*insert amber and patrick playing dominoes here*

thinking about hadestown as a story in which each character realizes both that they're in a time loop + that there is an audience observing them at different points throughout the show

there's this moment in if its true where it seems like orpheus is pleading with the audience to change how the story goes. eurydice knows this has happened before by come home with me reprise ("i can sing us home again" "no, you can't" "yes, i can" "no, you don't understand") but orpheus doesn't know until doubt comes in ("who am i to think that she would follow me into the cold and dark again?"). the gods are both observed and observing (hades and persephone and hermes all stand off to the side for most of the show when they aren't the main people in a scene); for hades and persephone, this happens year after year anyways without any kind of time loop narrative, but hermes is fully aware from the beginning of the narrative structure of the story, obviously.

persephone knows all along that she's being observed, but the amount she cares varies between actors (amber gray's persephone does not care that there's an audience; jewelle blackman's persephone is desperate for this story to be witnessed). hades never knows.

cause here's the thing! to know how it ends!! and still!!! begin!!!! to sing it again!!!!!

[id: tag reading, in all caps "Hadestown is haunted send tweet."]

The fates are an interesting case in this. They know how it goes. And are actively forcing everyone else to stick to the plot, because that’s their job. When the other characters stray from the loop, the fates nudge em back on

Feeling a lot of feelings about how Hadestown doesn't present the story as "Orpheus turned around and everything fell apart and there was nothing anyone could do to fix it" and instead presents a story that says "he turned around, he doubted, he failed, but if we keep telling his story maybe one day Orpheus won't" and it's not just about Orpheus as a single character, it's a bout every Orpheus, everyone who runs up against a system they can't change and fails and everyone who sees that failure and gets back up and says "maybe I can change it now" and tries again. That Orpheus failed isn't the takeaway of the story. The takeaway is that one day he might succeed.