Working on a Song
Page 17
Fates
Doubt comes in and meets a stranger
Orpheus
I used to see the way the world could be
Fates
Walking on a road alone
Orpheus
But now the way it is is all I see, and
Orpheus & Fates
Where is she?
Where is she now?
Eurydice
Orpheus
You are not alone
Workers
You are not alone
Eurydice
I am right behind you
Workers
We are all behind you
Eurydice
And I have been all along
Workers
Have been all along
Eurydice
And the darkest hour
Workers
Darkest hour
Eurydice
Of the darkest night
Workers
Darkest night
Eurydice
Comes right before the—
(Orpheus turns)
Orpheus
It’s you
Eurydice
It’s me
Orpheus
Orpheus
Eurydice
Notes on “Doubt Comes In”
Vermont & Off-Broadway
“Doubt Comes In” began as some scribbles in a notebook from before I was married. There was someone I was thinking a lot about, even making some plans around, and it seemed to be going well until one late-night phone call. It was the tiniest thing: something in his voice had changed. It opened a tiny crack in my confidence about the relationship, and the crack became a chasm. It reminded me of other circumstances in which “doubt comes in.” I wrestled (let’s be real, still wrestle) with self-doubt onstage, especially as a solo performer. One tiny negative thought leads to the next, and then the next . . . That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote the first stanza of “Doubt Comes In.” Like “Way Down Hadestown,” it was an unrelated fragment until I expanded it for the first draft of Hadestown.
The Vermont, studio album, and off-Broadway versions of this song are almost identical. The one thing I added, for NYTW, was the act of Orpheus singing his la las intermittently. They were meant to illustrate his aloneness; he sings, and no one sings back. Here is that early version:
Orpheus: La la la la la la la / La la la la la la la
Fates: Doubt comes in and strips the paint / Doubt comes in and turns the wine / Doubt comes in and leaves a trace / Of vinegar and turpentine
Fates & Orpheus: Where are you? / Where are you now?
Fates: Doubt comes in and kills the lights / Doubt comes in and chills the air / Doubt comes in and all falls silent
Orpheus & Fates: It’s as though you aren’t there / Where are you? / Where are you now?
Eurydice: Orpheus, you’re shivering / Is it cold or fear? / Just keep singing / The coldest night of the coldest year / Comes right before the spring
Orpheus & Fates: Doubt comes in with tricky fingers / Doubt comes in with fickle tongues
Orpheus: Doubt comes in and my heart falters and forgets the songs it sung
Orpheus & Fates: Where are you? Where are you now?
Eurydice: Orpheus, hold on / Hold on tight / It won’t be long / The darkest hour of the darkest night / Comes right before the dawn
(Orpheus turns)
Eurydice: You’re early
Orpheus: I missed you
Those last two lines were a repeat of the Hades and Persephone exchange in “Way Down Hadestown.” I threw them into a draft on a whim, uncertain if they would make sense to anyone. Some loved them and some didn’t; the creative team was divided right down the middle. I liked the symmetry and the idea that the young couple had, at some level, “become” the older one. But the lines seemed to require the engagement of the mind at a tragic moment when it felt better to simply engage the heart. In subsequent productions I instead had the lovers cosmically “name” each other . . . one last time.
Edmonton
“Doubt Comes In” came under fire from all sides after NYTW. It was, to be fair, poetic portraiture of an abstract emotion at the show’s climactic moment. As many pointed out, the audience had no “access” to Orpheus’s thought process during the scene of his undoing. Without access, there wasn’t a lot of arc; it was as if Orpheus’s turn was a foregone conclusion from the beginning. How to add real suspense to the scene? At the Citadel I took a deep dive in the direction of an idea from Ken—that perhaps it would be more engaging if Orpheus remained hopeful to the end. The Canadian version looked like this:
Fates: Doubt comes in / The wind is changing / Doubt comes in / Here comes the storm / Doubt comes in / Ain’t that the same wind / That took her from you before? / Where is she? / Where is she now?
Orpheus: Eurydice / I can see us now / You and me / In a field of flowers / And we’re in each other’s arms
Fates: Ain’t that just the way it sounded / On the day you turned around and she was gone? / Doubt comes in
Orpheus: Eurydice / I can hear the birds
Fates: Doubt comes in
Orpheus: In the trees / And the rivers
Fates: Doubt comes in
Orpheus: I can hear them on the wind
Fates: It’s the wind that made her leave you / Are you sure she wouldn’t leave that way again? / Where is she?
Orpheus: She wouldn’t
Fates: Where is she now?
Orpheus: She wouldn’t!
Eurydice: Orpheus / Lover, brother, friend / I’m right here / And we’re walking in the wind / And the coldest night . . .
Orpheus: Eurydice! / I can feel the sun / Shine on me / And on everyone / And it’s springtime in the world
Fates: Well, she said she wouldn’t leave ya / Are you sure that you believe her? / Are you sure?
Orpheus: I’m sure / I’m sure
Fates: Doubt comes in / The wind is changing
Orpheus: She wouldn’t leave that way again, would she?
Fates: Doubt comes in / Here comes the storm
Orpheus: It’s just the wind that’s playing tricks on me
Fates: Doubt comes in / Ain’t that the same wind
Orpheus: I used to see the way the world could be
Fates: That took her from you before?
Orpheus: But now the way it is is all I see, and
Fates, Orpheus, Workers: Where is she? Where is she now?
Eurydice: Orpheus / You’re not alone . . .
I’d written an initial line for Orpheus’s second verse that was highly controversial. It went: Eurydice / I can hear the birds / In the trees / And the laughter / Of our children on the wind. The line came the morning after a night of fitful Edmonton sleep and I wept over it; it felt to me the most tragic thing to invoke these children, and this future, that would never come. I triumphantly unveiled the line and again the response was split down the middle, with some moved to tears like me, and others, more stoic, saying, “Children have never been mentioned in this show before . . . you can’t really start now, in the penultimate song . . .” I changed the line.
London & Broadway
I’ve lost count of the number of ways I attempted to rewrite “Doubt Comes In” between productions, but I will say that the entire enterprise was connected to the larger question of why Orpheus turns. Because of the fact that in this telling of the myth, Eurydice actively abandons Orpheus, there was something about his doubt in her loyalty that felt worth mining. The Fates’ lines in Edmonton—which I’d initially written for Orpheus and then reassigned to them—were
all to do with his prior abandonment by Eurydice, and the fear that it might happen again. But there was something not quite right about that angle, either. As André De Shields put it in a workshop, it had to be “Doubt with a capital D.” It had to be deeper than jealous love. It had to be existential and inevitable.
The Who am I? idea was one of many rewriting angles I’d attempted and abandoned pre-Edmonton. What I’d initially written was this:
Orpheus: Where am I? / Where am I anyway / What if I / What if I can’t find the way? / Why would she? / Why would she follow me / When my steps are so unsteady / And she left me once already / Didn’t she?
I’d also stumbled upon this:
Orpheus: Who am I to think that I can hold my head up higher than my fellow man?
None of those lines made it into the Edmonton show, but I turned to them again for London. I was hunting for more existential language and Who am I? seemed to fit that bill. I also found a way to introduce that motif twice, from the mouths of the Fates (Who are you?), before Orpheus utters the line himself in “Doubt Comes In.” That gave it the sense of inevitability we were after—“Doubt with a capital D.”
ROAD TO HELL REPRISE
Hermes
Alright . . .
It’s an old song
It’s an old tale from way back when
It’s an old song
And that is how it ends
That’s how it goes
Don’t ask why, brother, don’t ask how
He could have come so close
The song was written long ago
And that is how it goes
It’s a sad song
It’s a sad tale; it’s a tragedy
It’s a sad song
But we sing it anyway
Cos here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin
To sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
I learned that from a friend of mine
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
See, Orpheus was a poor boy
Eurydice
Anybody got a match?
Hermes
But he had a gift to give
Eurydice
Give me that
Hermes
He could make you see how the world could be
In spite of the way that it is
Can you see it?
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
Can you hear it?
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
Can you feel it like a train?
Is it comin’?
Is it comin’ this way?
On a sunny day there was a railroad car
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
And a lady stepping off a train
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
Everybody looked and everybody saw
Company
Mmm . . .
Hermes
That spring had come again
With a love song
Persephone
With a love song
Workers & Fates
With a love song
Hermes
With a tale of a love from long ago.
It’s a sad song
Eurydice
It’s a sad song
Persephone
It’s a sad song
Hermes
But we keep singing even so
It’s an old song
Persephone & Eurydice
It’s an old song
Company
It’s an old song
Hermes
It’s an old tale from way back when
And we’re gonna sing it again and again
We’re gonna sing
We’re gonna sing
Company
It’s a love song
Eurydice
It’s a love song
Hermes
It’s a love song
Persephone
It’s a love song
Company
It’s a tale of love from long ago
It’s a sad song
Eurydice
It’s a sad song
Hermes & Persephone
It’s a sad song
Hermes
But we keep singing even so
It’s an old song
Eurydice & Persephone
It’s an old song
Hermes
It’s an old, old, old tale from way back when
And we’re gonna sing it
Company
Again and again
Hermes
We’re gonna sing it again
Notes on “Road to Hell Reprise”
Off-Broadway
The first “Road to Hell Reprise” was written, terrifyingly, over the course of off-Broadway previews. We went into our first preview with a proto-version of the song that was entirely emotionally wrong. I was under a lot of pressure to rewrite it quickly, and every change I made had to be metabolized during afternoon rehearsals (mostly by Chris Sullivan, our off-Broadway Hermes) and delivered that night in front of an audience. What was required was a delicate emotional transition between Orpheus’s turn and what I hoped would be an uplifting ending in spite of it all. It was important to dwell in the tragedy without wallowing in it; to move on, but not too quickly. A major middle-of-the-night breakthrough was the Hermes stanza: Cos here’s the thing / To know how it ends / And still begin / To sing it again / As if it might turn out this time / I learned that from a friend of mine. That stanza, miraculously, seemed to write itself.
I also wrote the stanza that begins That’s how it goes, which we ended up cutting off-Broadway, but reinstating in Edmonton. The problem was the line Don’t ask why, brother, don’t ask how. I loved its resonance with Don’t ask where, brother, don’t ask when, but it caused consternation off-Broadway because after a decidedly abstract version of “Doubt Comes In,” the audience was in fact left asking “Why?” and “How?” and the line compounded their frustration. This was Rachel and Ken’s firm opinion one late night during previews at a bar next door to NYTW called KGB. I agreed to cut the whole stanza, but the lines haunted me, and in Edmonton I earned them back—by rewriting “Doubt Comes In.”
Just as “Road to Hell” wasn’t our opening number at NYTW, “Road to Hell Reprise” wasn’t our closer. The song ended with this language, which paralleled the original “Road to Hell”:
Hermes: Everybody looked and everybody saw / That spring had come again / With a love song / With a tale of a love that never dies / With a love song / For anyone who tries . . .
And that last line segued directly into “I Raise My Cup,” which was followed by the curtain call.
Edmonton, London, Broadway
Off-Broadway, more than one person reported being troubled by the fact that we seemed to lose track of Eurydice after Orpheus’s turn. I tried to address this in Edmonton by reprising her Act I interjections Anybody got a match? and Give me that in “Road to Hell Reprise.” I liked the lines for their toughness and resilience, but more significant was the way they invoked a Groundhog Day–style return to the beginning of the story. In Edmonton I also let go of the Anyone who tries language in favor of We’re gonna sing it again. I wanted “Road to Hell Reprise
” to be the last song in the show proper, with full stop and applause. We’re gonna sing it again felt more final, both musically and thematically, and it also had the effect of signaling a return to the top of the show. In London, I doubled the final chorus, Liam arranged a choral climax, and Rachel went full Groundhog Day with the staging, which required more than one lightning-quick costume change.
It was breathtakingly right. There was a joyful defiance in the act of “beginning again” that seemed to sum up the spirit of our story.
WE RAISE OUR CUPS
Persephone
Pour the wine and raise a cup
Drink up, brothers, you know how
And spill a drop for Orpheus
Wherever he is now
Persephone & Eurydice
Some birds sing when the sun shines bright
Our praise is not for them
Persephone
But the ones who sing in the dead of night
We raise our cups to them
Persephone & Eurydice
Wherever he is wandering
Alone upon the earth
Let all our singing follow him
Persephone
And bring him comfort
Company
Some flowers bloom
Persephone & Eurydice