BHS Productions Presents

DRAMATURGY

Why a myth?

A myth isn’t the work of one author. It changes every time it’s retold, which is why Orpheus and Eurydice come to us in more than one version: Virgil and Ovid told it differently, Anaïs Mitchell told it again, and now we’re telling ours. Myths exist to wrestle with the oldest questions there are, like what makes life worth living and what we do about loss. Retelling is how a myth survives, so our production, which carries its own interpretation of Hadestown, is the myth doing exactly what myths do.

DRAMATURGY

One era, two worlds.

Our whole show takes place in the Jazz Age: a speakeasy above ground, and below it, Hades’s company town, built over the decaying remains of the Gilded Age. That earlier era of grand fortunes was itself a picture of unbalanced wealth, and Hades inherits its machinery rather than inventing it. So the two worlds aren’t separated by decades. They’re separated by how resources, and people, are treated, and the actions in one just might effect the other.

DRAMATURGY

Why five Fates?

Tradition never agreed on how many Fates there are. Homer usually speaks of a single Moira, the temple at Delphi honored only two, and Hesiod gives us three: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Elsewhere the number grows from three great and many more besides, to sixty, one for each year of a sixty-year cycle, each taking a turn overseeing the world’s fortunes and misfortunes. In our version of the myth: we begin with three, quickly joined by two who learn from them, because what the Fates do is contagious. They prey on people’s fears and anxieties, and the behavior spreads. As the story goes on, the five begin acting together. They never tell anyone anything they don’t already have in the back of their mind, and that’s exactly what makes them frightening.

DRAMATURGY

The wrist clasp.

In ancient Greek weddings there was no ring exchange. The groom grasped the bride by the wrist, a gesture called cheir epi karpo (“hand on wrist”) that symbolized taking her into his care. Eurydice belongs to no one, so in our version both hands find the other’s wrist, and hers arrives first. It’s the same ancient ritual, but it reads as her choice instead of his claim.

DRAMATURGY

Lanterns and borrowed light.

Greek weddings ended in a torchlit procession, with the mothers of the couple carrying flames lit from their own hearths. Eurydice has no family left to carry a torch for her, so our company stands in and carries the light she doesn’t have. The lanterns also drift like fireflies around the pond. Watch for them to return later in the show and see who has taken that light.

DRAMATURGY

Where Hades stands.

Hades watches from a raised bridge on the second level, our own take on a very old industrial idea: put the boss where he can see everything. In the 1780s Samuel Bentham designed a workshop around a single inspector with every bench in view, an idea his brother Jeremy published in 1791 as the Panopticon. Historic mills put the overseer in a glass-walled office at the end of each production room, and by 1915 steel mills ran their lines from an elevated control platform called the pulpit. All of it came well before our Jazz Age, and the word “supervisor” itself means “over-seer.” In our Hadestown, control works through height, distance, and gaze rather than touch. Keep an eye on that bridge. It matters.

DRAMATURGY

The pond and the plug.
Water is life and love in our show, and you’ll notice how many moments of love and creation happen near the pond: a song that makes a flower bloom, two people choosing each other at its edge. For much of Act I the pond is open, then it’s sealed with a heavy stopper, and everything the water stood for becomes unattainable. We hope that when it re-emerges, you find yourself able to breathe differently.

DRAMATURGY

The Egyptian influence.

Anaïs Mitchell studied abroad in Cairo, and we think Egypt left its fingerprints on our Hadestown. Ancient Egyptians believed death was a continuation, not an end, so the dead still needed food, shelter, and labor. They even buried small figurines, called shabti, meant to do the dead’s work for them. Their Book of the Dead is a papyrus of spells and names for getting past the gatekeepers of the underworld, and in our Hadestown, papers are what let you in: without them, Orpheus faces an immigration raid. The Egyptians’ greatest fear wasn’t punishment but being forgotten, because a name was part of a person, so in Hadestown the workers don’t scream. They slowly become anonymous, and we tell this story again to remember.

DRAMATURGY

Brothers and children.

Listen for two words. In “Why We Build the Wall,” Hades calls his workers “my children.” Hermes and Persephone call people “brother.” That difference may come from Mitchell’s time in Egypt, where a professor pointed out that Nasser in the 1960s addressed citizens as “brothers and sisters,” while Mubarak later called them “children.” A brother stands next to you, and a child is someone you decide for, so which word a character uses tells you who sees you as an equal and who sees you as someone to be managed.

DRAMATURGY

The weather.

In Greek myth, Persephone’s months below ground are what give us winter, so the weather has always been how the story shows a marriage out of balance. Anaïs Mitchell began writing Hadestown in her twenties, a young activist and touring songwriter, the climate crept in over time. In the chapter of her book Working on a Song about “Any Way the Wind Blows,” Mitchell says 2012 was the first time she registered the tragic irony of flooding in the East and drought in the West at the same time, and the show is full of quieter hints: characters lament that real spring and fall have been missing as long as they can remember, and Orpheus refers to Hades having come for Persephone too soon. That is why Eurydice arrives running from blazing heat and freezing cold, why the weather also stands for economic injustice, and why Hadestown is industry out of balance with nature. Watch for moments when certain characters control the weather.

DRAMATURGY

A ticket, not a coin.

Many productions have Eurydice take a coin on her way down. The script does indeed refer to needing a ticket, therefore, we use a ticket, and there is real historical evidence in an ancient ancestor. In Athens, citizens carried a pinakion, a ticket stamped with a name and the city’s seal. A coin is a toll, but a ticket is admission already granted, which feels colder and more systemic, like the paperwork of a company town. Hades issues our ticket, the wind blows it to Eurydice, and Hermes, our conductor, takes it upon boarding.

DRAMATURGY

The signs.

Our Hadestown is about the cyclical nature of injustice and greed, the same pattern repeating wherever and whenever power learns to feed on fear. So during “Chant,” when neon slogans fly in and are plugged in, we chose signs from across the globe and across time. Each is an invented Hadestown slogan built from a real one: Greece in 1821, the Soviet state, and Egypt in the 1990s. You can feel the parallel without our having to say it out loud:

The point isn’t any one politics. Slogans from every era, left and right and East and West, use the same trick: they make a demand sound like comfort, and the cycle starts again.