Hadestown...how do we save the environment? (Hadestown 7/8, episode 36)

Hadestown is a story about politics.  You’ve seen the show, so you know that it’s the ancient Greek story of Orpheus put in a fictional but modern setting – a “a post-apocalyptic  American Depression  era.”  It’s a world of environmental ravage and resource scarcity.  Hades himself is unambiguously an industrialist, a mine-owner, and a tyrant.  “It was hard times” is a line straight from the dialogue of the show

There is no doubt that Anais Mitchell, the author, is putting political issues right in the front and center of the audience.  And the question is – what are we gonna do about it?

Today we will talk about Mitchell’s answer – how should the public respond to income inequality, unfair working conditions, environmental destruction, and sexism?  A truism is that those who benefit from our current arrangement aren’t going to walk away from the things that are making them filthy rich just because it’s the right thing to do.  We have to do something to force the change.  There aren’t a lot of great models out there –

So, what should we do?

And to me, this is really the heart of the show, because while the problems that Mitchell puts in the script are obvious, the obvious answer to all those problems in the script is – seems a little futile.  We should find a musician who will write a song good enough to restore balance to the universe, it won’t work, and then we’ll toast him for trying.  Just like Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill for all eternity, we should try again.

I mean, that’s not Annie.

Is that all there is to it?  Is that enough?  Is that a satisfying answer?  Mitchell is right – the environment is in a lot of trouble, and the guys who are destroying it are all about building walls and not so much empowering the workers.  What should we do?

If you want a big answer you gotta ask a big question, and Mitchell has certainly done that.  How do you get out of Hadestown without looking back?  We’ll see if we can figure out what Orpheus could not, on this episode of THM.

References

UNEP: https://www.unep.org/interactives/geo-7-feature/2025

Transcript

Hades Town is a story about politics can't really miss that. You've seen the show, so you know that it's the ancient Greek story of Orpheus putting fictional but a modern setting, a quote post-apocalyptic American Depression era, end quote. It's a world of environmental ravage, resource scarcity. Hades himself is unambiguously an industrialist, a mind-owner, and a tyrant. 

It was hard times. His line comes straight out of the dialogue and show. Now there's no doubt that, and they ask Mitchell, the author, is putting political issues right in the front and center of the audience, and the question is, what are you going to do about it? What do you know about all this environmental destruction that's going on? 

Today we are going to talk about Mitchell's answer to that question. How should the public respond to income, unenquality, and unfair working conditions, and environmental destruction, and sexism, and altruisms that those who benefit from our current arrangement aren't going to walk away from the things that are making them filthy rich just because it's the right thing to do? We have to do something to force the change, and there aren't a lot of great models out there, so what should we do? And to me, this is really the question at the heart of the show because while the problems that Mitchell puts in the script are obvious, the answer to those problems in the script seems to be a little bit futile. We should find a musician who will write a song that's good enough to risk our balance to the universe that's not going to work, and then we'll toast him for trying. You know, just Sisfis pushing that rock back up the hill again and again for all eternity, but we should still try again. 

I mean, that is a plot, but it's definitely not anning. And is that all there is to it? Is that enough? Is that a satisfying answer? 

Mitchell's right. The environment is definitely in a lot of trouble, and the guys who are destroying it are all about building walls and not so much empowering the workers. So what should we do? 

If you want a big answer, you got to ask a big question, and Mitchell has certainly done that. How do you get out of Hades Town without looking back? We'll see if we can figure that out when Orpheus couldn't on this episode of Theater, History and Mysteries. I'm John Bruschke, and you are listening to Theater, History and Mysteries, where I take on musical theater production, go into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. I hope that this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons that the musical has for theater and for life, and I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Jentley, it is all connected. I am recording this on December 23rd, and for my interfaith family, that puts it right after Hanukkah right before Christmas, which is putting me all up in the holiday mood. 

So I will forego here the usual plea for you to help in promoting the show and simply say how truly thankful I am that you are listening. We're now about a year and a half into this show. We've dropped episodes every two weeks without missing a single beat, except for that one time that I forgot. 

It was Tuesday until about 10pm, and the episode ran at about 1am on Wednesday. But other than that, we have never missed a show. I have faith that all those episodes, which have a sizable but modest and exceptionally good looking audience, are going to be listened to by every new listener who finds us. I mean, if you only got three episodes, you can pretty much binge those, driving three exits down the four or five freeway because that takes about four hours. But if you've got over 40 episodes, when someone finds the show, they can pretty much drive to Canada and all the way back and never run out of the long form commentary on the history of musical theater that this show provides. The archive includes the classics, The Man of La Mancha, The Phantom Cats, Jesus Christ, Superstarly, Miz. 

So if any of those strike you fancy, then go ahead, replay and give those a listen. Just go to the archive, start at the beginning, and there's plenty of content there for you. Or if you want to know the crazy historical events that those productions walk us back to, like the French Revolution, the creation of the Bible, how T.S. Eliot's great, great, great, great grandfather was involved in the Salem Witch Trials. You can find historical coincidences, plenty if you just go into the library for this show. 

Boy, am I babbling. Anyway, there is a lot of content out there on the feed for the show, and it's only there because you're listening to it and I am super grateful that you are the holidays. Make me sappy and my friends with Zen tell me that you should live your life with gratitude. And right now I am appreciative of you. So thanks as always. 

All right. Also, it's become clear that although the human brain can process 600 words a minute, and I can only talk at only about 300 to 350, that's about anybody can talk at, even say, an auctioneer at the Pig Auctions in Iowa. I talk too fast if you're just trying to listen to. So I'm going to make a conscious effort to slow my voice down. As I talk through this, that's going to make this episode run a little bit longer, hopefully it'll be a little bit better. But that's where we're at. 

That's my holiday gift to the world. This is episode seven of eight for Hades Town on the prior episodes. We have talked about the ancient Greek civilization and the origin of the Orpheus myth. We've talked about the song that comes together. It's kind of the center of the show. 

The song that Orpheus is going to use to sing the world back into harmony and restore the environment. We've talked about the curious connections between the show and autism. We've talked about the show and what it has to say about race, class and gender, because that's a lot. OK, today we're going to talk about political solutions, which are the heart of the show. We're going to do a quick plot summary, and then we're going to take on these questions. The first one, the basic question. 

Can a Broadway show to a Broadway audience inspire the people who show up to watch it to make an environmental change or a change in policy, a change in culture, a change in politics, get them to go out and march and do something that's going to get Congress and society at large do something about the environment. That's the first question. Then we will take on two ideological questions. Does it matter what particular message you're putting into the show? 

And is there something you got to focus on to make your environmental activism effective? That is definitely an issue that some critics have taken up with the NES Mitchell masterpiece. The third thing we'll take on is the overall question of art. 

Can art change the world? We'll find out. And finally, we'll take a look at Mitchell's stance. 

What is that Mitchell thinks her own show is going to do? And then we can compare that with what a bunch of scholars and the critics have had to say about it and hopefully come up with some useful answers. OK, so our first agenda item is the plot summary. 

Well, it goes like this. There's longer, more detailed descriptions and earlier issues of the earlier episodes of the series. So go back for you on a deeper dive. 

This is just kind of the big strokes that we'll need to tackle today's questions. But it goes like this. Orpheus is the original rock star. He's got a golden liar that's been given to him by the gods. And he's so good at singing he can calm the oceans. 

He's like the ultimate musician and people just love his music. But he is not very practical. So in the show, he starts as being totally broke. Eurydice leaves him because he literally cannot put food on the table. The Eurydice and Orpheus are in love, but he is way too head in the clouds. He for her, she loves him, but she realizes that they're going to starve to death. If they stay together, so she makes the deal that she's going to go to Hades and get some material things her material needs met by making a deal with Hades, the God in Hades, the location, which is Hades town in the musical. 

It's a little bit confusing. Anyway, Eurydice leaves Orpheus to go hang out with Hades because Hades has got the money. Some have linked Orpheus's nature to autism that he's so taken to the music and he's so not involved in things practical. They think that is reminiscent of autism. And maybe that makes him a positive role model for autistic people. 

Maybe it's not that's a debated issue, but that's part of how non-practically is. But Orpheus can do some pretty amazing things with his music. In the ancient Greek myths, he can stop fights amongst the Argonauts. He is actually part of Jason and the Argonauts crew. He's actually the first Argonaut. 

Jason brings along to calm the crew and things get tense between them. And he also out sings the sirens and does some other amazing things. In ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus's music can literally change nature like trees will bow, rocks will move, streams will start flowing. And that doesn't happen in Mitchell's play, but there's definitely the idea that he's going to play a song. What are we going to do about the environment and all this environmental destruction that is so prominent in that first act? Well, Orpheus is going to write a song that is so good, it's going to change all that. 

That's kind of the plot. Things are out of balance, but Hades is doubling down on his industrialism. This definitely involves mining and mining is a particularly important symbol because that involves the stripping of the land for resources like nobody moves into a mine after all the resources have been extracted. It essentially takes the process of mining, takes what is a beautiful part of nature and gets rid of it or commercial purposes for industrial purposes. 

And once it is served those purposes, then humans tend to forget about it. The particular work in Hades Town is performed by dead humans who are getting transformed into mindless atomitons via lost memory. The people who work there, you die, you go to Hades, you lose your memory, and then you are just a mindless worker for all eternity. Essentially, all dead people become some version of an abscissist that performing mindless, manual work for the benefit of somebody else. 

They themselves don't benefit from it. And that is what Hades for hell is being like. But Hades is selling this whole thing as a way to keep the workers safe, that there are poor people that are outside of Hades Town and they are going to break it and threaten the people of Hades Town. 

So we got to build a wall. And central to this whole oppressive operation is that Hades keeps selling the idea that he's going to provide safety in exchange for the labor. It's true you have to work hard. It's true I'm the boss and you're the laborers and that kind of sucks. 

But if we don't have this arrangement, there's a huge number of threatening other people out there that could come over and throw us over. So the important thing to notice there is that Hades maintains control of the whole operation by convincing the oppressed that he is their protector and he's the champion. He's doing it for them. And he's definitely very explicitly saying that to Persephone and to a lesser extent to Eurydice. That's Hades strategy and it works. Orpheus is going to sing to him. He's going to sing a song that can convince Hades to let Orpheus take Eurydice back out of hell and probably do something to help the workers. 

Like maybe he's going to stop it as hard enough. We'll talk more about how ambiguous that is. But there is a metaphor that's running through it is there is a crack in the wall that was actually the original title of the show. It's one of the key songs in the show that there's a crack in the wall that Hades is in control of everything. But there are cracks around his power, his control and around Hades town. 

And if you can open those cracks up enough, then you can change the conditions for the workers or Orpheus for Eurydice, maybe even for Persephone. So, you know, sort of as a general rule, pressers want a political structure that seems too big to take on. You can think of the Nazi party or slavery in the South or King Louis of France or King George of England. The idea is we are the state or the government or the church or something, some big political structure, and you're not going to be able to beat us. You may have your fancy ideas. You can sing your songs, but we are too big. If you come at us with a frontal assault, we are going to beat you every time. And this is definitely part of Mitchell's vision. 

They can't hold that forever. There are cracks in all these huge oppressive structures, and you could open up this cracks. And this is part of what Orpheus is going to do with this song. The path to liberation is a little bit unclear. Are they going to close the mind? They can overthrow Hades? 

Are they going to go on strike? Well, that's not really this story. That story doesn't really go there, but there's definitely cracks that need to be opened up and open. And so unambiguously, you don't have to think about it too hard. You can say, why is it that Hades is able to stay in control of Hades and Hades Town and hell? And the answer is, well, he convinces everybody else. It's in their best interest to keep that current structure. And how do you overcome an oppressive structure that powerful? 

Well, there are cracks in the wall and you got to open them up and that'll get it done. OK, so and as part of this, Orpheus conjures up a flower. That's a symbol of rebirth and salvation from the hellscape. It is taking something of beauty and it's putting in this horrible oppressive company town, mining area, place where it is a representation of humans destroying the earth. 

You can put beauty back in there and that is the crack that Orpheus thinks he's going to get into the wall. He starts to inspire the workers. Now, John Alvarez, John Alvarez and Patricia Saltzman Mitchell of Montclair State put it this way, quote, thanks to recollections offered by a subversive persephone and Orpheus's forceful example, the workers question their condition and hint at revolt. Now, that's as close as the workers are going to get to liberation. That Orpheus is going to sing a song. 

He makes his pitch to Hades. The workers start to revolt, but they never really get there. The workers aren't part of any great rising up. There's just Orpheus shows up and there's the implication that he's got a way that you get out of hell and involves him singing a song and that might help liberate the workers, but it's not clear how. 

OK, but it does start to work. Hades can tell something's up that Orpheus is getting some traction, Orpheus is definitely convincing Persephone and of course, Eurydice. So Hades buys out this revolution with the idea of a challenge. If you can exit hell without looking back, then you can totally leave. Orpheus, of course, fails. 

He does look back. Why? Well, according to Anas Mitchell, it's existential doubt that Orpheus never really believed enough in himself. He only believed in his music and when it came down to he had to rely on himself, he couldn't do it. 

It was doubt with a capital D, says Mitchell, and that's why he turns around. But notice that even if he does get out, it's not at all clear what happens to the workers like you're a mindless worker in hell. Your life sucks. Is your life better now that Orpheus is left? 

No. Also notice that Hades responds to the challenge with the divide and conquer strategy. He separates Orpheus and the rest of the cause and by offering Orpheus kind of a long shot way out for one guy instead of fundamental change for everyone. Hades kind of knows this is going to stop Orpheus from doing anything that's really going to damage my interest and it works. 

And this is kind of my issue with the plot. What Hades does is going to work even if Orpheus does get his act together and decides not to look back. Orpheus can decide not to turn around and look back at Hades. 

And if he does that, Orpheus and Eurydice get to leave, but all the workers are still there. And that, I think, it's a part of Mitchell's plot that I struggle with. Like what the show is especially good at is personifying all these characters and their motivations and brings them to life and it makes them real. 

And there is some power in their relationships. But definitely Mitchell's posing the question, what do we do about the environment? And it's not clear to me what that should be. Should Orpheus sing his song? He does sing his song. It should Orpheus not turn around. It's not clear to me what Mitchell thinks would, in fact, address all the environmental problems and the environment being out of balance. Now, it all ends with the attempt at freedom is toasted. 

Everyone raises their glass to Orpheus. It didn't work, but you got to keep on trying. The effort itself is noble. Maybe a more subtle message in there is that you got to keep trying because just like water dropping on a rock forever. Eventually it's going to work. 

It's true. Hades can win this battle, but you can open up that crack if you just keep pulling at it long enough. Just like a water dripping on a rock, it'll take thousands and thousands of tries. But the water will eventually beat that rock. 

The rock will have a hole in it and the water will continue to flow. You can read that into the show. I'm not sure it's there explicitly. There is a pretty central emphasis on you can't judge an effort by its result. You can measure it by its motivation and by how noble it is and by the attempt to bring beauty into someplace that is terrible with the idea that eventually that could have some kind of positive outcome. 

But you can't judge whether or not any individual effort is a good one on the basis of whether or not it worked because it probably won't. And so what does all of this add up to as a political program? Well, art can challenge charity is definitely a central theme of the show. How is Orpheus going to change the world and save the environment? He's going to do it with art. 

Would that work? There's also a central theme that power arrangements are complicated. The bad guys are still bad, but the good guys face tough choices and compromises and those bad guys were made bad by some kind of life experience. Like they're just not like I'm evil and I want to oppress everyone. They believe their own story, right? 

They really believe I need to double down on my mind and that's the only way I can make everyone safe. And why is it Persephone won't get that sort of the way Hades is by the end of that? But that's a complicated thing. That sounds just like there's a bad guy and they're terribly bad. 

And then for the good guys, it's way more complicated than all that because it's okay. We don't have any of the power. So we have to both get everyone together to challenge this tyrant, but we have to do it correctly because if we pick the wrong strategy then we all lose. 

Boy, that'll just make everything suck a little bit more. Okay, so we are at there are those in power who aren't going to change on their own and you need some form of political resistance. Here's a quote from Jared De Prado and he puts it this way, quote, Hades and Persephone's story is further developed throughout the revision process to show that those in positions of political power cannot be trusted to fix the problem. If anything, as both musicals argue, they make them much worse. 

And quote, the other musical that De Prado is talking about is frogs, but that's just a good way of summarizing. What is the problem? What is the central conflict in this show? Well, there is bad guys in power and they're not going to change on their own just because it's the right thing to do. So you have to come up with some kind of political resistance. And the question I want to ask in this episode is what is that resistance and is it going to work? Okay, we're going to tackle that in three questions. 

First of all, can you motivate a Broadway audience? Second question, is there a particular ideology that you have to take into this fight? And third, how does art relate back to political change? Is art a place where you can change the world and overcome a bunch of political arrangements? And I should also say before I dive into this, by politics, they don't necessarily mean winning elections in a modern democracy. Politics, classically, is the study of power and how is power distributed. 

And even if you didn't have modern democracies, you've always had throughout human history, people in power think Egyptian pharaohs and workers think the guys who built the pyramids and the people in power are compelling others, many, many others to engage in a bunch of sucky work to make the lives mostly of the people in power better. How do we find it? Good question, and I asked Mitchell. 

I'm glad you brought it up. Let's see if we can answer it. All right, question number one, Broadway audiences. Will this show Hades Town be a flash point for revolutionary change? This is the key political issue of our time. It's got to be climate change and something needs to happen or we are honestly all in trouble. 

What can be done? All right, let's just take a minute and focus on how bad this question is. There are climate deniers out there. 

I gotta say they're just wrong. This comes from the UN United Nations Environmental Program, quote, oppressive heat, species extinctions, pollution choked skies. This is what awaits humanity in 2050 unless it ends the earth's environmental decline. Billions of people will be exposed to hazardous air feeding a wave of death and illness, especially in the developing world. The earth may cross several environmental tipping points. The planet could be in for some seismic and irrevocable shocks from the disappearance of the Amazon to the collapse of the major ice sheets, end quote. That is not the most alarmist description of what's going on with climate change. It's what we got to come to grips with. Like our society, we're consuming too much carbon. There is overwhelming evidence that we're in trouble. It's also obvious that those in power aren't going to fix it on their own. 

The big energy companies aren't just going to say, oh, yeah, that turns out this would hurt our profits, but it's better for the planet. So we'll do that. The battle lines are drawn. We kind of know what's coming up. Now, there have definitely been a few key moments in human history where there's been a turning point. Oh, did I just use that phrase? 

Yes. A turning point, a key moment where the forces of democracy and justice overcame huge oppressive structures. The anti-slavery debates began at Oberlin College. A bunch of academics, collegians and activists got together at Oberlin College. Have you ever heard of Oberlin College before? If so, you are deeply into the slavery movement because you don't say, hey, quick, list the 10 top colleges. 

What's your top choice? Graduating high school senior with a 4.8 grade point average. Yes, my daughter has a 4.8 grade point average. Is that a humble brag? Yeah, I'm really proud of her, but mostly how do you get a 4.8 grade point average? 

And if you have a 4.8 grade point average, list the colleges you would want to go to and is Oberlin in the top 10. No, but at Oberlin College, there were a series of debates which started an anti-slavery movement and you can draw a pretty straight line between that specific event and the Emancipation Proclamation. There was a Boston Tea Party. 

Was there resistance to the British government? Yes. Was there a key moment where it all turned? 

Yes. That was the Boston Tea Party, or at least that was one of the key events. There was the storming of the Bastille. All those I know are historically complicated. It's very difficult to point to a single event and say, this is what caused the outcome. But you can definitely say there are key moments that had a huge symbolic importance in the outcome or the turning of the tide, that things were going one way and after that event other things happened. 

Hand, the turning of the tide for environmental climate catastrophe. B, the musical Hades Town. Will this be the show that sparks the fire? Okay, the two basic answers are yes and no. 

Will this show light the fire? Here are some people on the yes side. I'm going to share with you a series of short quotes that I think get to what everyone is interested in. Okay, so the basic question is can Hades Town the musical be such a flashpoint that will erupt a new era of environmental change where we fix the environment. 

Everything is great now. There are two basic answers to that question and they are yes and no. And there are some important scholars who have answered both of those questions who think both of those have taken a side either on the yes side or the no side. Okay, so let's start with the yes side. 

These are people who think that Hades Town the musical does have an important role to play in environmental activism. This is Alvarez and Salzman Mitchell, who we had introduced before. They're from Mount Claire University and here's their quote. Hades Town's ritual can help the audience deal with their own guilt about their participation in the abuse of nature and memory and hope and love. Our audience can identify with the workers oppression and reflect for a moment as the workers awaken to a revolutionary spirit. 

This hope is not impossible. End quote. The show is in fact designed to make the audience ponder. Valerie Schrader of Penn State University, who was talking about the song Why We Build the Wall, had this to say quote, when the number ends the audience is sent an intermission pondering the unsettling messages of the song and how they may or may not reflect current events and quote. May not reflect current events. They definitely reflect current events, but Valerie Schrader does believe that the point is to make the audience ponder those connections. And finally, not finally, second to finally, Jared De Prado of Sacred Heart talking about remember both Hades Town and Frogs thinks both shows have end quote emphasis on using the art of theatrical performance as a catalyst for political action even when it feels like one is working against a complacent majority and it makes the pleas all the more timely end quote. And now finally this is Abigail Voss who is writing her MA thesis from the University of Witt Waters Rand that I think is in Australia. 

Maybe South Africa, why am I even guessing it's from the University of Witt Waters Rand quote, Hades Town presents an audience with a mirror of the world they live in and asks the audience what it will do about it end quote. And in the conclusion Abigail Voss writes quote, This musical has brought a branch of activism into the Broadway world previously not seen there. It has spoken for climate change and against capitalist industrialism and it is done so by pulling at the heartstrings of the audience through a love story for the ages. All right, those are four separate scholars who all think that Hades Town can play an important role in helping the world get its act together about climate change. 

But there's also a no side this comes from Nea Wilson who's a graduate student at Texas A &M University in 2021. She wrote quote, The audience's relationship to the presentational stirring telly of Hermes and company mirrors Hades relationship to Orpheus's song inviting the spectators to consider their own access to economic and social power. Of course, this is perhaps unintentionally ironic given the cost of tickets to a hit Broadway musical and quote, and Jason DeLara Molesky a professor at St. Louis University commenting on the potential futility of the plot quote the pioneering Clifed drama, Clifed by the way climate fiction. 

That's a great one. Clifed drama about collective politics in this understanding would become something akin to a sonata played on a sinking ship a meditation on stoicism beauty and doom such an argument no doubt has its merits particularly given the absurdity of imagining that most in a Broadway audience will take to the barricades for radical climate solutions. Also, yes DeLara Molesky is 100% on board with Nea Nea's concern that the cost of Broadway tickets sort of puts an irony around a show that would critique capitalism. Now DeLara Molesky definitely does like the show and does like Mitchell. 

He just doesn't think that Broadway is going to launch a revolution. So will that and that's what the scholars think. What do we think? What do you think? 

What do I think? Let's let's I'm divided Will it inspire Broadway audiences to start an anti-capitalist revolution? I think the answer is no I just don't think that's what Broadway is about or at least that's not what Broadway has become It is definitely confusing to look at the relationships between the rich and the poor especially as a critiques capitalism now Karl Marx famously wrote the book Marx and Engels and Engels was the son of a wealthy industrialist and finance much of what Marx was trying to do that makes it sort of a interesting and complicated start to the you know seminal moment in the critiques of capitalism So it's not necessarily the case that just because there are some rich people involved or that you're making money on your art or that The art is sort of high end and requires Expensive production costs and hence expensive ticket sales That doesn't necessarily doom the show is something that's taken on capitalism, but it doesn't help I'm just not sure that that Broadway audience is the one that's going to go out there and and storm the barricades I mean, I guess it does depend on how interconnected you see capitalism and the environment if the show can convince people that you can't Really fix the environment as long as it's tied to the system of capitalism you have That has some political potential DeLara Molesky definitely thinks there's an interconnection between capitalism and the environment Mitchell writes a narrative that has all those close links Can you critique capitalism at a show that cost two thousand dollars a ticket in the expensive orchestra seats? DeLara Molesky thinks not Mia Wilson is skeptical and I am just not sold. I'm just not buying it. Boy am I mixing my metaphors I'm not sold on a critique of capitalism. I'm not buying a critique of capitalism Well, I can't even come up with a metaphor without capitalism I do think that and I will explain this later in the show I do think there's definitely a role for this, but I don't think this is the flashpoint for the revolution and that whole Let's light a match. 

Let's spark a revolution thing. Is that what the show's trying to do? Hmm. I think it is playing a part, but I don't think that's really how it goes This isn't like the powder keg and Hades town is the show that's going to write it or this song that you tell The story that you tell again is the going to be the flashpoint that sparks the revolution But as I will explain in a moment, I do think it's going to play a role. 

All right. That's question number one Will the broadway audience take the show and go to the barricades with it to create an environmental change that will save the planet Something yes something no I lean no if you have a different thought I'd love to hear it go ahead and hop on that email and and let's see if we can get a conversation going. All right question number two the political theory in Hades town. Okay, so in academia This happens all the time you would ask What is the political theory that is embedded within any work of fiction that if it's a great piece of art There's something that goes in there if you read layman's especially the original victor hugo book There is he's got something to say about poverty and the relationship between the rich and the poor And a lot of great art does that and so a bunch of one thing academics do all the time Is they'll pick up a great work of art and look for the political theory that is embedded within it What does it mean to depict a political ideology that has productive possibilities? You know what I love doing on the show taking weird academic senses and then translating them into actual english That people can engage And that's my own sense that will depict a political ideology that has productive possibilities That's my own quote. 

So I'm gonna unpack my own quote If you're a rhetorical critic and yes, that's a real job you can have it you can get a People with phd's in english view themselves this way in my field People with degrees in communication view themselves this way it is Interesting, but those articles are pretty inaccessible. I'm going to try to make the ideas. Hopefully fun here in Hades town we can like and we can appreciate that production a little more if we dig into What are the politics of the show? 

Okay? Anyway, long way of saying There are lots of theories about there out there about how you go about changing an oppressive system to lose inquiry Those are two names that are kind of hot ones in the contemporary academic literature They've definitely got theories about the way the world can be changed. Uh, move is another Does knowledge evolve or revolve? How does intellectual change link to political change? 

Steven toolman an author named Steven toolman who's big in argumentation and another guy named thomas kuhn that you've probably Read about talk about paradigms and the way knowledge changes in religion. There are definitely theories about this Loyola, you've heard of loyal there's a whole bunch of universities named loyal the original saint. Loyola was gonna literally Invade heaven. 

He was like a military guy. You've heard of Calvin Calvin had a theories about predestination All this is to say that there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to come up with the answer to How is it we achieve salvation or political change? Or intellectual change and a lot of people who think it's really important You get that question right in your art in your literature These theories play out a bunch in literature a common thing for scholars to do is to ask whether or not a book or a play Or a musical has an immediate political effect Like is it going to start a revolution or lead to the passage of some law or change a government? And also ask about an overall theory of political change and whether or not that's included in a book or a Musical and whether or not that has a good long-term strategy for how you engage how you change oppressor political structure Let's I'm gonna take a little side trip here and talk about the life of Karl Marx just a little bit He was basically a grumpy journalist He got invited to a union action because it was held in london It was the first international working man's association meeting or convention or something They just called the first international now anyways hang out in london. 

They're having this international event They need more germans. He's a german so they invite him this grumpy and not very successful and middle eight late middle age Journalists shows up and that launches his career starts writing more things They ask him to write the manifesto for their movement and he eventually writes a book He writes a couple books where he describes how economics were linked to power and that sparked a huge debate over whether he was right about political change and the link between economics and politics there were these different economic classes and he saw that that was linked to power and he was a I mean his big contribution was he started that conversation and for better or worse Those ideas changed the course of history those ideas inspired massive changes in china and russia probably His theories were warped in both cases Neither one really ended up with an exciting democracy. It is notable that China and russia are currently totalitarian systems of government But the end result was he pointed out economic inequality It's not clear if his theories of revolution worked very well But there are people who carry on that tradition and say all right We got we still had problems and there were economic class problems that marx was writing about but now we've multiplied that by some massive Environmental problems we have to deal with what is the right way to deal with that? Lots of people think about that With marx we have the luxury of history to kind of trace out his ideas played out and whether or not it was successful but the Those authors I mentioned before, Galuze and Quaterree and Moof are all thinking about what, you know, grumpy journalist shows up to a meeting, writes a book, changes the course of history, what that demonstrates of nothing else, the power of ideas. 

And so what ideas should we be carrying forward in our now collective fight in favor of the environment? It is more common to have that debate when you don't have the benefit of looking back at the 150 years of history that followed Karl Marx in the writing of his book. So when you evaluate a piece of art and its relationship to politics, you look at the political vision that is included in that piece of art, that show, that musical, and you decide whether or not it's a good one or a bad one. And there are a couple of scholars who have done exactly that with Hades Town and let's listen to what they have to say. The point of everything that I just had, it was just chattering on about is that academics, frequently look at a piece of art and they ask about its political possibilities, what vision of politics is included in there. 

And then they ask if that's a good one or a bad one. A couple scholars have done that for Hades Town. Let's see what they have to say. Valerie Lynn Schrader from Penn State University, who is writing in the Journal Studies in Musical Theater, is talking about Hades Town and its relationship to politics. Now there's two main pieces to what Valerie Schrader has to say. The first one is the concept of hegemony. 

I'm going to read that quote, then we'll unpack it a little bit. Quote, hegemony, a term coined by Antonio Ramsey, is a dominant group's maintenance of power over a subordinate or oppressed group. Hegemony is a complement to the theory of the state as force. Fontana notes that hegemony describes the ways and methods by which consent is generated and organized, which in turn is directly related to the mechanisms and processes by which knowledge and beliefs are first produced and second generated. The hegemonic state becomes the common sense of the people and that they accept their own oppression as a part of everyday life. Hegemony then is the institutionalization of consent and persuasion within both civil society and the state. 

End quote. Now the connection to Hades Town is pretty easy. Hades is the hegemon. 

Hegemon meaning the dude in charge. And the message is to build this wall to keep everyone safe. It's I'm doing this for you, especially Tupersephany and Eurydice, and that's a central theme. 

What Hades has done, why it works, why he's a hegemon, why he's exerting hegemony, is that he has totally normalized the life of the dead workers as automatons. You have to do this. Your life has to be this way. 

It is good for your life to be this way because that will keep us all safe. He's convinced the workers that their own oppression is something normalized and natural, and it's just common sense that we need people to work in these minds so we can build this wall because if we don't do it, we're going to be overrun by the poor people and they're going to kill us all. All right. That's the first piece of Schrader's article. The second piece involves Hannah Arendt. That idea is that memory is key and challenging those accepted structures is a key to moving forward. You have to have a memory to be able to start thinking about the idea that this common sense structure maybe isn't the right one. Schrader relies heavily on Stephen H. Brown to explain Arendt here as a quote from Brown that's included in Schrader. 

It goes this way, quote, taking together a wrencher reflection on the protection, remembrance, affords against the waves of time and transience, the perils of forgetting and its consequent destruction of hope, meaning and motive for political life and the disclosure of that life through speech and action represent three tightly braided themes with which the fabric of her thought is given its distinct texture. Okay. So let's take note of that. There's three things you got to remember what life was like before the dominant structure. You got to think about it and you got to be able to challenge common sense knowledge. 

Schrader's own conclusion on this point is a little more digestible. So let's take a listen to that quote, this hope only occurs because of memory. Orpheus's song awakens memory and erudicy, allowing her to remember who she is and that she loves him. Her active remembering gives Orpheus hope that he might change Hades mind through his song in turn. 

The workers remember to hope for their own freedom after witnessing the events that transpire between Hades and Persephone and between Orpheus and erudicy. Hades town makes a statement that aligns with Hannah Arendt's view that memory is juxtaposed with judgment and that forgetting is akin to losing the ability to think critically and to make judgments and quote, just note Schrader is directly linking the theories of Hannah Arendt to the plot and the political vision in Hades town. Now Hannah Arendt is a complicated figure. She is forever linked to Martin Heidegger. They had similar ideas and they had a romantic relationship. 

The two of them hooked up when she was like 18 and he was a 35 year old professor. She wrote a bunch of stuff about the trial of Adolf Eichmann that is controversial and some consider an apology for Eichmann or at least for the German people or like the German people forgot and that's why they were cool with the Holocaust and some of you that is forgivable. But Arendt was also part of the political resistance. She smuggled people out of especially Jews out of Berlin. 

But her connection to Arendt was not just romantic. They cited each other. They promoted each other's careers. They promoted each other's ideas. 

They did so from impressive academic position. So it mattered that Arendt was supporting Heidegger and that Heidegger was supporting Arendt. And Heidegger is also complicated. His writings were supposed to be revolutionary and they were the big way that you could challenge totalitarian governments but himself was the rector at Berlin University when there was an order to expel all the Jewish professors. Now he didn't issue that order. 

It's not clear how active he was in it but he sure didn't stop it. Some people really dislike both Arendt and Heidegger. Some people very ardently defend them. They're like all the shade that's getting thrown into Arendt and Heidegger is an attempt to silence their ideas by people in power because they know these ideas could unlock revolutionary potential and change all the political structure. I will just say if the theories really worked like if Heidegger's theory of resistance was good, surely nobody understood that better than Heidegger and it did do him a lot of good. He was not like front and center challenging the Nazi power regime. 

And there were people who did. Hans and Sophie Scholl who founded the White Rose Society. They took on the Nazis. Somebody said, oh yes, Sophie Scholl, your writings are actually an apology for Adolf Eichmann. Everybody knew that Hans and Sophie Scholl were completely against the Nazis. 

Archbishop van Gaelen openly spoke out against Nazi power. They all faced death and everybody faced the choice in the Nazi regime. Look, you can speak out against the Nazis and you'll probably get killed or you can be quiet. 

You can preserve yourself and live to fight another day. I mean, that was just a tough choice that people in that regime had to face. But there are people who faced that and came out way less controversial than either Arant or Heidegger. Anyway, if memory and critical thought and challenged common sense are indeed the key ways to fight oppression, you know, you would hope that Arant and Heidegger would have done it better than anybody else did and they would have been done better against the Nazis than they did. Now, that doesn't mean that they're wrong and it's pretty easy to judge them 72 hundred years after the fact. Okay, it doesn't mean they're wrong, but does make you wonder if their theories really are that great and why they themselves did not do a little bit better. Now anyway, maybe that means that there are better places to look for political possibilities than in Arant's theories about memory. 

Here is Schrader's conclusion. We are all orpheus. We must keep telling the tale and we must keep remembering, judging and thinking critically. In this way, we are all orpheus seeking to make a difference. Eurydice is our world, self-sufficient, but in desperate need of care, we need to finish the song and continue telling the tale. 

Maybe, just maybe, the story will end differently this time. And quote, go Valerie Schrader. I love that quote that definitely puts all the cards on the table, makes a compelling case, but I'm not sure I am sold that we are all orpheus. Look man, orpheus is unique. We're not all orpheus. Orpheus is the greatest musician and the greatest singer. 

We're not all that. He wouldn't be orpheus if everyone could be orpheus. And he did some stuff that's bad. He failed. He failed because of that capital D doubt or some other reason, but in every telling of the story, in earlier episodes we talked about the two great Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid. In both of their stories, he failed. In Mitchell's version, he also failed. He actually failed. 

The dude failed. It's not just like if we try again, maybe it'll be different. It's going to be the same unless we do something differently than orpheus did. We are not all like orpheus. It's more than just trying and again and again with the same song against the possible odds. 

It's making a better effort each time, or at least trying out something different. And it still leaves out the workers. And unless you imagine that if he didn't turn around, his song would have done something for them. But what would that have done? Would that have been he persuaded Hades? He expanded the crack. He restored the environment. 

He would have taken down the wall. It's not very clear. So she, Valerie Schrader, ends up, we are all orpheus. And we shouldn't stop trying after repeated failure. All right. So I'm not going to sit here and try to judge 80 years after the fact what it was at rent. And Heidegger should have done in resistance to the Nazis. And whether or not they did it right or they did it wrong. 

But I will say there are other people who definitely did it better. Hans and Sophie Scholl, who founded the White Rose Society, were always activists against the Nazi government. Nobody questions their political stances. The Archbishop von Galen openly spoke out. Now everybody at the time was facing the choice of, if I speak out against the Nazis, they're probably going to try to kill me. 

So I'm facing the choice of death or complicity. But there are people who handled it in a way that was unequivocally positive, less so than a rent and Heidegger. That's not to personally judge a rent and Heidegger. But it is to say that maybe their approach, their philosophies, aren't really the key to fighting a big oppressive power structure like the a Nazi party. Anyway, if memory could have gone thought and challenges to common sense are the key ways to fight oppression, then you would have thought that a rent and Heidegger, who surely understood those concepts better than anybody else, would have come up with a more effective way to fight the Nazi party. 

I think history remembers their contributions as mixed and remembers others as having done it better. Maybe then we should look someplace else. Anyway, let's go back and take a look at Schrader's final conclusion. Quote, we must keep telling the tale, and we must keep remembering, judging and thinking critically. In this way, we are all orpheus, seeking to make a difference. 

Eurydice is our world, self-sufficient. But in desperate need of care, we need to finish the song and continue telling the tale. Maybe, just maybe, the story will end differently this time. 

End quote, Valerie Schrader, you've got a way with words. I love the way you have put your conclusion. We are all orpheus. 

But not sure I fully agree with it. Orpheus is orpheus because he's unique and we can't all be him. He's the greatest musician, the greatest singer. He can produce a piece of art that can change the world. 

Can we all do that? Things are also not any better when he's done. He failed. 

He failed because of his capital D doubt. I mean, there are at least three great tellings of this tale. One came from the poet Virgil. One came from the poet Ovan. 

One came from Neas Mitchell in all versions. Orpheus fails. He fails maybe because of capital D doubt, maybe because of some other reason. But it's not just like if we try again, maybe it'll be different. 

It's going to be the same unless that doubt is addressed. Or for whatever reason that he failed, somebody comes up with a solution to that. We're not all like Orpheus. And we got to do more than just try again with the same song against impossible odds. 

It takes courage for sure to take on those impossible odds and to confront these great, seemingly unbeatable powers with nothing but your guitar and maybe a flower, really cool flower, really great guitar and really good song. But we have to do more than that. We got to do something different. Something that's going to work this time. 

Not simply try again. And it's also not clear to me what happens to all those workers, even if Orpheus does not turn around. What's going to happen? He gets out. He gets out there with your Ritisi, but then Hades is persuaded like, okay, cool. Now you can all do that same thing. 

You can all leave if you don't look back. Has he expanded the crack? Has he restored the environment? Has he torn down the wall? 

If he does not turn around, it's unclear. I think it's an unanswered question in the plot and in the political stance of Hades Town. So Schrader likes the political possibilities in Hades Town. She ends that we are all Orpheus and we shouldn't stop trying even after a repeated failure. 

And I think maybe the show definitely demonstrates that hegemony really works. And I don't think it's really that Orpheus's memory restoration that really matters. Now, Anise Mitchell is definitely on record as saying that she thinks the loss of memory is a big deal and that that's what makes it super scary. But Anise Mitchell is also on record as saying what the reason Orpheus fails is that capital deed out he doesn't trust himself. 

For Gromssey, it is challenging common sense political arrangements, which Orpheus definitely does not do. He sings a beautiful song. He tries to remind the people in power that they too were once young lovers and that there's possibility in love and hope in the face of despair and doom, but doesn't really come to grips with what Gromssey thinks needs to happen. You have to challenge the common sense idea that it's really Hades call to make. Take the choice away from Hades, put it in power with people. 

That's more what Gromssey is all about. That doesn't really happen at the end of Hades Town. So anyway, according to Valerie Schrader, there is great political possibility in Hades Town. That is in the act of restoring memory. 

I think there is political power in Hades Town, but maybe it has to be something other than the restoration of memory. So let's look at another theorist. This is Melinda Sharp. She is a pastoral psychologist from the Columbia Theological Seminary, which is located in Georgia. 

What is a pastoral psychologist? You asked, I don't know. I didn't know. So I asked my friends in the psychology department, including the immediate past chair of the psychology department at Cal State Fullerton, and you know what? They didn't know either. 

So we went to that repository of all knowledge Wikipedia. Here's what it says, quote, pastoral counseling is a branch of counseling in which clergy people, including ministers, rabbis, priests, and imams provide psychotherapeutic service and mental health support to practitioners of a given faith. Pastoral counselors often integrate modern psychological theory and methods with traditional religious training and an effort to relieve psychospiritual concerns in addition to the conventional spectrum of counseling service and quote, what is pastoral psychology? 

It is faith based psychology. Now as a side note, Melinda's Melinda Sharp's daughter had some significant medical issues and that's talked about in the article. They end up being iatrogenetic. Hey, there's your word of the day. 

iatrogenetic. Is that a Melinda Sharp? No, that's me. Is that me using pretentious academic words? Maybe, but that's my favorite academic word. 

iatrogenesis is a medical problem that is caused by medical treatment or at least overtreatment, or it is caused by presenting yourself for service. It's a real thing. People study this, but it's also part of Melinda Sharp's experience. It's part of how they dealt with her daughter's medical problem was that they really got into Hades Town and they saw two different productions with it. Her daughter's particular problem was she was suffering something was difficult to diagnose, so they went to the doctors. The doctors wouldn't really trust her daughter or what her daughter was saying. It sort of implied that they thought her daughter was being an abuse victim or that she'd been engaged in sexual activity that she hadn't really been involved in. Then the doctors prescribed some massive treatments that ended up being inappropriate, and then her daughter's condition was being made worse by this treatment and this overtreatment in the middle of all that mess. Melinda and her daughter turned to Hades Town. They saw two different productions of it, and Jule Blackman, who played the role of a muse, was a character that her daughter was especially taken with. Shout out to Jule Blackman and for taking an interest in the life Melinda Sharp and her daughter. They exchanged some messages. They Jule Blackman made her a little quick video that they got to play with. Very cool. Anyway, it seemed to help her daughter quite a bit. 

But Melinda Sharp is now trying to theorize about what can go on with pastoral psychology and can help it. Let me just take a pause and say I've got a relative, let's say cousin. It's not quite that, but it's step cousin, cousin in law, something like that. But the guy was an emergency room nurse and has dealt with a lot of substance and substance issues. It's himself a licensed nurse and a counselor and a great guy. And he would say, if you were to take a look at all the different ways that you can treat addiction, alcoholics, anonymous beats all of them, like statistically, quantitatively beats them all by a mile. And if you were to ask him why he would say it's because they put spirituality right in the heart of what it is that they're doing, that part of the healing that human needs to go through, spiritual healing, and because alcoholics, anonymous makes that a part of the program, they succeed where others fail. And I think that's kind of the point of pastoral psychology that if you believe humans have a spiritual side and a lot of people do, don't just take that out of the treatment, make that front and center of the treatment, bring in the questions of faith and spirituality, and there's real healing that can happen there. 

Lots of people think that alcoholics, anonymous think that Melinda Sharp thinks that and she is connecting it rather directly to Hades town. For Melinda Sharp, the key is not remembering. It's not memory. It's not Hannah Rint. It's not Reinhardiger. 

It is love. Here's the quote. It's lengthy. 

I think it's worth it. Quote, I want students to contribute to possibilities for healing and to the subversive nature of hope, while also being tuned in and truthful to harmful, unjust, and oppressive conditions that easily feed off fears and regularly constrict freedoms. As we continue to struggle with our daughters health issues, now my own convictions were being tested. Does love show up in the depths of suffering and uncertainties around future well-being? Eurydice and Persephone awaken to their worth, believing that healing love could tell the truth about the redress tightly strung control. Orpheus awakened to the possibility of his voice to widen cracks of manufactured impossibility for the sake of healing love beyond himself and his individual relationship and quote. And I should also say that Melinda Sharp relies heavily on Howard Thurman's theory of liberation and that theory is that deception, fear, and hatred, the three dogs of hell, need to be countered by love and trust. Okay, so it's not just about restoring balance to nature and it's not just remembering, it's using hope to break open the cracks within the walls. 

One more quote, quote with Hades Town that starts with imaginative glimpses of cracks in the wall. What womanist theologians call making a way out of no way and what liberationists call make a road by walking. An oppressive context is one where there is no path to freedom and no way planned, like flowers in sideways cracks, liberative healing grows through the cracks of oppressive systems when possible pathways toward collective freedom are glimpsed. In Hades Town, actors and audiences imagine possible ways forward through collective awakening from seemingly impossible stuck places of relentless suffering. 

There are compelling reasons to stay stuck when these same elements, lighting, muses, chorus, stage, companion voices fade to near nothingness. Hermes helps Orpheus imagine a pathway forward into uncharted territory. Orpheus having glimpsed away into possibility, having helped him awaken himself. 

Hades Persephone, Eurydice, the chorus of oppressed laborers and the walls themselves to their own motivating possibilities is asked by coworkers to enact liberative imagination, end quote. It's not just starting over and hoping that it might work this time. It is purposefully finding faith and love in the darkest hours and trusting that positive connections to each other can make it go differently, can topple the systems of power. The solution to hegemony is fighting that deception, that big lie, that this is the best thing for you, that you should accept that the people in power get to stay in power, because that's the best for everyone or that's just the way it's gotta be. 

You gotta fight that with connection to other people, with hope, with trust and with love. Is that a better approach than Schrader and Hannah Arendt? I kind of think so. All right, here's my rant. My students have to hear it. I think it's true. We defeated the Nazis. Arendt and Heidegger cheered that moment. They were part of the defeat of the Nazis, but how did we do it? There are a lot of dead bodies along the way, and maybe it was the Nazis screwing up due to their own arrogance and, say, invading Russia, as much as it was any brilliance on the side of the Allies or the triumph of democracy. We should be rightly proud that we ended the Nazi regime. 

But there is another way to do that. Gandhi took on the British Empire. Now, famously, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, probably 11 million people, probably 20 or 30 million people if you add up the Russians, and these are not like battlefield casualties. These are just like the civilians that were killed by the Nazis. It was probably 20 or 30 million. But that number, I promise you, was just dwarfed by the number of people in continental, in Southeast Asian India that died as a result of British colonial rule through starvation, through ignorance, through poverty, through trillions of dollars of wealth being taken away. The death toll in India was at least as high at the hands of the British Imperial Government, was at least as high as that of the Nazis. Gandhi also defeated the British, and he did so without a single military casualty, without firing a shot, without dropping a nuclear bomb, without anything but the power of love. By confronting the British colonial government with non-violence resistance, Gandhi got the British to leave and to admit that he was better than they were by the time that they left, that he was just a better human than they were, and that worked. Anyway, it's not the time or place for an entire exposition of the end of World War II and why it was the British colonial empire left India and the evils of the colonialism. But there are at least two historical models that we have to face when asked how can you overcome a hegemonic power that has a whole ideology about why it's so important that they're the ones in power, either because you're the master race or because there are savages that need to be civilized and the natives are better off if the colonial power is in charge. There are two different ways out of that. You can beat them with a military and you can also beat them with the power of love, and if you're Melinda Sharp and you think the power of love is sufficient to overcome a hegemony and to topple government's topple power structures that are destroying the world for all of us, you can point to a couple historical examples, and I don't think that she's far off base in actually more comfortable landing where Melinda Sharp did than landing where Valerie Schrader did on the importance of memory handing her it. I am certainly not opposed to remembering stuff and all four critical thinking, those are both important things that need to happen, but if you're going to say what is the political possibility that you need to add to the song of Orpheus so it's going to work, it's probably something that is more collective and love oriented that can that could help us. Okay, that gets us to our last question. 

What about art? Now this is the core of the story. Hades Town is at its core a take on a hegemonic power structure. There's a big bad, there's a guy in charge and he's convincing everybody else he should be in charge and they're buying his story and Orpheus is going to unravel all that and he's going to do it with art. What makes Orpheus so compelling? 

And Anne-Ace Mitchell has not called me up to talk about why she did what she did. I've read her book and I'm not sure she directly addresses it there, but if you were going to say why was it Mitchell decided to tell the Orpheus story? Like you are a folk musician, you're just getting into musical theater, you want to write a show, why'd you pick Orpheus? It's because Orpheus is the ultimate musician. If you're a musician and you want to believe your art can change the world, take a look at Orpheus because he's the guy who really believed that. He walked in front of Hades with his guitar and he was just going to, with the power of his music, change the mind of the, literally the god of hell and make him flip. The core question that you would ask in Hades Town is can art change the world? Orpheus is going to sing a song to restore the balance of nature? There are other stories like that. Robert Johnson, the great blues musician at the Crosswords was going to take on the devil in a guitar playing contest. 

Charlie Daniels was going to outfittle him. There's a recurrent theme that there are people who believe that art can change the world. Does it? Can it? Can art change the world? That's kind of the core question. 

My answer is definitely yes. I think culture change precedes political change, that you don't have out of the blue the civil rights act, just get passed because people think it's the right thing to do. Or Abraham Lincoln just kind of saying, you know what? 

Let's go ahead and emancipate these slaves. That doesn't come from nowhere. There's an entire cultural background and context for all those changes. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book about how much it sucked to be a slave. It was a hugely important novel. It told a story. 

It was a great piece of art, but it told a particular story about the oppression of people. It's hardly the only book that did that. But when you got to the end where we were ready to finally end slavery in the United States, people could point to that book. That's the one that really rang true with people, that showed people how bad slavery can be. George Orwell definitely had a book that was talking about how bad it can be to be a totalitarian state. That was the point of what his writings were. 

Political change is long and slow. Incumulative Boy is Mitchell Wright about it. It's an old song. 

It's a sad song. We got to tell it again. We got to tell it better, but it cumulates. How does art change the world? We build a common understanding of a problem over time. 

That becomes part of the cultural consciousness. Really, that's what storytelling is. That's what the Orpheus story is. Homer first told the Orpheus story. It ended. It hasn't ended yet, but it landed in the lap of an asked Mitchell so that 20, 30 centuries later, Mitchell was telling the same story that Homer is telling. 

It was a story about how art can change the world. There's usually not one piece of legislation or political change that's going to do it. It can happen on its own. The Civil Rights Act happened in 1964. George Floyd died in the year 2020. We still have a ways to go. The point is that one legislative action cannot change culture. Culture has to change enough that the legislation action becomes possible. 

Then once it becomes possible, it has to get written into the way we think about the world and the way we act about the world. And I think this is by both what Mitchell gets right and what she might miss a little bit. It is an old song. 

It is a sad song. You got to tell that story over and over because the battle is never going to end. We are never, or at least we have not yet, found a way to get rid of all oppression, all marginalization, all the unfairness and injustice in the world. That is going to keep coming back. The tyrants, the totalitarians and the hegemon are going to keep coming back. 

We sing that song over and over again, not because we're going to get it right because they rise and they fall. It is possible to overthrow tyrants. It is possible to overthrow tyranny. 

There will be more tyrants who come back and more tyranny to fight. That is what makes the song eternal. That is why we have to keep doing it. Let's raise a toast not because we tried and we failed but the cause was so noble. 

But next time we will get it right and then our problems will be solved. The struggle is eternal but there are important victories to win along the way. Gandhi won one of them. We defeated Adolf Hitler. That was another important end. There are other examples. 

We have to find a good way to replace them with something better. We talked about this on the show before. We talked about it with Les Mis. We talked about it with Man of Lomondcha. But it's a thing. 

It's definitely front and center of Hades Town. There are fights to be had. Let's fight them. Let's win them. Can art win? Can flowers grow? 

Can cracks expand? The answer I think is yes. We just got to make sure that we do it right and that we approach it with the right philosophy. And if you get it, you know, I totally agree with Mitchell. If you tried your hardest and it didn't work, I'm raising a cup to you because thank God you're out there trying. All right. 

Let's wrap this up. Does Hades Town raise issues of oppression and environmental destruction? Yes. 

Does it show them as connected to broader systems of oppression and to sexism and to the abuses of capitalism? Yes. Does it have a solution? 

Kind of. It has a unique ending for sure. It is not a happy ending. 

The ending is that this attempt to get the Hedge Mon out of power didn't work, but we're going to keep trying and we're going to keep saluting those people who do keep trying. If we ask the question, is it effective? Well, is what Hades Town did? 

Is it effective? Well, it's probably not going to spark a revolution with a Broadway audience. There's too much capitalism there for that to be the place that capitalism takes a blow. Is remembering enough? Probably not. You got to do something different, different how? 

Not a better song. Maybe a better understanding of the way power works. You got to understand and address hegemony. 

And in that way, I think Mitchell is brilliant in the way hegemony is portrayed in Hades Town. What's the solution? How do you overcome all the despair and the doom and the deception that the Hedge Mon is going to unleash? Well, love and connection with each other. That's definitely a place where political possibility is there. Some people want to change the world with silly love song. And what's wrong with that? I want to know. Yeah, art changes culture and culture changes society. And it doesn't happen all at once. But that, all right, if you only have Uncle Tom's Cabin, you probably never get to the Emancipation Proclamation. But without Uncle Tom's Cabin, it's going to take you a lot longer to get there. So each of these, how can art change the world? 

It does so by adding to the collective consciousness for the way we all understand the world by painting a better vision of how bad and unfair things are to create the epitose to change it. Is it going to happen fast? No, which is not a reason to be patient, but it is definitely a reason that we should all want to try again. Let's raise a toast to trying again and doing it a little bit better next time. All right, that'll do it for this episode. We have one more episode on Hades Town. 

One more question that we want to ask about politics. It is Hades Town is a mining town. Does the mining nature of Hades Town is that important? Does that play a role in everything? 

I think yes. We'll talk about why on our next and final episode then we are going to switch it up and move on to Hamilton, our second contemporary show after we've covered all those classics. I love my favorite podcast is The Constant by Mark Chrysler. 

He's from Chicago and you know that because he ends every single episode by connecting back his content or whatever topic he's taking on to something that is happening in his hometown of Chicago. All right, here's my homage to Mark Chrysler and The Constant by Plenidolback to me in my life. I am John Bruschke, a professor at Cal State Fullerton where in 1992 on an exact date unknown rage against the machine took its political protest movement to our Wednesday noon concerts just outside the student union and it drew maybe 20 fans just like every other event of Cal State Fullerton. There's footage of the event and if you do watch it you can see them playing their guts out on the stage with a bunch of board-looking students kind of walking to and from the union behind them getting a lunch going to class. My god, that is how everything happens at Cal State Fullerton. We're a commuter school. We can't get 5,000 people to anything including rage against the machine concerts. But I am raising my cup to Zach Della Rocha. It's a sad song man and it's an old song but we're going to sing it again and next time we might just win the battle of Los Angeles.