A Ticket to The Underworld: Classical Reception in Hadestown
Open Access
- Author:
- Mason, Abigail
- Area of Honors:
- Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Mathias Hanses, Thesis Supervisor
Erin Mc Kenna Hanses, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- classics
classical studies
classical reception
classical myth
Hadestown
musical theater
orpheus and eurydice
autism spectrum disorder
hades and persephone
katabasis - Abstract:
- The 2019 Broadway musical, Hadestown, tells the stories of two sets of ancient lovers–the mortals, Orpheus and Eurydice, alongside the gods, Hades and Persephone–within a dystopian, capitalist society that is wrecked by divinely caused climate change. In this paper, I examine Hadestown through the lens of the literary, archaeological, and historical records of Ancient Greece and Rome from the Archaic Greek period through the early Roman Empire. I argue that Hadestown was created in hopes of using the two intertwined ancient stories to depict modern issues such as neurodivergence, substance abuse, climate change, refugee crises, industrial capitalism, and poverty. By using traditions surrounding death and marriage from both the ancient Greco-Roman world and New Orleans communities, Hadestown visually and aurally supplements the stories of katabasis that are central to the myth. In the process, the writer, Anaïs Mitchell, and the rest of the production team also conveyed issues of reimagining female agency, the representation of autism spectrum disorder, and the cyclical nature of stories in myth. In particular, I suggest that Hadestown represents Orpheus, in a manner opposite to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as an autistic young man who is sensitive to the desires of others despite his hyper-fixation. The representation of Orpheus as autistic can be seen both through the visual representation of Orpheus and the dialogue surrounding him. “You might say the boy was ‘touched’” (Mitchell, 2019) is a line from Hermes that is repeated multiple times throughout the musical. This line interacts with the popular sayings that led to the creation of the puzzle piece symbol that represents the hate group Autism Speaks, such as the idea that autistic people have ‘a piece missing’ and are ‘touched in the head’. I argue that Hadestown creates a dialogue with many of the problematic topics that affect modern American society.