Live from Mount Olympus returns for its epic fourth season on Tuesday, April 9th. A podcast series that reinterprets Greek mythology for a whole new generation, the series has already covered Perceus (the inspiration behind Percy Jackson and the Olympians), Persephone (one of the stories depicted in the smash Broadway hit Hades Town), and Atalanta (featured in the 2014 live-action Hercules film starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). This new season tells the tail of Prometheus, whose premonition about a disastrous war forces the title character to have to become friends with his sworn enemy, Zeus. I recently had the honor of speaking with series creator and showrunner Julie Burstein about the origins of the series, how stories are chosen for each season, working with some of New York City’s top theater talent, and how her Peabody-winning work in radio helped prepare her for this quest.
(Julie Burstein/Onassis Foundation)
Julie Burstein: When I was a little girl, my mom got us this book, Greek Myths by the D' Aulaires, which is still on my desk. It has these fantastic illustrations, and so even before I could read, I would sit and look at the pictures and she would tell me the stories. When I was in fifth or sixth grade, we were asked to make a diorama of something that we found really inspiring, and I made a diorama based on this book of the twelve Olympian gods sitting in their palace on Mount Olympus with Hestia in the center. So this was a part of my very early life, and I kept this book, and I read it to my own kids. When the Onassis Foundation came to me, this may be five or six years ago, they wanted to develop a podcast. I developed several different ideas for them, and one was to create a podcast retelling the myths for tweens, between eight and twelve-year-olds, because that just felt like the right age to be captivated by these stories.
Alex: That's probably about the same age that I started to get into them as well. Greek mythology seems to be having a bit of a Renaissance right now. I'm wearing a Camp Halfblood shirt, so the work of Rick Riordan has done a lot, and also books like Song of Achilles and Circe have really caught on with BookTok. Marvel’s Thor franchise had Zeus in the most recent installment. Why do you think there is such a fervor for these ancient stories all of a sudden?
Julie Burstein: I love that you're wearing a Camp Half-Blood t-shirt because that is something that I read with my kids, and it's just so awesome. I really think the reason that these stories continue to be told and retold, and every generation has its own way of looking at these stories, is because when they were first told (and they weren't written, they were told, they were oral stories to begin with), it was a way for us to figure out the world and our own place in it. So these stories really get at that very innate human curiosity of, what is this place and how do I fit? There's that basic human urge to tell stories about what our lives are like and what the world is like. Camp Half-Blood and the Rick Riordan series gets at this, and so do all of these other contemporary retellings. There's such an exciting adventure component to these stories, whether it's Persephone being taken down to the underworld and trying to figure out where she is and what's going on and who these strange creatures are that she's meeting, or in the stories that we're about to tell for this new season, the story of the Titanomachy, which was a war between the gods that destroyed the whole world. It was a moment when these incredible forces collided, and then Zeus and the Olympians had to figure out what to do next. So there's this extraordinary sense that it's just so big and filled with such extraordinary characters that I think every generation wants to tell it in its own way.
Alex: My next question was going to be about how you chose Prometheus as the central character for Season 4, but adding to that, based on what you just said, are there current events that inspire those decisions? For example, world leaders waging modern wars?
Julie Burstein: We are always thinking about our primary audience, which is kids. And we've heard that adults love this series, too. I mean, it's performed by the most extraordinary actors, so it has something that reaches audiences of all ages. But what we really think about as we are developing seasons is, what are the things that would resonate with kids at this age when so much is changing in their lives. We started in the midst of the pandemic. We recorded our first two seasons on phones over Zoom with the actors all recording in their apartments. So the first season had a sense of isolation in it with Perseus, who is born in a prison almost, then thrown into the sea in a box with his mother, and then washes up far from home. This sense of isolation felt really important to explore in the first season of this podcast.
And then the second season was Persephone, and I have to say that partly was my own choice. My mother, who read me these stories as a little girl, was also a professor of English Literature. Her focus was on how the Victorians used myths in their novels. So, again, this idea that these stories come to life, and we get to tell them in our own ways. My mom was dying, and she really wanted me to tell the story of Persephone. She was one of my advisers for the first two seasons, and together we created this story. One of the most important pieces was, how do we tell this and tell it from Persephone’s perspective? Because in most ancient myths, Persephone has maybe one line, and everything is done to her. But she was a young goddess, so she must have had experiences. We were able to tell it both from her perspective and from her mother's perspective. What was it like for Demeter when her daughter disappeared? That was very personal. I chose that one because my mom really wanted it, and I'm so delighted that she said, “Let's do this one.”
For season three, Atalanta, I'm a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away, and all of those incredible stories. The Atalanta myth felt almost like that. A girl who was born, abandoned, and then raised by bears. It gave us this opportunity to tell a story that had these magical pieces to it. It felt important because this was a girl who was most at home in the natural world, and over the past many years, the issue of how we treat our planet has become so essentially important. It felt like, how could we tell a story where it isn't a question, it's actually embedded in? There are also interesting aspects of this because Artemis, who is Atalanta's protector and the goddess of the hunt, is also the goddess of nature. So much of what happens in this story is set in motion when humans don't respect her realm. So it did feel like it had a lot of resonance.
But that said, one of the things that we felt was really important from the get-go was that these myths were not told at the beginning to be moral tales. And so we continue to wrestle with that because I think in our culture, we feel like, okay, what's the moral of this story? And we feel very strongly that we need to take away from this whatever it is. We take away that this is a powerful story, but we're not trying to teach you a moral lesson. We are trying to explore issues that are incredibly powerfully linked to our own lives, but we don't want to say, do this and not that.
With the story of Prometheus… Yes, it does have all of these elements of huge powers clashing with each other, and sometimes not making the best choices. And a protagonist, Prometheus, who can see the future. But when he tells people what he sees, when he tells the other gods, they're like, “I don't want to believe that.” There are lots of layers to this story. We're in a world that feels like there are all these powers beyond our control that are happening, but what we also wanted to look at was this unlikely friendship between a Titan, Prometheus, and an Olympian, Zeus, who in the Titanomachy are enemies. But Prometheus leaves everything he knows to go fight with Zeus because he knows the Olympians will be victorious. In our telling, he and Zeus really become best friends in part because Zeus is the king of the gods, and he has to rule his own siblings. But Prometheus sort of comes in from another angle, and so he can actually let his hair down with Prometheus. But then Prometheus realizes he has to make a choice that means he has to sacrifice his friendship, and in ways, I think, where this season takes us is how do we make the right decision even when we know it may upend everything we hold dear? Because it's right, and you have to do it.
Alex: It sounds like a really exciting story. You touched on the actors a little bit. Since you’re based in New York City, you lean into the Hades Town ensemble in many ways, plus the local theater scene, which is an embarrassment of riches in terms of talent. What's it like to cast voices for the show?
Julie Burstein: We were so incredibly fortunate. We started developing this project in 2019. In early 2020, as we were writing scripts, we realized, how are we going to create an ensemble when everybody was living the way we are talking right now, through Zoom. So we reached out to The TEAM, which is an extraordinary collaborative theater collective in Brooklyn. The artistic director is Rachel Chavkin, who is the Visionary Director of Hades Town, and we said, “Would you be willing to play with us?” And they leaped at the opportunity because nobody could perform. So right from the beginning, we had this extraordinary group of actors who had worked together for many years, and it meant we could create a feeling of connection through the medium of Zoom immediately, and really feel like the actors, these characters, were in a world together. The TEAM has been an amazing production partner for the Onassis Foundation, and they are the leader when it comes to casting, so it meant that Rachel could reach out to André De Shields, who played Hermes in Hades Town, and say, “We can't imagine this without you as Hermes.” And thank goodness he said yes, so we immediately had an extraordinary host for the podcast And the actors of The TEAM. And then they connected us with a group called Epic Theater Ensemble, which is a group in New York City that works with young middle school and high school actors. So many of our young actors have come from Epic Theater. Divine Garland, who played Perseus, Joanne Hernandez, who played Persephone and Atalanta, and this season Xavier Pacheco who plays Epimetheus, prometheus's little brother, all come from the Epic Theater Ensemble. And then we've also been so lucky in that, between The TEAM and Karen Brooks Hopkins, who used to be the executive director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there's this extraordinary web of connections. So we've been able to have Isabella Rossellini as one of our gods, she was Iris in the story of Persephone, and we've been able to have Amber Gray in season one, and John Turturro was in last season, so it's been lovely to have these extraordinary guests come in and join us.
Alex: Your enthusiasm for the series is infectious, and it's easy to see why they would be so attracted to it. I know you've had a career in radio, so working in audio media is your niche. How does working on this series compare with the work you've done in the past?
Julie Burstein: My experience in radio is foundational for what I'm doing now, and yet what I'm doing now is completely different from anything I ever did. We're working now on various aspects of Prometheus, and we know that Prometheus is chained. We're beginning the way Aeschylus begins Prometheus Bound, with Prometheus being bound to a mountaintop. So my audio producer and sound editor and I will have these conversations where we'll be listening, and we actually got bicycle chains in the studio and were shaking them. We recorded these close up, and we actually ended up having to re-record them [to account for] the distance on the mountain. We're just always laughing because I don't think I ever imagined when I was a producer at NPR working on an arts program, or when I was the executive producer of Studio 360 at WNYC, that my conversations would be, “Does the eagle sound scary enough? I think we need a red-tailed hawk. Oh, the red-tailed hawk sounds really scary. Okay, we're gonna use the red-tailed hawk.” It's just such a delight. It is so much fun. I think that my years of wearing headphones and focusing on the words people were saying and how to tell stories with all of the incredible colors that you can have in radio has been such a great education for what I'm doing now. But this other aspect of creating a world through sound has been a joy over the past four years. I love it.
Alex: Hopefully, listeners of the podcast will think twice when they hear those chains or all of the foley that goes into this project.
New episodes of Live from Mount Olympus: Prometheus are released on Tuesdays now through early May, distributed by PRX.
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