Allison Russell isn't afraid of the dark.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has returned to Hadestown for a limited run, shimmying back into Persephone's tattered beauty through March 1. The experience has only deepened her affection for the character.

"Anaïs [Mitchell] and Rachel [Chavkin] have been so generous in their allowances" Russell shares, her voice amber-warm in spite of the frigid temperatures outside. While the depiction of Persephone in Hadestown is textually set, Russell's multi-year study of the mythological figure has filtered into her performance, illuminating new corners of the woman thrust into the shadows. 

Russell laughs lightly, a breathy sound as she debates where to even begin. "So much has happened to her before the curtain rises, and that 'crack in the wall' is a crack in her composure."

Check out Russell's unique rendition of "Our Lady of the Underground" above, and learn more about her deeply considered depiction below.

One of the most complicated aspects of Russell's performance, and of Hadestown in general, is the core relationship between Hades and Persephone. While many mythologies were written in ancient times about the godly pair, they were hardly the happy heavenly couple.

"In the musical, their relationship must be consensual: For our story to work at all, you have to believe that they had a deep, true love," Russell explains. "But there's always more to the story than 'they loved each other, the end.'There's dysfunction, there's despair, there's longing. There's a reason that their myth has had this staying power. We've been telling versions of their story for over 3,000 years, because it resonates with our own human nature, both the good and the bad."

Russell knows a thing or two about that particular coin flip. The daughter of a single teenage mother with then-undiagnosed schizophrenia, Russell was heavily abused by her adoptive stepfather, leading to her running away from home at 15 in search of peace. She found it in Mount Royal Cemetery, a 65-acre burial ground in Quebec, where she connected with the primal side of peace among the trees and mausoleums. In time, she confessed her struggles to a classmate, her first love, whom she immortalized in her 2021 song "Persephone." Russell wears a custom gold Persephone pendant, complete with a jeweled pomegranate seed, as a physical talisman of her influence. 

"I draw heavily from the Orphic Myths, which are really specific," Russell explains. Now a mother herself, Russell's understanding of that particular myth cycle has compounded with time. "The Orphic Myths are told by Orpheus to the world after he loses Eurydice, and within them, he speaks of Persephone as having been a bereaved mother. She was aggressed by her father, Zeus, and had two children by him, Zagreus and Moe, and those children were murdered by the Titans as collateral damage. That version of her, which speaks so deeply to me, really dovetails beautifully with the story that we're telling in Hadestown, of Hades and Persephone."

Russell's deep connection to the mythological queen of the underworld has stretched her performance as Persephone in a complex series of ways, from the very first domino played at the top of the show. The trauma of the outside world has infiltrated the crack in her Persephone's reality, compounding as the evening goes on.

"I cry every single show. Every single performance hits me harder than ever, with everything that is happening in our country right now, with the rise of authoritarianism and fascism globally. This story speaks to that base violence, and it also speaks to the humanity of the people that are trapped in that fear-based violent behavior. One of the most complex parts of our show is Hades, and how Anaïs has managed to make him feel human, where you can understand how he's gotten to this place of just doing such harm." 

Russell sighs before plowing forward. "Our audiences are filled with young people right now, because this show gives them a way to move through some of their grief from coming of age in the world as it is today. It forces them to connect with each other, and to believe that they will be able to find the world they dream of in a more profound and connected and collective way."

A longtime friend of Mitchell's, Russell has watched the piece evolve since 2006, when she first heard her perform the Act I closing number, "Why We Build the Wall." It is still that moment, every night, that shatters Russell-as-Persephone.

"'Our Lady of the Underground' is such a difficult piece, specifically because it comes right after she has hit rock bottom during 'Why We Build the Wall.' My Persephone never imagined that her man would sink as low as her father had, to take advantage of and violate a young girl and take her life and her identity from her. That moment, when Eurydice goes up the stairs to Hades' office..." Russell shudders. "Persephone does nothing, she doesn't stop it, and it is truly beyond words. It's the hardest moment in the show for me."

"Every night, I feel that suffering in my body. I feel that rage, that desperation, that pain. I let you see it, in my body, as I watch Eurydice. And then we come back to Act II, and it's 'Our Lady,' which has this happy sounding melody underscoring the telling of such tragedy. Persephone has hit rock bottom. She is self-medicating even more than usual. She is trying to use her powers to be kind, trying to wake up the underworld, but no one hears her. They won't even name her. And finally, she cracks."

Russell makes a snapping sound, taut and frantic. "'Look up! Look up!' That's what she's really saying, over and over, in the piece. 'There's a crack in the wall! Don't you see it?! Wake up!' And then, the piece ends with the factory whistle blowing and Eurydice coming out after being robbed of her identity, and Persephone is shattered all over again. The moment she sees Eurydice, she just collapses, because until she exits the office in the worker's enslaved garb, Persephone still has one shred of hope. Throughout 'Our Lady,' she is still praying that Hades is bluffing, that he's not really going to do it. But no, Hades has slid fully into authoritarianism and awful abuse of women, and it's devastating for Persephone, and she finally awakens to the fact that she is equally as responsible for letting him get to this point, because she was the only one who could stop him, and she didn't."

And yet, Russell's Persephone still has to find some way to come back together with Hades in the end. It isn't an easy cycle to remain in, especially given her own lived experience.

"My history is deeply abusive, with a mother who had no choice but to marry a man old enough to be her father. He was born in 1936 and raised in a sundown town in the U.S.; he had been abused ideologically by white supremacy and by his own family, and he brought all that with him, and he paid it all forward. And my mom still lives with this man. It's one of the heartbreaks of my life. Why won't she free herself of this man? Even when I charged him, and he went to jail, she was there waiting when he got out. When you get conditioned into these relationships, sometimes you are not able to break free of it. And Persephone, in particular, is trapped."

Russell sighs once more, her tone mournful. "She is trapped, contractually, to keep the world alive. If she doesn't continue to return to Hades, there's no seasons anymore in the world. If she leaves him completely, life will cease. The cruelty of him having agreed to that deal, and then getting more and more angry with her about the thing they both agreed to... there's so many layers to this piece. Returning to the role has only shown me how much more there is to explore."

The concept of trust in the aftermath of such abuse weighs heavy on her mind. "I don't know that Persephone ever trusts Hades again, after what he does to Eurydice. When Orpheus and Eurydice leave the underworld, Persephone truly believes that they're going to make it. When it looks like Hades is going to let them go, she has one final glimmer of hope, and then she is crushed underneath him once again, when he puts that caveat on it." 

Again, a sigh. "Still, she loves. We all have the capacity to love people when they've done us great harm, and we forgive, and we hope. But I don't know that trust can ever truly return after it is broken in that way. By the end of the piece, things between Hades and Persephone are certainly not resolved. By the end of 'Promises,' there is this opportunity for a moment of redemption, but he's not willing to let the young lovers go, which is another break of her trust, when their connection was at its most fragile. He immediately retreats back into fear and control, and Persephone will never forget that. She desperately wants him to put his fear down, to let go of it and come back to who they once were, but she will never fully trust him, all the way. Once you know what someone is capable of, you don't forget it. Your love can never be the same again."

Processing the abuse and trauma cycles night after night wears heavily on Russell, but thankfully, Mitchell has built in a natural reprieve: "We Raise Our Cups."

"Hermes says it up top. 'It's a sad song, but we sing it anyway.' We sing it, even though it's hard, because life outside of the theatre isn't going to stop being hard. We're never going to have a life that is free of trauma and conflict and tragedy. That's the truth of our lives in these brief, corporeal times as physical humans on this planet. And yet, we have to find hope to keep doing something good, something generative, something that pushes back against the pressures to give up. I find that in 'Cups,' and I find that in the ritual of telling the tragedy. Stories can help us navigate real-life hardships. They've certainly helped me navigate mine. Living this parable helps me to show more resilience in real life, when the inevitable blows and tragedies and hardships come my way, and I believe it has the same effect on our audiences. And that is redemptive. Hades may not be redeemed, but we the human race receive redemption by the end of it."

With only a few more weeks left in her run, Russell is cherishing every sob-racked moment of communion with the audience. "We're only one-half of the circle on stage. It's the people that that come to participate in the audience that are the other half of the circle, who make the ritual. Every struggle, every trauma, every loss they bring in with them is a part of our ritual every night. Being in a room together, feeling things, crying together, feeling the tragedy together, acknowledging the tragedy and the sadness together, public grieving. We as a culture are so bad at grieving together, but Hadestown allows everyone in that building to access it. Outside those doors, we do what Persephone does for the first half of the show; we self-medicate to distract ourselves from our grief, to numb ourselves to our pain. But in that theatre, we sober up, we face each other, and we face ourselves. And that is profound."