I think one of the things that really gets me about Hadestown is the way it gets collective action, specifically the timeline of it, in a way that I don’t see from most other musicals about protest.
Because the thing is, most of the time you don’t get the happy, clean, we win! ending of Newsies or The Prom. You get wins that feel like that in the moment, sure. Moments like in Promises when you’ve finally gotten them to listen to you and you’re hugging your friends and feeling like nothing can possibly go wrong now. The union gets a contract. One of the biggest demands you had was met. You feel invincible. Courageous in a crowd.
But then a year later you’re right back on the picket line, because corporate found another way to screw you, or you have to go back and renegotiate for the demands you didn’t get on the first round, or a new problem has come up that no one could have foreseen. And maybe this time, not all your friends from the first protest are there with you. Some of them got too burned out to continue fighting, or they fell out of the group socially, or worse they stopped believing the cause can be won. When progress feels slow and it feels like you’re alone in believing in it, doubt comes in.
Change is cyclical in the way any given cause rotates between action and planning, riding waves of public outrage to make big pushes and quietly accumulating support, raising awareness, negotiating the results of whatever the latest push has won. A lot of the time during the slower parts of the cycle, it can feel like you’re not moving at all, or even like you’re right back where you started. You look back on all the work you put in and wonder if any of it was worth it. Maybe you were just being naive to imagine the way the world could be. Maybe you came all this way to fail.
And you know what? Maybe you did fail. Maybe everything you tried was doomed from the start. But what really defines you is what you do next.
Do you still believe in the cause? Do you still begin to sing fight for it again, even if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted this time? That is the important thing. That is the thing that Hadestown understands so well.
I feel like looking back on big social movements from the past, learning about them in history classes or reading about them in books, they feel a lot quicker than they were. It seems like these fights were won, clean and happy, almost overnight. Even if you’re told the months or years between important major events, it’s hard to fully understand. You don’t learn about the cycle, or how frustrating and exhausting it can be.
Hadestown is so effective as a protest media in part because it’s about the cycle. Orpheus and Eurydice and the workers lose and win and lose every night. But the ending still says that it was worth it to try, and it salutes the birds that sing in the dead of night—the people who keep the fight going even when things aren’t moving fast, even when they don’t have a crowd to make them courageous.
Just… Hadestown, cycles, and collective action, man. I wish I had a more clever conclusion than that.
