Orpheus Is the Absolute Worst

There are several stages to realizing that a beloved piece of art has been lying to you. For me, watching Hadestown: The Musical, it went like this: 1) marvel at the amazing staging; 2) fall completely for the trombone-forward, New Orleans-by-way-of-the-Underworld sound of it; 3) get genuinely moved by “Wait For Me”; and (4) arrive at the slow, dawning, unshakeable conclusion that Orpheus — sweet-voiced, doe-eyed, gift-of-the-gods Orpheus — is a real drip.

I know. I know. He’s the hero. He’s the boy who can make the world sing. His voice is so pure it thaws a frozen god’s heart and briefly repairs the busted marriage at the center of the cosmos. And Reeve Carney plays him with exactly the kind of douchey otherworldly sincerity the part demands. That’s the problem. The performance is great. The character is a simpering weasel. This guy is the worst.

The Orpheus myth is Greek in origin, obviously but the version everyone actually knows comes from the Roman poets, Virgil in the Georgics and Ovid in the Metamorphoses. In the original, Eurydice doesn’t slink off to the Underworld because of poverty. She dies. A snake bites her heel on or near her wedding day, and that’s that. Orpheus, gutted, walks into hell, plays a song so devastating that Hades and Persephone — who have never once granted a petition from the living — grant his. He gets one rule: walk out, don’t look back. He looks back. She’s gone forever. For centuries this has been read as the great tragedy of art and love.

Anaïs Mitchell’s brilliant stroke, in Hadestown, was to make it worse.

Because in this telling, Eurydice doesn’t die of a snakebite. She’s cold. She’s hungry. It’s the tail end of a hard, hungry season, the wind is coming through the walls, and her partner — her supposedly devoted, love-of-her-life partner — is sitting in the corner working on a song. Not a song to get her food. Just a song. He is so lost in his own composition, so consumed by the melody (which, and I cannot stress this enough, he lifted directly from Hades — the man plagiarized the King of the Dead and called it inspiration) that he doesn’t notice his girlfriend is quietly starving to death beside him. So Eurydice, being a person with a functioning survival instinct, signs a contract with the literal devil in exchange for room and board.

And here’s the thing the show wants you to feel as a tragedy that I have decided to feel as a personal affront because I am married and work for a living: It was completely avoidable. Love is compromise, y’all. There is a time for art and there is a time to go find your freezing girlfriend a sandwich, and a well-adjusted adult can tell the difference. Orpheus cannot. Orpheus watched the woman he loved get so desperate that Hell started to look like the better offer, and his contribution to her ordeal was a really pretty tune. Dude, get a job!

But fine. People are flawed. He’s young, he’s an artist, he gets a shot at redemption, and what a shot! He walks into the Underworld. He talks his way past the most brutal labor operation in the afterlife. He sings “Epic III,” a song so complete, so devastatingly beautiful, that it makes Hades remember he was once a young man in love with Persephone, and on the strength of that one song the god agrees to let Eurydice go. Do you understand what a flex that is? He wrote a song that renegotiated the terms of death!

And then he’s given the single easiest instruction in the history of instructions. Walk ahead. Don’t turn around. She’s right behind you. And this man — who had the follow-through to descend into hell and out-argue a god — cannot make it up a flight of stairs without buckling. Dumbass. He doubts. He turns. And the whole thing, everything, every impossible feat he just pulled off, evaporates because he could not manage the act of the entire quest: having a little faith. No job, no faith! What is the point of this man?

The thing is, I don’t think it was ever about Eurydice. It was about the song. Writing the song, singing the song, being the boy who could write a song like that. Eurydice was cold and starving and Orpheus made it about him. When she was hungry, he wrote. When she was gone, he wrote a masterpiece. And when all he had to do to actually save her was trust, to want her back more than he wanted to confirm she was there, he sh** the bed, because on some level the tragic version is the better song, and part of him knew it would win him history’s version of a Grammy.

I mean, I’m not endorsing Eurydice’s choice either. Do not sell your soul to the Lord of the Underworld for a warm bed and three meals; the benefits package is not what it appears and the exit interview is rough. But between the man who at least tried to solve the freezing-and-starving problem and the man who noodled on his lyre while it happened, I know whose side I would’ve taken.

So, Orpheus, I’m sorry. Not to you. You’re fine, you got a beautiful song out of it, which is clearly all you wanted. I’m sorry to Eurydice, got engaged to an artiste instead of a partner. Go see Hadestown. It really is that good. Just know that when everyone around you is weeping at the tragedy of a love undone by one backward glance, you’re allowed to be the person thinking: brother, she was cold, and you wrote a f***ing song.