Tragic Love and Raining Elevators

The story goes: Orpheus the son of Apollo and Calliope (the muse) falls for Eurydice, and their love is triumphant. Orpheus plays the most beautiful music the gods have ever heard, and the two lovers are set to be married. Eurydice steps on a snake and dies instantly. Orpheus charms his way down to the underworld with his music to retrieve her and his song is so beautiful that he succeeds in convincing Hades to let Eurydice go, under one (fateful) condition: Eurydice has to follow behind Orpheus, and if Orpheus turns to see if she’s there—she disappears forever. Of course, this is Greek Tragedy. Orpheus turns sees his love for a fleeting second, and then she vanishes.

Why are you telling me this?” You might ask. Well, I was off traveling again—This July I enjoyed a ridiculously long vacation with the rest of the family clan in Greece. Some of the trip was what I expected: beautiful white and blue houses along winding roads, spectacularly clear waters, and way too much feta. Some of it, however, was surprising: the mountains of the Pelion, for example, are lush and a verdant green. It felt straight out of a Miyazaki movie, as if spirits were seeping out of the cracks in the stone.

Speaking of spirits, I don't know who took a big gulp out of the retelling-of-a-greek-story bucket this season, but it seems like Eurydice/Orpheus's story is everywhere. It’s kind of taken over my year a bit. Between this trip, Wesleyan’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice this past spring, and the production of Hadestown this year that won the Tony, tragic love is in the air.

When we booked this trip to Greece, I was curious about how much the myth I knew from Edith Hamilton played into true Greek culture. Obviously, Greece‘s culture and history are more complex than any American tourist’s view, so I picked up Eurydice Street by Sofka Zinovieff, a well-written little memoir that follows Sophia’s first year living in Athens with her family with interspersed Greek history throughout. I would recommend the read, especially if you are interested in a cultural dive into Greece with a little bit of personal narrative thrown in there. I've never been a big non-fiction girl, so the narrative aspect of this memoir was gladly welcomed. She writes about the Greeks and their tragedies, saying (i'm paraphrasing here) that Greek culture incorporates Greek myth by living grandiosely: in other words, if you fail, fail tragically, and if you succeed, succeed triumphantly.

I’ve loved Ruhl’s Eurydice since I read it in playwriting freshman year, and with this resurgence of the myth in my/the theater community, I was curious to write down my thoughts on Hadestown and Eurydice together.

My favorite part about Ruhl’s work is her capacity to lasso emotion with simple language and gesture: her words aren’t made up of particularly heightened language, so they aren’t hard to connect with, yet they carry an ineffable power in their lightness. (Also not hard to memorize!! Thanks, Sarah!).

I think on some level the purest thoughts are the most simple ones: an "I miss you" that explains more in three words than a paragraph. That being said the purest ones are maybe the hardest ones to distill into three words, and harder yet to create as an actor. Maybe it's the actor in me that reads Ruhl's play and sees this challenge as an opportunity (if the work in rehearsal is done right) for beauty. Ruhl clearly expects a lot from her actors; she presents pure thoughts and requires the actors to do them justice.

I also would argue that the "pure" aspect of Eurydice's script has to do with the characterization of the lovers. In both Hadestown and Eurydice the lovers are completely human: In Ruhl's version, the two are "too" in love. Their young (and #relatable) obsession adds to the simple purity of the story. It's a story that we understand because we have lived it. In Hadestown, the lovers are a pair we have seen before too: a scrappy young girl who gives into the starving, sweet, artist.

Hadestown and Ruhl's Eurydice are both enticing for the same reasons: they offer a retelling of a beautiful cathartic love story woven so that we can see ourselves in it. However, Eurydice is easily less political and focuses on the complexities of grief, love, and moving forward, while Hadestown tackles a different set of issues, namely, the end of the world/climate change, self-worth, and freedom. With so many themes to tackle, Hadestown loses the simplicity of the myth (that Ruhl captures) but it does something else instead--it makes the world of the play more tangible and visceral.

I would argue that because Hadestown's themes are more complex and more numerous, they allow more space for interpretation--it is particularly notable that a lot of shows in the 2018 season were about death, and the search for an ecological savior feels particularly apt these days. The focus on wider themes gives Hadestown more power--it punches through to the audience by building a world that is tragic and relatable on many levels and leaves us to think about not only love but the world's future, and storytelling's future. A notable example of this is Mitchell's song "Why do we build the wall", where Hades looks out upon his dystopia, a town where the dead souls work for him to create fuel/energy and goads them into a chant with his subterranean bass vocals:

"What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children And the war is never won The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free We build the wall to keep us free”.

This song (which was written before Trump's candidacy) serves as a chilling reference to how our current administration sees freedom: as something to be harnessed and harbored. Freedom in Hadestown is for those who divide themselves, and Hades creates an Us/Them dichotomy in his chant so that his workers believe they can't find empathy on the other side of their wall.

Sitting in the theater, it is impossible not to see the connection to Trump, but it also allows a view of what the other side of the fight looks like. Hadestown asks the audience how they see freedom, but also why they see freedom that way. When Eurydice "chooses" to go the underworld, she does so because she would rather not starve, and the ensemble asks the audience to get off their high horse, saying:

"Life ain’t easy, life ain’t fair
A girl’s gotta fight for a rightful share
What you gonna do when the chips are down
Now that the chips are down"

It's easy to assume that the audience in a broadway theater understands freedom a certain way because of their ability to afford a ticket, their interest in liberal theater, etc. Freedom means something different depending on where you're coming from, and when the fates ask the audience what they would do, they also ask the audience to consider their privilege in judging Eurydice.

That being said, it does seem that Hadestown lays blame on Eurydice for her choice/her own death, which I don't love. I'm always searching for the female narrative in a story, and I think (especially because I had spent months working on Eurydice) I was disappointed about how little I saw of Eva Noblelzada. She carried a lot of power on the stage and I wished she was given more to say. In the myth, Eurydice has no part in her death. In Ruhl's work, she is pushed into a corner by a controlling and manipulative man that doesn't take no for an answer. In Hadestown, Eurydice leaves to search for food, runs into Hades, and chooses to leave with him instead of returning to her world of hunger. In Gone, I'm Gone, Eurydice sings "Orpheus, my heart is yours/Always was and always will be/It's my gut I can't ignore/Orpheus I'm hungry. What frustrates me is that in the actual show her death is framed as an abandonment of Orpheus.

At this moment, Hadestown asks its audience pretty directly about what they'd do at the end of the world, with no food? Would they take the deal, or no? It an interesting query, but it also seems worth mentioning that in the song, it sounds like Eurydice is going to die anyway--is there really a choice? Is Mitchell's creation of a "choice" in the song making Eurydice the bad guy aimlessly? After all, Hades mentions that if she doesn't follow him, she'll be torn up by birds instead. Maybe it's the hopeless romantic in me, but I think it would frame the tragedy better if Hades had taken Eurydice, because then the love between the timeless lovers is never called into question, and the story has a more consistent through-line.

Speaking of love, the tragic end of Orpheus and Eurydice is what defines the whole myth, so naturally, the endings define both of these shows too. In Ruhl's version, Eurydice has the autonomy: she follows Orpheus, makes a conscious choice, and calls out his name. Ruhl gives a lot of space to the director/actor team in this moment so any given Eurydice can make her decision about why she decides to call out. In my opinion, she seems to be acting out of fear of the unknown. Although she knows Orpheus, a lot of time has passed, and she isn't so sure if he is what she wants, or if life is what she wants. In her insecurity and fear, she calls out for reassurance and turns the story tragic. She returns to find that her father has voluntarily forgotten all he knows about her, and she joins him. We watch as she forgets, and then Orpheus appears in the Underworld, also joining the world of oblivion: the hurt is too strong to bear remembering.

In Hadestown, Orpheus has the autonomy. The show sets up that it is Orpheus's responsibility to lead Eurydice up to the underworld and as he walks, self doubt overtakes him, so that moments from the surface, he turns. As he walks, the fates sing

"Who are you?
Who do you think you are?
Who are you?
Who are you to lead her?
Who are you to lead them?
Who are you to think that you can hold your head up higher than your fellow man?"

We watch as doubt creeps into Orpheus's mind, and he second guesses his connection with Eurydice, his talent, his leadership, and his every step. When he turns, it's because he's lost faith in himself, not in Eurydice. The self-sabotage and self-doubt in Orpheus doesn't usually exist: he is usually played as slightly cocky. Hadestown allows him to be vulnerable, and therefore gives his turn a deeper meaning. The ensemble then reenacts the beginning scene, the audience watches as Orpheus meets Eurydice again, and Hermes (the show's narrator) tells the audience:

"It's a sad song
We keep singing even so
It's an old song
It's an old tale from way back when
And we're gonna sing it again and again"


This ending is particularly interesting because it both gives the audience the catharsis of a tragic ending and a reminder that catharsis isn't the only reason we retell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice over and over--we tell stories to create hope, and Hadestown allows hope by fighting for the lovers again and again, even when they are doomed.

So. Which one is better? I think each has their strengths and weaknesses, each offers a form of catharsis, and each transforms the characters so that Orpheus and Eurydice are new, tragic, and current. Eurydice offers a distilled, tragic story about love and loss, and Hadestown offers a spectacle that confronts political themes and self doubt. I guess it's to each their own, but at the end of the day, we don't have to choose. Each piece does something for theater, and for storytelling. What more can we ask for?

I'd love to hear your/more thoughts, and I hope that mine were interesting to read! Coming back at you soon, with something else. I'm planning on a lot of writing this semester, so I hope you're ready for some moody drafts!

x.
O