Working on a Song

by Anaïs Mitchell

  Follow that dollar for a long way down / Far away from the poorhouse door / You either get to hell or a border town / Ain’t no difference anymore . . .

  Suckin’ on the gristle and chewin’ on the bone / Thinkin’ ’bout missiles and the old Dow Jones / All alone on your chromium throne / And lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely . . .

  When I began working on the show in earnest in 2006, I repurposed that melody and some of the language, started writing verses, and threw this word in the choruses: Hadestown. Until then, the piece’s working title had been “A Crack in the Wall,” and the new title Hadestown appeared like a bolt of lightning. The first version of the song included many of the verses that survive today, as well as the following, which fell by the wayside:

  Persephone: Though I’m happy at his side / He’s not an easy man to love / I used to keep him satisfied / But lately he can’t get enough / Never enough of the mine and the mill / Never enough of his working girls / Never enough of the wall he’s building / All around the underworld / Way down Hadestown . . .

  Orpheus: Mr. Hades is slick as an eel / Fountain pen, crocodile shoes / Quick as a snake, and he’s hot on your heels / He’ll make you an offer that you can’t refuse! / Way down Hadestown . . .

  Hermes: Speak of the devil and the devil comes / Here comes Mister Hades now / To gather up his chosen ones / And bring ’em down to Hadestown / Way down Hadestown . . .

  In the second Vermont incarnation of Hadestown in 2007, director / designer Ben Matchstick and I both got excited about the idea of Hermes as a “coyote” figure, vaguely in the employ of Hades himself. That year Hermes, played by Ben himself, launched the song with a pitch:

  Hermes: Make room, make room for Hermes, sir! / Make a little room for Hermes, ma’am / They call me a messenger / But that ain’t half of who I am

  I’m a man of influence / I’m connected up and down / And I got all the documents / You need to get to Hadestown / Way down Hadestown . . .

  Tired of walking in your worn-out shoes? / Tired of running on nothing at all? / Tired of standing your bets to lose? / Tired of losing? Give me a call, we’ll go . . . / Way down Hadestown . . .

  So Hermes was on Team Hades in this version of the song, and he clashed with anti-establishment Orpheus:

  Orpheus: Mister Hades got an iron fist / Step outta line and he’ll have your head / In the blink of an eye, with a flick of the wrist

  Hermes: Hang around here and starve instead!

  Orpheus: It’s a cattle pen!

  Hermes: It’s a feeding trough!

  Orpheus: He’ll fatten you up just to cut you down! / I’d rather starve

  Hermes: I’d rather stuff my pockets down in Hadestown! / Way down Hadestown . . .

  Off-Broadway & Edmonton

  For the 2010 studio recording I boiled the song down to what felt most essential and allowed us to hear from the major players. Off-Broadway and Edmonton took the album as a jumping-off place, but I put in two new Persephone verses: Down there it’s a buncha stiffs! and Give me morphine in a tin. The morphine line was inspired by Utah Phillips’s “Miner’s Lullaby,” a song I discovered via Steve Earle. Apparently, at some point in American history, coal miners had a (secret) practice of bringing a tin of morphine with them down the shaft, in case of a cave-in or a flood—to numb their pain and panic, or to take the end of their lives into their own hands. I was haunted by this image from the moment I encountered it.

  Jim Nicola said something to me in his NYTW office that sticks with me to this day. He was eating a sandwich and said something like, “Poetry is me bearing witness to the sandwich, expounding upon the beauty of the sandwich. Drama is me actually eating the sandwich, right here and now, in front of an audience.” That idea spoke volumes and led to many moments like Hermes’s: And the car door opened and a man stepped out . . . interlude in “Way Down Hadestown,” which hails the arrival of Hades aboveground. The moment was electrifying because, after many verses of “poetry” about Hades, we were treated to the “drama” of the man himself, appearing before our eyes, exchanging words with his wife. The challenge of rewriting Hadestown was often the challenge of “opening a door” in the train of the poetry so that a character could “step out.”

  I credit Rachel with these lines from that same moment: You’re early / I missed you! She threw them out casually in a dramaturgy meeting as the kind of thing our troubled gods might say to each other, and they were, in fact, the exact five words the moment required. A favorite dramaturgical phrase of Rachel’s is to “hang a lantern” on something—to draw the audience’s attention, either verbally or visually, to some aspect of the storytelling. We often found that in a sung-through musical, lulled by melody and rhyme, the audience is liable to miss critical information. To “hang a lantern” sometimes required the snappy change of pace of a spoken exchange.

  London

  Orpheus had always been engaged as a naysayer in the “Way Down Hadestown” debate, but in London, we took him out of the song entirely. Lines that had belonged to him for more than a decade (like Everybody hungry, everybody tired . . .) were reassigned to Hermes and Persephone. This was Ken’s suggestion, and it made a lot of sense to me. If Orpheus knew everything there was to know about Hades and Hadestown from the getgo, it didn’t leave a lot of room for discovery. It was more satisfying to witness his education and radicalization in real time.

  Broadway

  For Broadway, I expanded the intro of “Way Down Hadestown” to include the lines about the underside, yonder side, and other side of the wall. I was trying to address a note that had come from Nevin Steinberg (sound designer). He wondered, was there a way to “hang a lantern” on the existence of “the wall” somewhere early in the act, so it wouldn’t come as a complete surprise? I hung the heaviest lantern I could in an even longer version of the intro that continued:

  Hermes: On the underside / On the yonder side / On the other side of his wall!

  Workers: What wall?

  Hermes: The one he’s building all around his town

  Workers: What town?

  Hermes: Hadestown! Way down under the ground . . .

  Follow that dollar . . .

  I really dug it, and Team Music (Michael, Todd, Liam, and their associates and assistants) spoke about it as a “Cab Calloway” big band moment, but to others in the room, including producers, director, and associate director, it was an act of spoon-feeding the audience. Also, it further extended our already-extended intro, so I let it go. Still, the song was now feeling long, and this came up in previews. Something had to go, so I chose (with a bit of sorrow) to cut a verse that had been with us since 2006:

  Fates: Everybody dresses in clothes so fine / Everybody’s pockets are weighted down / Everybody sipping ambrosia wine / In a gold mine in Hadestown.

  A GATHERING STORM

  Fates

  Ooooh

  Ooooh

  Ooooh

  Ooooh

  Hermes

  With Persephone gone, the cold came on

  Orpheus

  He came too soon

  He came for her too soon

  It’s not supposed to be like this

  Eurydice

  Well, till someone brings the world back into tune

  This is how it is

  Hermes

  Orpheus had a gift to give

  Eurydice

  Hey—where you going?

  Hermes

  Touched by the gods is what he was

  Orpheus

  I have to finish the song

  Eurydice

  Finish it quick

  The wind is changing

  There’s a storm coming on

  Fates

  Wind comes up, ooooh

/>   Eurydice

  We need food

  Fates

  Wind comes up, ooooh

  Eurydice

  We need firewood

  Hermes

  Orpheus and Eurydice

  Eurydice

  Did you hear me, Orpheus?

  Hermes

  Poor boy working on a song

  Eurydice

  Orpheus!

  Hermes

  Young girl looking for something to eat

  Eurydice

  Okay

  Finish it

  Hermes

  Under a gathering storm . . .

  Notes on “A Gathering Storm”

  Off-Broadway

  The first version of “A Gathering Storm” was called “Wind Theme (‘I’m Working’).” It was while working on this scene that I realized I could intercut Hermes’s narration with dialogue lines from the characters, which became an important storytelling tool. Off-Broadway, it went like this:

  Fates: Ooooh / Ooooh / Ooooh / Ooooh

  Hermes: With Persephone gone, the cold came on

  Eurydice: Do you hear that?

  Orpheus: Hear what?

  Eurydice: The wind / It’s changing / Winter’s coming on

  Hermes: With Persephone gone, the nights grew long

  Eurydice: We have work to do

  Hermes: And the days grew short and dark and cold

  Orpheus: I’m working on my song

  Eurydice: Well, find me when you’re finished

  Orpheus: I’ll be there in a minute

  Hermes: And young love, too, grew old . . .

  I loved the economy of this early version, especially that foreboding last line. The problem was, this was a version of the scene that made us hate Orpheus, because I’m working on my song came across as selfish and petulant. Also, this version didn’t get at the idea that the weather was out of whack; it described a natural cycle of seasons.

  Edmonton

  Edmonton was a low point for the scene. I’m including this version even though it embarrasses me! Many times these narration / dialogue scenes became the place where I tried to address many dramaturgical notes at once, since they seemed structurally more flexible than songs. That made them dangerously ungainly in the realm of poetry. The Citadel version began like the NYTW one, but when Eurydice remarked, “the wind is changing,” Orpheus replied:

  Orpheus: It’s fall / It’s fall, that’s all

  Hermes: Cold came on and the wind came up

  Eurydice: Everybody else is leaving

  Hermes: Wind came up and the clouds blew in

  Eurydice: Orpheus, we should go

  Hermes: Clouds blew in and the pressure dropped

  Orpheus: Why?

  Eurydice: Look at the sky!

  Orpheus: Eurydice . . . This is my home

  Fates: Wind came up, ooooh

  Orpheus: It’s your home too

  Fates: Wind came up, ooooh

  Orpheus: It’s me and you

  Eurydice: So what do we do here all year long?

  Orpheus: Well, I’m working on a song

  Hermes: With Persephone gone, the cold came on

  Eurydice: Well, it better be good

  Hermes: But that ain’t all, brother, that ain’t all

  Orpheus: It will be—when it’s done

  Eurydice: I’m gonna go get some firewood

  Hermes: Looks like the sky’s gonna fall

  Eurydice: Finish the song

  In that production, in an effort to bring into focus the Orpheus character as well as the aboveground world (which people had found pretty nebulous off-Broadway), we tried to paint Orpheus as something like a Dust Bowl-era farm boy, deeply connected to the land he called home and reluctant to leave in the face of a storm. Eurydice and the Workers were migrant agricultural laborers, used to coming and going according to the changing weather. But like the famous Edmonton train tracks, my efforts to literalize the aboveground world backfired. We encountered this push-and-pull many times during the development of Hadestown. Dramaturgy demanded clarity of focus for the characters and the world. We turned the camera lens too far and suddenly the picture was too clear, too focused to succeed at the level of poetry. So we pulled back, but perhaps we’d made one or two discoveries that stuck. For example, Eurydice’s Anybody got a match? / Give me that in “Any Way the Wind Blows” is a residue of the exercise of imagining her as a migrant agricultural worker. With so many lines on the cutting room floor, those two turned out to be indispensable.

  London & Broadway

  The London version of this scene was similar to Broadway, story-beat-wise. In both iterations, the premature disappearance of Persephone prompts Orpheus to rededicate himself to his Epic. London Orpheus was quite self-aware—a sleuth unraveling a mystery:

  Hermes: Cold came on and the wind came up

  Orpheus: It wasn’t always like this, though

  Hermes: Wind came up and the clouds blew in

  Orpheus: I think I know what’s wrong / Eurydice, I think I know

  Eurydice: Know what?

  Orpheus: How to finish the song

  The delicacy of this moment over the years had everything to do with the audience’s feelings about our young lovers. It was possible, by the end of the scene, to wind up hating either Orpheus or Eurydice. It’s the first inkling of trouble in their relationship. Eurydice has real, physical needs: food, warmth, shelter. Orpheus is busy working on a song that may or may not save the world, but either way, he isn’t responding to Eurydice’s needs. If Orpheus came across as cavalier or self-obsessed, we hated him. But if we absolved him completely—that is, if he didn’t make an appreciable “mistake” of some kind—then we hated Eurydice for abandoning him.

  I remember a fascinating conversation with Reeve in London. He was protesting a dismissive line from Orpheus in response to Eurydice’s declaration that she was “going for food and firewood.” Aside: that firewood line felt archetypally right in every incarnation of the scene; there’s something so fairy-tale ominous about a character saying they’re going for firewood, they’ll be right back . . . In any case, both Reeve and I have had this experience as a songwriter: you’re working on a song, but your lover / partner needs your help with something. You express your annoyance at being interrupted in the act of writing. Your lover / partner says, with unconcealed resentment: “Fine, I’ll do it myself” and leaves you alone. Just what you wanted! Except now you can’t write. You can’t put the incident out of your mind. The notion that Orpheus could dismiss the love of his life in one breath and return to the creative act in the next didn’t ring true. In the lead-up to Broadway—when I began reframing Orpheus as naive, otherworldly, touched by the gods—it suddenly seemed natural that instead of ignoring Eurydice, Orpheus doesn’t even hear her. He’s in his own world; he can’t really help it. We can’t blame Orpheus for who and how he is, but we also can’t blame Eurydice for leaving him.

  EPIC II

  Orpheus

  King of silver, king of gold

  And everything glittering under the ground

  Hades is king of oil and coal

  And the riches that flow where those rivers are found

  But for half of the year, with Persephone gone

  His loneliness moves in him, crude and black

  He thinks of his wife in the arms of the sun

  And jealousy fuels him

  And feeds him, and fills him

  With doubt that she’ll ever come

  Dread that she’ll never come

  Doubt that his lover will ever come back

  King of mortar, king of bricks

 
The River Styx is a river of stones

  And Hades lays them high and thick

  With a million hands that are not his own

  With a million hands he builds a wall

  Around all of the riches he digs from the earth

  The pick-axe flashes, the hammer falls

  And crashing and pounding

  His rivers surround him

  And drown out the sound

  Of the song he once heard:

  La la la la la la la . . .

  Notes on “Epic II”

  Off-Broadway & Edmonton

  Ever since the NYTW days, “Epic II” was a moment for Orpheus—who has just witnessed firsthand the appearance of Hades and the early disappearance of Persephone in “Way Down Hadestown”—to rededicate himself to his song of how the world came to be this way. The off-Broadway and Edmonton versions of “Epic II” were exact replicas of the studio album’s “Epic I,” and went like this:

  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 they bowed down to Hades who made them sweat / Who paid them their wages and set them about / Digging and dredging and dragging the depths / Of the earth to turn its insides out, singing / La la la la la la la . . .

  King of mortar, king of bricks / The River Styx was a river of stones / And Hades laid them high and thick / With a million hands that were not his own / And a million feet that fell in line / And stepped in time with Hades’ step / And a million minds that were just one mind / Like stones in a row / And stone by stone / And row by row / the river rose up, singing / La la la la la la la . . .