She flashes a huge grin at the audience and takes a swig from her bottle. She wears a bright green velvet dress and a giant wig that looks like a cascade of fusilli pasta. When we first meet Persephone, she is still aboveground, carrying a giant basket filled with flowers and a bottle of red, like a woman headed to a debauched picnic. He keeps coming earlier and earlier to collect her from the sunlight and bring her back on a train to the Underworld, which he has converted into a steampunk sweatshop where the souls of the dead toil endlessly, building a wall to nowhere. But in the course of hundreds of years his sweet nothings have turned sour. Hades (the great Patrick Page, in a slick pinstripe suit with a booming basso profundo) did not abduct her, as he does in ancient myth he wooed her, he made promises. Gray, who is nominated for a Tony Award for the role, plays Persephone as a tornado of resentment and rascally rebellion. But it’s Persephone, played by the thirty-eight-year-old actress Amber Gray, who steals every scene she’s in. The show, which began as a concept album, from 2010, by the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and was developed for the stage by Rachel Chavkin, tells the tragedy of Eurydice, who sells her soul to Hades, and her lover, Orpheus, who must descend to the Underworld to try to get her back. This version of Persephone-the soulful modern woman trapped in stifling surroundings-is the one who saunters onto the stage each night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, on Broadway, as one of the protagonists of the new musical “ Hadestown,” a bluesy retelling of ancient myth set in a town that resembles Depression-era New Orleans. Starved for sunlight, she has taken to the bottle, wobbling around in a drunken haze. Persephone’s domain is the giving of life now, trapped half the time in a world of death, she is going a little crazy. Then she has to return, across the River Styx, into the dark. There, Persephone and Hades strike a deal she can return to the land above for six months every year, to kick off the spring and summer solstices. Persephone, the Greek goddess of harvest and fertility, and a daughter of Zeus, is walking through a garden plucking wildflowers one day when Hades, the god of the Underworld, whisks her away to his subterranean realm.

Original persephone and hades story