the hole in his chassis

One of my favorite parts of Hadestown is the way Hermes slips so seamlessly between participant and narrator. The fact that he knows from the beginning how the story is going to go, but still plays his part, surrounded by people who don’t know they’re characters in a tragedy. And he plays his part well. Every night, he tells Orpheus, “You want to talk to her? Go on," and every night, he asks, “Just how far would you go for her?” Every night, Orpheus asks him, “ It’s not a trick?” and he tells him, “No, it’s a test.” And every night, when the cycle starts again, when his voice is so broken with grief that he can barely get the words out to tell the audience - the audience that he and no one else has known was there the whole time - “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,” when Eurydice appears - fresh-faced and alive, with no memory of what has just happened - to ask, “anybody got a match?” he wordlessly extends his matchbook to her, and lets the story start anew. Someone’s got to tell the tale, whether or not it turns out well.

Rio Vidal my beloved