Persephone (to Eurydice): When I was a young girl like you / Sister, I was hungry too / Hungry for the underworld / When I was a young girl / Now you know how it tastes / The fruit of Mister Hades’ ways / Sister, it’s a bitter wine / Spit it out while you still have time
Take it from a woman of my age / Love is not a gilded cage / All the wealth within these walls / Will never buy the thing called love / Love was when he came to me / Begging on his bended knees / To please have pity on his heart / And let him lay me in the dirt
I felt his arms around me then / We didn’t need a wedding bed / Dark seed scattered on the ground / And wild birds were flying around
That’s when I became his wife / But that was in another life / That was in another world / When I was a young girl
The I felt his arms around me then section was a dreamy musical bridge that I called the “garden flashback.” I felt it deeply, but someone made the valid point that all that poetic imagery might be stealing thunder from the extended garden flashback that is “Epic III.” More importantly, we were plagued by a sense that “Chant Reprise” was meandering at a moment when the storytelling demanded acceleration. For the Citadel I shortened the “flashback”:
Persephone: Love was when he came to me / Sister, we were wild and free / In the garden where we met / Nothing was between us yet . . .
That rewrite turned out to be the tip of the iceberg, because the entire Persephone section came under dramaturgical scrutiny as the arc of the characters evolved post-Edmonton. The problem was this: By the time “Chant Reprise” rolled around, we were all well aware that Eurydice had made a mistake. She’d expressed her regret in no uncertain terms, so for Persephone to try to make her see the error of her ways was redundant. If anything, we wanted Persephone to see the error of her own ways. I was unhappy letting go of the poetry and the symmetry of Now you know how it feels, but I had to admit the problem was real, so in London I unhappily set about rewriting it like this:
Persephone (to Eurydice): When I was a young girl like you / The underworld was younger too / Everything was possible / When I was a young girl / Now I been down so long / In this town of steel and stone / I forgot what feeling was / And then I heard your Orpheus
Something in the way he sings / I believe that he could bring / The mightiest of kings to tears / Even after all these years / Sister, even at my age / I believe the world can change / Sister, this is how it starts: / A change of heart
This solved the redundancy problem, but it lacked the poetic specificity I’d loved in the previous version. For Broadway I rewrote it this way:
Persephone (to Eurydice): When I was a young girl like you / This old world was younger too / We set it spinning hand in hand / Me and a young man / Now you see what he’s become / Hades, with his heart of stone / I forgot was true love was / And then I heard your Orpheus
Take it from a woman of my age / There is nothing love can’t change / Even where the bricks are stacked / Love is blooming through the cracks / Even when the light is gone / Love is reaching for the sun / It was love that spun the world / When I was a young girl
That finally seemed to approach the bull’s-eye, thematically and poetically, but in the midst of Broadway previews there was a real crisis about the length of our second act. It happened like this: There was one particular preview that was, necessarily, identical to the one that came before it. Since there was no new material for me to check out, I took a rare night off. Ken, too, was out of town and missed that preview. At the production meeting afterward, the absence of writer and dramaturg made room for other members of the creative team to express their own views. Rachel later said she’s found this to be a common event in the life of a production: a moment in previews when folks like scenic, lighting, and sound designers—who often take a deferential backseat during dramaturgical discussions—can no longer contain their opinions about what the show wants and needs. The headline from our team was: “Act II is too long,” and one obvious culprit was “Chant Reprise.” What, if anything, could be removed from the song without changing its dramatic essence? The Persephone section.
Losing Persephone meant that the Broadway version of “Chant Reprise” became a Hades tirade, rather than a continuation of the “How Long?” confrontation. But Hades’s text was also much shortened over the years. The longest-ever version of his final Electric City! rant was delivered at our Dartmouth workshop in 2014:
Hades: And in this symphony of mine / Are power chords and power lines / Which I arrange and orchestrate / And every day I dedicate / The magnum opus of my life / To my unkind, ungrateful wife / Persephone, and she shall see / Her name in lights on my marquee / And every night, another show / My symphony will never close! / And she shall have a front-row seat / Which she shall never, ever leave! / Young man, you can strum your lyre . . .
Off-Broadway, it began like this:
Hades: Young man! I was young once too / I once sang the young man’s blues / Women come and women go / Get you high and get you low / One day she’s hot, the next she’s cold / Women are so . . . seasonal! / Women leave again and again / Take it from an old man / Now I sing a different song . . .
It began to feel odd, as the story of the Workers came to the fore, that Hades would respond to this existential threat to his authority by doling out advice about women. I wanted to tie a thread between romantic togetherness and communal solidarity, so in London I tried this:
Hades: Young man! I was young once too / Sang a song of love like you / Brotherhood, togetherness / Let me tell you how it is / Lovers leave, brothers betray / Turn like weather on a windy day / Pledge allegiance, then defect / The second that you turn your back . . .
The word defect got the point across, but felt to me more academic than poetic. The Broadway version of that section (Son, I too was left behind) is half as long—four lines, rather than eight.
EPIC III
Orpheus
King of shadows, king of shades
Hades was king of the underworld
Hades
Oh, it’s about me . . .
Hermes
Go on . . .
Orpheus
But he fell in love with a beautiful lady
Who walked up above in her mother’s green field
He fell in love with Persephone
Who was gathering flowers in the light of the sun
And I know how it was because he was like me
A man in love with a woman
Singing la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la
Hades
Where’d you get that melody?
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Persephone
Let him finish, Hades
Orpheus
La la la la la la
You didn’t know how, and you didn’t know why
But you knew that you wanted to take her home
You saw her alone there against the sky
It was like she was someone you’d always known
It was like you were holding the world when you held her
Like yours were the arms that the whole world was in
And there were no words for the way that you felt
So you opened your mouth and you started to sing
La la la la la la la . . .
Company
La la la la la la la
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Orpheus & Company
La la la la la la . . .
Orpheus
And what has become of the heart of that man?
Now that the man is king
What has become of the heart of that man?
Now that he ha
s everything
The more he has, the more he holds
The greater the weight of the world on his shoulders
See how he labors beneath that load
Afraid to look up, afraid to let go
So he keeps his head low, he keeps his back bending
He’s grown so afraid that he’ll lose what he owns
But what he doesn’t know is that what he’s defending
Is already gone
Where is the treasure inside of your chest?
Where is your pleasure? Where is your youth?
Where is the man with his arms outstretched
To the woman he loves with nothing to lose?
Singing la la la la la la la
Hades
La la la la la la la
Orpheus
La la la la la la la
Hades & Persephone
La la la la la la . . .
Notes on “Epic III”
As we approached the lock date for Broadway, I was staying with Mara in her friend’s apartment uptown so I could focus on writing without commuting back and forth to Brooklyn. I was barely sleeping. I tried taking sleep aids, but my anxiety was stronger than the pills, and then there I was: groggy, but still awake, and still trying to work. At two a.m. one night, I knocked on Mara’s bedroom door and climbed into bed with her like a child. I said: “I’m panicking.” The problem was “Epic III.”
Vermont
“Epic III” is the moment of truth—and truth-telling—between Orpheus and Hades in the underworld. It dates back to the second Vermont production, where it went like this:
Orpheus: The strong will take what they want to take / And the weak can only tell the tale / And the heart of the king loves everything / Like the hammer loves the nail
The heart of the king is iron and steel / The heart of the king is the color of rust / The heart of the king is soldered and sealed / The heart of the king is a tinderbox / That he has to keep under lock and key / That it not catch fire inside of his chest / Cos a lover’s desire is a mutiny / A lover’s desire is a wilderness
But even that hardest of hearts unhardened / Suddenly, when he saw her there / Persephone in her mother’s garden / Sun on her shoulders, wind in her hair / The smell of the flowers she held in her hand / And the pollen that fell from her fingertips / And suddenly Hades was only a man / With a taste of nectar upon his lips, singing / La la la la la la la . . .
Off-Broadway & Edmonton
The imagery in that first version felt unfocused to me; for the studio album, I started honing in on the contrast between king and man, heavy and light, hard and soft:
Orpheus: Heavy and hard is the heart of the king / King of iron, king of steel / The heart of the king loves everything / Like the hammer loves the nail
But the heart of a man is a simple one / Small and soft, flesh and blood / And all that he loves is a woman / A woman is all that he loves
And Hades is king of the scythe and the sword / He covers the world in the color of rust / He scrapes the sky and scars the earth / And he comes down heavy and hard on us / But even that hardest of hearts unhardened . . .
That version became our jumping-off point in the lead-up to NYTW. It was also one of the first storytelling moments Rachel questioned when I began working with her. She didn’t see how this text was enough to move the heart of Hades. “He knows what happened in the garden,” she said. In response to that note, off-Broadway, I added the What has become of the heart of that man? section that appeared in all subsequent productions.
London
“He knows what happened in the garden . . .” During years of rewriting Hadestown, I had an intermittent love affair with the idea and image of “the garden” and how it might fit into the “Epics” and the story as a whole. In London alone, all three “Epics” began with what I called “garden stanzas.” The initial text was:
Orpheus: There used to be a garden / There used to be a woman and a man / I don’t know how their story ends / But that’s how it began
“Epic II” had the alternate lines I don’t know how the world will end / But that’s how it began. Some were confused by the Judeo-Christian resonance of the garden stanzas. I found it fascinating that the story of Eve so closely resembles that of Persephone—a woman eats forbidden fruit, and the world becomes more complicated—but I was also uncertain whether the resonance was helping or harming us. I eventually replaced the line There used to be a garden with Back in the beginning but the garden language survived elsewhere in “Epic III”: Lady Persephone, walking the garden and Where is the man with his hat in his hand / Who stands in the garden with nothing to lose? The London version of “Epic I” also included this verse:
Orpheus: King of diamonds, king of spades / Hades was king of the kingdom of dirt / Miners of mines, diggers of graves / They bowed down to Hades who gave them work / And he bowed down to no one, below or above / Till the arrow of Eros struck him in the heart and / The king of the underworld fell in love / With a woman who walked . . . in a garden
What made the garden so appealing to me is that it was a kind of archetypal shorthand for the state of grace from which the world has fallen and to which it might be restored. But it was an imperfect metaphor. In the story of Adam and Eve, the state of grace involves both lovers together in the garden. In the story of Hades and Persephone, the state of grace involves Persephone in the garden, Hades in the underworld, and their seasonal separation and reunion. What we witness in Hadestown is a world out of balance, and what we’re trying to restore is balance; we’re not after a return to the garden in the sense of a time before seasons. There may have been a way to make the metaphor work, but I felt trapped by it. Ultimately, I ended up excising the word garden everywhere it appeared in the show. I’m obsessed (to a fault) with symmetry, the repetition of words, lines, and images. I couldn’t bear to drop a deep psycho-spiritual image like “the garden” in one or two spots and not go all the way with it.
In classic versions of the Orpheus story, it’s common for Orpheus to invoke Hades’s love for Persephone in his appeal on behalf of Eurydice. It’s a beautiful, empathic gesture: a mortal man putting himself in the shoes of a god and asking the god to do the same for him. In London I began to discover that for Orpheus to use the language of his own experience to describe the experience of Hades felt mythically spot-on. I remember Patrick Page dropping some mythological wisdom in a workshop once. Hadestown, he said, was a “dragon story.” The boy who sets out on the journey to slay the dragon could never have slayed the dragon. The journey itself makes a man of the boy, and the man then slays the dragon. I loved the idea that Orpheus had to have loved and lost to be able, in this moment, to speak truth to the king. In London I was working on the expansion of “All I’ve Ever Known” and was thrilled to find I could repurpose some of that language in “Epic III”:
Orpheus: He didn’t know how and he didn’t know why / But he knew that he wanted to take her home / He saw her alone there against the sky / It was like she was someone he’d always known
I also added this stanza:
Orpheus: And the sun rose and fell in his chest when he held her / He felt the earth moving without and within / And there were no words for the way that he felt / So he opened his mouth and he started to sing
I later changed that first line to It was like you were holding the world when you held her, another line recycled from “All I’ve Ever Known.” These were small changes, but I felt them deeply. I was especially devastated by the line And there were no words for the way that he felt because in London I began to suspect that, for all my efforts, no amount of rewriting the “Epic” verses was going to magically tie the room together. It didn’t matter if the verses were clever, metaphorically rich, complexly rhymed. What mattered most was the purity of heart in that la la chorus.
In London I expanded the wordless choral section of “Epic III,” adding a climactic melody for Orpheus. There was one “money note” which I hit upon in the stairwell of the National Theatre. The interval reminded me of ecstatic spiritual music I’d heard in two different settings: a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, and a gathering of devotional Indian bhajan singers. I said, “Reeve, can you sing this note?” and I’m lucky that he could.
Broadway
Still, when we got back to New York, I was unhappy with “Epic III.” Now with the long wordless musical climax, the song seemed to overstay its welcome at both ends. I wanted it streamlined. It seemed to me that the entirety of New Orpheus’s “gift” was encapsulated in the wordless choral singing, this moment of psychedelic auditory flashback for Hades. I thought of it like the moment in the animated Pixar film Ratatouille when the critic Anton Ego tastes Remy’s dish and has the sudden recollection of his childhood, of simpler times. Another animation example I often returned to (remember, I had a five-year-old during Broadway rehearsals) was the truth-telling moment between Moana and Te Ka in Disney’s Moana. It’s so simple—a matter of six lines, culminating in: This is not who you are / You know who you are. These “simple gifts” felt powerfully cathartic to me, but there I was with “Epic III”: stanza upon stanza of language before the gift arrived, and then many stanzas of post-gift denouement. For Broadway I shortened the beginning of “Epic III” so that it closely resembled “Epic I”—Orpheus’s naive, almost rote telling of the original myth—followed by a moment of identification with the king: I know how it is because he was like me / A man in love with a woman. The language was almost childish, but it made the point simply, which was what I wanted. The Hades line Oh, it’s about me, eh? was an ad-lib from Patrick. It might have been a joke the first time he said it—but its effect on our preview audiences was hilarious. I’d intended for Hades to laugh in Orpheus’s face, prompting Hermes’s Go on . . . Now there was no need, because the audience did the laughing for him.
Working on a Song Page 14
