Amber Gray said in an interview about the show that she considers herself a lifelong civil rights activist and the frustration of the ending is how she feels about activism Three steps forward, two-and-a-half steps back Orpheus always turns around at the last minute
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But every time he gets *closer* Just before the moment the song stops, and Eurydice's shocked face vanishes into the darkness And everyone sighs, surrenders, goes back to their work stations as the cops put their badges back on and the lights turn back on
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Like another famous Greek's obsessive musings We never actually get there, to the world where the cops and the laws and the toil and the suffering ends We cross half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder of that, then half again of that
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12.5% of the way left, then 6.25%, then 3.125% Every new Orpheus goes through the same epic journey the last one did, and seems to get EVEN CLOSER to the mountaintop, before hitting the point where he fails
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Replying to @arthur_affect
...Ah. This explains a lot about where people who see it as hopeful/have vastly different interpretations from me of “to know how it ends, but still begin to sing it again as if it might work out this time” are getting that from, I think?
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Replying to @chrysopoetics
The BTS stuff says that the show became a lot more "political" not just because of Donald Trump being President, but because in the Broadway staging they actually had the money to pay an ensemble of background actors for the first time
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
Which means that for the first time the denizens of Hadestown are actual visible separate people, rather than roles temporarily inhabited by the other principal actors during someone's song Which means that the question of what their POV is during all this becomes more urgent
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
It isn't necessarily true that Orpheus' journey has objectively brought Hadestown any closer to true revolution than it was before But the common people are obsessed with telling and retelling this story because it *feels* like it did
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
There's real life resonance here with the source material The myth of Orpheus itself sounds like a story about death being inevitable and permanent no matter how much the power of human longing (expressed through music) makes you feel like it can be defeated
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
But then the Orphic Mysteries are a tale of how Orpheus DID find a way to succeed and cheat death and how he and Eurydice WERE reunited in a new life, how if you know the right songs and incantations you can escape the Underworld for reincarnation
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Of course, it only works because it's a secret known to very few In the present day, with the loss of the Orphic cult's writings, possibly known to none
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
To me that's kind of the essence of what the Orpheus myth is, why it's written the way it is That's what the story is about, why people tell stories like this - the story ends with the restoration of order, the world turns back into the way we all know the real world is
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Replying to @arthur_affect @chrysopoetics
If it didn't, we would reject it - we all know the dead don't come back to life But what gives us hope is that tantalizing hint that it COULD happen, it's just barely possible, it was only by the thinnest margin that order and logic won out that time
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