Press page · 2007
An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe
The theatre’s 2007 Halloween bill, and the press page it kept for it.
The original site kept this page as a set of press photographs for the 2007 run of An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe, released for use by Denver papers and listings sites covering the theatre’s Halloween programme. The photographs themselves were the production’s own images of real performers and are not reproduced in this archive. What follows is the production as the theatre described it, and the notice it drew.
The production
An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe ran from 12 October to 3 November 2007, directed by Maggie Stillman and produced by a visiting ensemble company. It was already an annual fixture for that company elsewhere in the city; audience demand moved it to a larger venue, and the venue it moved to was the Vic — which the company’s own copy described, with evident pleasure, as beautiful and possibly haunted.
The bill mixed new material with Poe’s best-known work, including The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tell-Tale Heart. The cast was Dell Domnik, Ben Koucherik, Amy Ratliff, Jeff Simpson, Peter Trinh and Amanda Van Nostrand.
Reader’s theatre
The production was staged as reader’s theatre: a form in which the actors both read and perform, and in which, as the company put it, images are created by suggestion in ways that could never be realistically portrayed on stage. It is theatre of the mind, freeing performers and audience alike from the physical limitations of conventional staging.
For a basement with plaster walls, no fly tower and no wing space, that is not a limitation but a specification. Poe’s tales were written for exactly this kind of delivery — he performed them on the lecture circuit himself, a period of his working life documented in detail by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore — and a small dark room with the audience within touching distance is the closest a modern venue gets to the conditions he wrote for.
The notice
“No ordinary stage performance is this…a theatrical reading that is one part production, one part recital and all parts black pageantry…presented with a force that is as chilling as it is powerful. (The) troupe executes a commanding and near faultless performance…a treat as trick as your first Jack-o-lantern.”
The Halloween slot stayed in the Vic’s autumn calendar afterwards. The theatre had a reputation for being haunted well before anyone programmed Poe into it: actors who worked there told stories about door locks, seats folding down on their own and doors slamming in still air, and the house never went out of its way to discourage them.
The full production entry is on the 2007 archive page, and the complete index is in the production archive.