction is strongly negative. 

That hurts both of them. Here's another quote from Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell, quote, Persephone herself bears some responsibility for the deterioration of her marriage in the world. Hades compulsion is the engine of the problem, but Persephone is not a blameless victim. She's in denial, drowning her cares from one scene to the next. 

End quote. So as Hades turns more and more to the dark side, Persephone can no longer recognize him. She actually becomes the center of resistance to the underground, which briefly happens and we'll talk about that part of the show more next time. And according to Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell, this is a callback to Demeter in an earlier myth where Demeter is unhappy with her role and also with a role for Persephone. But Hades and Persephone definitely have a very intricate relationship that is explored in Hades town in the way that it has not been understood in the earlier versions of the tale. These relationships, so taking the study of relationships, looking at them the way that Mitchell does, introduces the pitfalls and the promises of the relationship. So there are dynamics within the couples for sure. We just talked about Hades and Persephone. 

They are in a death spiral. Hades says he does it all for Persephone. That is according to Yasmin Nieman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who published an article in the University of Massachusetts undergraduate history journal. So that's Nieman in 2025. I'll be referring to that author quite a bit. But according to Nieman, when Hades has asked, why are you so such a toxic over consumer? The answer is I'm doing it all for you Persephone. 

It is clear that that's not the whole story. That it's something about the anxiety that he's experienced about his position and his loss of Persephone is just making him turn harder and harder into his more dysfunctional spots. Persephone, for her part, withdraws into the party girl troves. She's not having a good relationship with Hades. He's increasingly distant from her. 

She's spending more time on the earth and she's spending more time getting drunk. So that's the dysfunctional relationship of Hades and Persephone. Or if you're seeing Eurydice have their own trap, they love each other, but he's a hopeless dreamer and he does not have it in him to provide materially in a way that will support both of them. So they have love, but he's so much in his own world. He has difficulty connecting to others and she's in the spot where she does legitimately love Orpheus, but she also has material needs and it's also obvious to her that if I pursue this relationship with Orpheus, I will never be able to survive, especially in this environmentally degraded world. 

Those are the dynamics within each couple, but there are more complicated dynamics between each couple. Eurydice, as a younger, attractive woman, is a threat to Persephone. Hades kind of takes a shine to the younger woman. This is from Alvarez and Salzman Mitchell, quote, for Hades, Persephone's pity for Orpheus is also a threat to their sacred marriage and his power. 

End quote. So right as Hades is kind of looking at Eurydice and taking an interest in Eurydice, Persephone is looking at Orpheus and taking sympathy on him, which is the threat to Hades. And then Persephone openly advocates for Eurydice and tells Hades that they should be able to enjoy what she and Hades has lost, that is the Eurydice and Orpheus, should be able to enjoy what it was that Persephone and Hades once had, and that's Persephone's perspective, which is also threatening to Hades. Hades, on the other hand, also knows his own doubts about Persephone. He knows how he feels about Persephone, and then he figures Orpheus must have these same problems in his feelings with Eurydice, so he uses that against him. Hades uses that against Orpheus by setting up this thing like, if you totally trust her, you can get out of hell, and I'm betting you don't totally trust her because I know how I feel about Persephone, and I'm betting you feel the same way about Eurydice. Alvarez and Salpson and Mitchell link this to a notion of male fragility, that they're not, you know, males take their ego support in achievement, and so they vote, you know, Orpheus turns more and more into higher and higher musical achievement, Hades turns more and more into higher capitalist achievement, and that's where they try to find themselves when they really need to be reaching out and connecting to the women in their lives, but they can't do it because they're both fatally flawed. Orpheus, for his part, knows how he feels. He is in love with Eurydice, and so that is what he uses against Hades. 

He sings to Hades, hey man, remember what it was like to be young and in love, if you do, you gotta let, give me a chance here. And that's just a lot going on. How all of that resolves isn't really what I'm getting at here. 

I'm just saying there's a lot of complexity in there, and ultimately the action in the show is driven by each couple's need to reconcile. I just saw a production of Twelfth Night. It was put on by my daughter's high school, by the way, awesome production. And that is the high school, by the way, that Michael Desparse, who we've had a previous on the show and a previous episode talk about. 

But in that show, you know, it's Shakespeare. It starts with there's like three or four different romantic couples, and they all are messed up. And so everything that happens with the show is those couples trying to reconcile their relationships. And ultimately, that same thing is what's going on in Hades Town, that the couples have their relationships messed up, that is messing up the world around them. And the attempt to reconcile those relationships is what is driving the action. According to DiPrado, the older couple resolves on trying to get their marriage saved. As Orpheus and Eurydice head off. And so it all kind of works. 

Or at least it has the possibility of working. That those different, remember what young love is like, is what moves the couples forward. And we have these anxieties. 

We don't trust each other. So it moves these couples backwards, violence and tragedy. But those are the dynamics that are driving the plot. This definitely has the effect of rounding out the characters and the relationship. 

And according to Alvarez and Salzman Mitchell, this gives it more of a feminine lens. It's not just we get married and then we're happy or it's a rom-com. And the whole thing is, can we really get together? And then we do. 

And it's great. This is to say, all the characters have depth and all the relationships are complex. And the characters have to grapple with that. 

And that, according to Alvarez and Salzman Mitchell, puts it in a feminine lens. According to Neiman, which is a variant on that theme, it's about trying and failing. Which is, of course, the ultimate point of the show. And the human condition and human feelings and failings. 

And for Neiman, this includes relationships. That it is, you try and you fail with your song to save the world. But you also try and fail to make your relationship perfect or mutually satisfying. That just over time, there's a lot of challenges relationships face. And working your way through your failures in relationships is just part of the human condition. 

Okay. So the first way the gender plays out is with rich complex relationships. With struggles that come to, uh, indefinite conclusions. This is far more than the flat romances or a woman whose story ends with getting married and becoming a wife. It goes way beyond what the ancient Greeks did, including both Ovid and Virgil, where a beautiful woman is mostly an object of desire for a male figure in a chariot to abduct and reproduce with. So one thing that Mitchell has done successfully is to add relational depth and complexity to the Orpheus story, uh, as she tells it in Hades Town. So that's the first that's the first gender theme. 

The second gender theme is the idea of a provider versus a lover. Now, according to Charles Siegel, who we met in a previous episode, I believe he's a Brown University, Orpheus is an interesting literature because he's the first champion of love. And according to Mitchell, Orpheus is a hopeless dreamer. 

Hades is a toxic but sexy older male with a lot of cash. He's powerful if Henry Kissinger is right. And if you look like Henry Kissinger, you really hoped it was true that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Hades has got a lot of aphrodisiac on hand. So Orpheus is a champion of love. 

He's a long hopeless streamer. Hades is toxic but older and very powerful. And this definitely puts a uniquely feminine choice right in front and center of the plot. Do you choose the provider or do you choose the lover? And what you'd like is to have them both, but as has just happened so many times since western culture and society has been formed by 2000 years of privileging males and disadvantages females, it is a very difficult choice that many women have to face. Do I pick somebody that I think can make me emotionally happy? Or do I pick somebody who can provide for me materially? 

And what do I do if I can't have both? So Eurydice is essentially put in that choice. She's forced by circumstances and surviving on her own isn't really a choice. So she's got to pick. And then the choice is that she decides she's going to go with the older male. Now this is sort of a callback to at the beginning Hades and Persephone's met in a garden and he fell in love with her and she rejected the security of her mother's garden because she was overwhelmed by the intensity of Hades' love and desire. 

And the upper world was not yet Hades' enemy. That's according to Alvarez and Salisman Mitchell. That is true. That is one interpretation of the Hades and Persephone story. 

The other story is he's just a duck sir. But if Alvarez and Salisman Mitchell are correct, then the choice that Eurydice is facing between a lover and a provider was originally faced by Persephone and Hades. Now it is true that Orpheus's love broke Eurydice out of sort of ruthless isolation, but then she becomes so cold and hungry and Orpheus is no help. And the fates are around seeing her kind of taunting her with that. And so Eurydice chooses to leave, which ends up being a difficult choice for her and it ends up being a betrayal. As soon as she makes the choice, Hades was like, oh, you thought you were going to have a cushy job here in hell? Heck no. 

Get in that line. You're about to start losing your memory and you're just another worker to me. So I am making much of that older, powerful male and the relationship to Eurydice. In earlier versions of the play, it was a full-on sexual betrayal. That is that Eurydice leaves Orpheus to take on Hades as a lover. But in recent Broadway version, it's a momentary weakness. There's an implication that Hades is hitting on Eurydice, but Mitchell makes it very clear that it has to be a more difficult choice for Eurydice than that. 

It's not just a sexual one. That is still present. It is simply implied. At the end of all that, Alvarez and Salsman Mitchell say, modern audiences relate more to Eurydice than Orpheus now. And I do think that centers it as a gendered choice. Eurydice has got to make a difficult choice and Orpheus can kind of afford to be more of a dreamer. He's also more of a god than she is. He's also more favored by the gods than she is. And he's also got more natural talent that can bail him out. And so Eurydice is in a tougher spot and that is a gendered situation. 

And so the choice between provider and lover is something that Eurydice has to make and Orpheus does not. Theme number three, violence against women. This comes straight from Alvarez and Salsman Mitchell. Persephone sees herself in Eurydice. And according to these two authors, human life has sort of a divine pattern of violence that is passed down from one generation to the next. 

And if you read the ancient Greek stories, that's not uncommon. Gods are fighting each other. They're killing each other. They are betraying each other. They are betraying humans. They are mating with humans. They're treating humans poorly. 

And this violence just keeps getting passed down from one generation to the next. And so one feature of the ancient Greek stories is it's not like they have happy endings or hero overcomes everything. And then it's great. 

It's more like you just try to get through the next day. And the hero is the one who can survive a world that's generally trying to kill you. They cite some authors who think that this version of the story white washes the violence and the rape of Persephone. But their conclusion is that in this version, she has given some agency. 

That is that Persephone is less just a victim in the Aeneas Mitchell version of Hades Town than she was in the original, Virgil and Ovid versions of the story. I will say that is present. I don't know if that's a central point on which to judge the show, but generational violence, especially gendered violence is definitely a real thing that I think I mentioned on the show before. I teach class on sexual communication and sexual abuse definitely is not just something that happens to one person at one time. 

It's something that typically has a link that goes back generations, the people who are become sexual abusers or people who were sexually abused themselves. Like it's not just a little bit real. It's really, really real. If you read social science, it's a pretty unequivocal pattern. This is especially true of women of color and especially true of indigenous women. If you want a quick and painless entree to the topic, there's a show called Alaska Daily that starts Hillary Swank that brings this point into the forefront that women of color, especially at risk of violence and intergenerational violence. So my conclusion, what I think is happening in the show is that there's enough of this theme of intergenerational violence is into the show that it is a recognizable theme without really being central to the action. That's still an important contribution that adds more complexity and more depth to the story. It makes it feel more real. It makes it feel like it's dealing with more real issues. Okay, there is a fourth sexual theme. 

I'm going to dwell on this a little bit less. This is the theme of homosexuality. I'm going to turn here to Sarah Whitfield from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. Now, according to Whitfield, the traditional heterosexual narrative is a love story with a happy ending. And there's a chronology to it. 

That is, there's a time sequence that matters a lot. Okay, we have talked, I've talked about psychoanalytic criticism and rhetorical criticism. And there are definite insights that you could draw from that. There's also a tendency of these authors to write in ways that make the rest of us not really understand what they're talking about. I'm going to give you a quote here, just to give you the flavor of what Whitfield's ideas are like, try to do them suggest us, but also to identify the writing style that Whitfield is using. Quote, we're dramaturgies and queer characteristics, unsettled heterosexual dramaturgies in which a man and a woman meet and overcome obstacles to fall in love. It would be useful to consider the shapes of stories in musical theater in relationship to their temporality and indeed, Zachary Dorsey has made the argument that the musical as a genre tends toward what he calls the temporal inquiries, subjunctive mood. Then they, I will end my quote there, then Whitfield quotes Dorsey, but you know, do you know what the temporal inquiries of the subjunctive mood is? I'll just say, I'll just say, is there an easier way you could have said that or got to the point a little faster? 

And, you know, I fought my way through this article. And I guess what I wonder is my second question I would have is, is temporality really the issue here? Now there are some interesting challenges to traditional heterosexual structures in the show. The show itself is not about queer issues, but Andrew De Shields has asserted in interviews that his performance is. He plays Hermes, he's a black man in real life, he's homosexual, homosexual audience has recognized that, but of course his character is not necessarily homosexual in the way. And he links this to a small moment where he smacks his fist as an indication of black queer resistance. I think Shields has definitely tapped into a moment there and the audience has recognized that that's what's going on. It resonates with them. 

Whitfield is all in on queer temporality. Challenges are important. There's another quote there that I won't read. And okay, I'll say, I don't want to be, I honestly do not want to be dismissive here. There is something about the structure of a traditional heterosexual love story that does exclude other possibilities. But I will say that Abigail Voss, one of our other authors, does note that this also reads like a traditional love story, probably a tragic heterosexual love story, like say Romeo and Juliet. And there are some queer possibilities here. I'm just not sure that those are central to the theme. It is easy to see some powerful traditional male and female issues that are getting worked out in the show. You got to kind of squint to find the queer elements. But then again, the same is true of autism, which we talked about in the last show, not all audiences would see autism in this show, but autistic people do. 

Not everyone would see the queer elements of the show, but queer people probably do. And those elements are critical for people who find them. So I would say that's an element that is definitely in the show. 

I'm not really sure that it is the time element that is so important. Like there's a bunch of stuff about heterosexism. I'm not sure that it's the heterosexual ordering of plot that really is so exclusionary. And so I'm not sure challenging that is that big a deal. I'm also not sure the show really does challenge all that. It is definitely something about the cyclicality. 

It's more about failure and trying than it is about time, at least in my view. Okay, that wraps up our discussion of gender. We'll get back to what all that means and how it gets back to how that connects with the environment. But let's get to our third, our third main theme of the day, which is race. 

Those are, which is front and central, once again in Haneystown. Now, according to Molesky, he sees a connection with race and class since Eurydice is played by a young female of color who is in a precarious situation. And Voss notes that African-American spirituals have been used to represent the plight of black Americans that are part of the resistance. And the Mitchell very consciously sets this in jazz era New Orleans style thing that is definitely part of the African-American spiritual. And it's worth taking a minute to talk about the casting about race before we get into a discussion of what it means. The casting of the show is important, and there's definitely racial overtones that are suggested by the casting. 

We'll talk about that concept in a little bit. But just, you know, before we get too far into race, let's remember who's playing what. Persephone is played by Amber Gray, Wikipedia lists Amber Gray as biracial and was a military kid. Eurydice is played by Eva Maria Noblesada, Kearney, whose parents were Filipino and Mexican. So both Persephone and Eurydice are played by females of color. Orpheus and Hades are both played by white guys, Reeve Kearney and Patrick Page. 

And race is definitely not specified in the script. And what I just mentioned, that was the Broadway cast. That was the cast of the 2019 Broadway show that won all the awards. But they were definitely played, these characters were played by other people of different races and different cast and different incantations of the show and clearly used in a fluid way by the creators and who feel that the members of the cast could bring out different elements to the characters. I'll also say that Kevin Moro plays Hades on the North American tour. He presents as Black Man. 

I got to see that show. Kevin Moro is quite talented and very obviously presents as person of color, which does change the way you understand the role of Hades and in relation to the environmental and the gender question. So that's the backstory to how race is kind of set up going into the show. Nia Wilson is a graduate student in performance studies at Texas A &M University and published an article in 2021. Nia Wilson takes on very directly this question of race. Now I will say that Wilson has a very well written piece and it is not flippant. It's very consistent with what people write about white supremacy and the white supremacy literature. It's also a six page article, something like the 25 page long academic full blown treatment, but Nia Wilson is doing a very competent job of taking those ideas and deploying them and is taking on the question of race centrally. 

Here's how Nia Wilson sees. She cites some interviews with casting directors who talk about thinking about race as they're trying to tell their story. She thinks that Hermes being a Black man is a good choice that reminds everyone to think about structural racism and to see that maybe that situation I talked about before where there are some elites that are making decisions on the basis that could destroy the world for everyone else, that that's not just a question of power, that that is also a question of race and that is a question of a white power structure, not just a power structure. Nia Wilson's thesis is that the show never directly addresses that question of white supremacy quote, but despite its multi-racial cast, the US's history of white supremacy is never directly addressed in relation to the play's main themes of economic inequality and environmental exploitation. End quote, you know, my 50 word summary is it's not hard to look at US history and especially slavery and see that the development of the modern industrial world was built on the back of slave labor, which has always been racialized and race has never been absent from industry and from the environmental exploitation and from the arrival of the industrial era. 

And there are a lot of theorists that Nia Wilson cites that feel that question must be centrally addressed. Nia Wilson asks whether Hades is white or not since that character has been played by both a white person and a Black person quote, is Hades white or not? End quote, that's about us directly as you ask that question. And it ends the same paragraph with quote, given everything else going on in the production, a person of color Hades doesn't make sense. End quote. And then separately, quote Hades town openness to casting Hades as an actor of any ethnicity lacks a commitment to critiquing historical and contemporary white supremacy. End quote, Wilson does believe that the final message is that storytelling is a repeated act of hope, but it's very skeptical about this quote, the flexible approach to casting while inclusive hampers the production's ability to take aim specifically at white supremacy. The production does not make clear how class, exploitative labor and xenophobia are intertwined with white supremacy. Hades town avoids going beyond a liberal, we're all in this together by rendering the workers as a multicultural ensemble devoid of specific racial, ethnic, cultural or gendered identities and experiences. It is understandable that in trying to weave together so many political themes, Hades towns creative team chose to focus on economic inequality and labor exploitation rather than race. 

End quote. And Wilson also notes that Orpheus is frequently presented as a white savior who can save us the white guy with a guitar. That is Wilson's critique and the risk of simplifying it is essentially that the show raised the question of race, but then failed to explore the question of white supremacy as a central driving factor in the forces that are currently leading to climate change and destroying the environment. My take is that the show is addressing a solution more than the problem. 

What is the point of the show? It is that art and trying are important ways to produce political change. We will get to whether or not that's effective next time. Wilson's critique, however, focuses not about the solutions, but the failure of the show to go deeper into the causes. Now, knowing the cause is important to a solution, but it's not the whole solution. 

And what you want to talk about is how does art, how do relationships, how does the never ending willingness to try play into the solution, failing to completely lay out everything that has gone into the problem, I think is a more forgivable shortcoming. You know, what Wilson talks about is how Wilson is reacting, is gauging what the audience's reaction is going to be. I think that Wilson might be overgeneralizing, but I don't doubt that Wilson or anybody else who's really steeped in the white supremacy literature does react to the show the way Wilson does, but I don't think everybody has as many problems with a multiracial caste as Wilson does. And kind of gets to the question of what's your overall theory of what a critic is? Do you want to take the show as what it tries to and judge it in those terms, or do you want to identify what show you think should have happened or criticize the choices that the show make? If you want to criticize the choices the show makes, or it, you know, I think you get to do what Wilson does to say that took the wrong, named it the wrong thing at the beginning, so no matter how well it does, and it's never going to realize its full potential, and it might play into some multiracialism that is a problem for you, if you believe that we need to focus on white supremacy. If on the other hand, you get, you want to say, well, the show isn't really taking that question on, it's taking on these other two questions about solutions not causes. 

What did you think of that? Then I think Wilson's criticism misses the point a little bit. I also think that you need to look at some other shows. This is not the only Broadway show that has done the multiracial casting. 

What do you, what do you make of Hamilton? The clearly cast of color, they didn't really centrally address white supremacy. It lurks in every scene, and it's very obvious that you're playing people who historically white by performers who are people of color, it's there, but it does not centrally address the question of white supremacy in a way that I'm sure you Wilson would have wanted to do. What do you make of Jesus Christ Superstar? If you think that Hades cannot be played by a black man, and Jesus Christ Superstar, Ben Vareen plays Judas. Judas, others have said, is the most hated name in history, but everyone was kind of okay with Ben Vareen playing that role, kind of, because he played it so well. It might not the same be true of whoever it is plays Hades. 

If you played great, should that should that role be unavailable to people of color? What do you make of the whiz? WNYC called that a black take on the Wizard of Oz. It came out in 1974. It had Diana Ross. It had Michael Jackson. It also had Andre Shields in it. 

Was that failing? You know, was that you're using a black cast to play characters that were not originally written as black, but did it fail to deal with white supremacy centrally enough? What do you make of Wiccant, which is out in the theaters now? There's, you know, a person of color, made in green makeup that is sold out by a white person after it. Here's what I'm saying is, there's not a single formula for saying, how is it you must address race in your cast? I'm not saying those shows disprove Nia Hamilton's or Nia Wilson's point, but I am saying that if you're going to go all in on a multiracial cast, must address the question of white supremacy. 

I think you should at least talk about the other shows where that has been the same question and at least figure out how you thought they dealt with it. Now, I will also say there's a curious case of Clarence Thomas, the famously very, very conservative Supreme Court justice of color. I think if you were to look at what the current Supreme Court has done and what it's done with Donald Trump's agenda, if you were a opposed white supremacy, you would say this court and Clarence Thomas in particular have been very strong advocates for white supremacy. Well, if that's true, then it might also be the case that it is possible for a black man to be fully complicit with part of the white supremacy agenda. 

And if that's true, I do think that changes up what you would say about 80s down and its treatment of race or its treated multiracialism. Nia Wilson makes a strong case from the perspective of a white supremacy critique. I take this as sort of a, in the same way I read Hamilton. Casting is obviously making a racial statement, but the plot mostly puts that in your peripheral vision. I think Hamilton is ultimately a win for more inclusion and for shaking up whiteness and for challenging some taken for granted assumptions. And from my perspective, letting the characters have richness across racial characteristics is a net positive thing. I do think there's much to be said for taking white supremacy. I'm not sure every show has taken that on as a central thing or every show with a multiracial cast that addresses questions of oppression and industrialism needs to make that its exclusive focus. And I think there's progress on multiple fronts. 

And isn't that kind of what the show is all about? Okay, that has been a lot. We have taken on the three of the many big important questions of our day. We've taken on race, race, gender, and the environment. What do we make of all that? Okay, here's the conclusion. On the environment, the ambiguous ending ends up being a very on-point message for a current climate moment where eco depression is such a threat to getting anything important done on the climate. And since this show was written in 2006, way before, you know, back when there was 20 years for us to get our act together and take care of climate change by the year 2026, making that point in 2026 that, look, man, you just got to keep trying. It seems huge. 

It seems bigger than the new, but you just got to keep trying. That is an important message that responds very much to our exact moment on climate change, which is I think why the show has some relevance. I have previously said what is great art do and it has something rich in there to say about a lot of different issues for a lot of different change in political circumstances. I think that since at its outset, Hades Town focused on questions of oppression and marginalization and privilege and exclusion that as those issues keep coming up in the world around us, it will continue to be relevant to all of the issues that came up. 

And in climate, at least, I think it really hit the nail right on the head. For gender, it perceived relational complexity and gender relations. Oppression plays out as a series of difficult choices rather than simply bad and white choices with easy good guys and easy bad guys. I will stay my own master's students struggle with this that in my argument seminars, we'll bring up question of gender. Look back 100 years ago, and the students are very good at seeing women are marginalized, men are privileged, but if they have to give it any more nuance or complexity than that, they begin to struggle. I do not think Hades Town has that same difficulty that Hades Town immediately starts with, okay, so if there is generally speaking, privilege to males and exclusion for females, how does that play out in the relationships that men and women have with each other? 

And that's very deeply explored in Hades Town. And I think that is a win for the show. And for race, the multi-ethnic casting choice can be seen as raising opportunities as being more inclusive as letting everyone be more well-rounded or as missing a key point about white supremacy. 

I'm in the, it's a net good group, it presents rich characters, cross races, Neil Wilson is in the net bad group, I guess I'm gonna let you decide that for yourself, but I'm gonna end with just a couple thoughts about where the show is, how it fits historically and how it fits on these questions of race, gender and the environment. I had earlier said there are three great tellers of the Orpheus tale. There is Virgil, who told a traditional Greek story about structure and order and the way that gods relate to humans. There is Ovid, who made it a great love story and they are very different versions. So one important thing is that Anais Mitchell interpreted, inherited not one story of Orpheus, but at least two very different stories of Orpheus and decided to tell her own story. And I will just beg you to go back and listen to the first two episodes of the series if you are at all interested in what the original Orpheus story is. 

Anais Mitchell made it a modern story and took those very deep issues and brought them to our time and I do think that makes, you know, in the way Virgil made the Orpheus story relevant to where Virgil was living and Ovid made it relevant to his world that he was living in, Mitchell has made it relevant to our world. The Man of Lomondcha is a great musical. It is based on Cervantes's book Don Quixote. Les Mis is a great musical that's based on Victor Hugo's novel and arguably each one of those books are the best novel in their own language. That is to say Don Quixote is widely regarded as the best novel in the Spanish language and Les Mis is arguably the greatest novel in the French language. 

There are of course other contenders, but those two are definitely at the top of the list. They express so many important ideas with passion and nuance that speak to their time and the human condition that you can reread them and keep finding more stuff in there every time you read them. And in fact, when we talked about those two musicals in earlier episodes of this very podcast, one point that we did is there's a bunch of scholars who go back and reread those two books every year because they keep finding more stuff again and more out. And I think that is what Anais Mitchell has done with her two-hour tales. She's added so many themes and played them all out so well in the truncated language of poetry. Like, Dr. Hugo burned a bunch of pages. 

Don Quixote crosses volumes, both books, many volumes. What Anais Mitchell did, she had to do in two hours. And so, you know, whatever she was going to do, she had to do with very few words to get to some really big ideas. 

But she put it all in there in a way that could launch a million different discussions. And it has, and I hope in this episode I reviewed what some of the people out there who think a lot about that story Hades Town have put into it and what they take from it. Hades Town is indeed a story that can be told again and again. It is an old story. 

It is a sad story. And it's a song that we're going to sing over and over. And if you go back and watch that show a couple different times, you'll keep getting more and more out of it. That does it for this episode. Next time we will take what all of these different issues kind of dance around or implicate is Anais Mitchell right about her political prescription can't art and trying again and again make the world a better place. We will find out next time on episode seven of Theater History and Mysteries treatment of Hades Town.