An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe

2007 season · Production archive

There is no better way to spend Halloween than with a scary story, and Edgar Allan Poe is the original master of the genre. Due to audience demand the company moved its annual favourite to a larger venue — the beautiful (and haunted?) Denver Victorian Playhouse. New stories and an exceptional cast joined Poe’s most famous classics, including The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death and The Tell-Tale Heart.

Reader’s theatre is performance art in which the actors both read and perform. Like storytelling, it creates images by suggestion that could never be realistically portrayed on stage: theatre of the mind, freeing performers and audience alike from the physical limitations of conventional staging.

Written by

a reader’s theatre production

Directed by

Maggie Stillman

Ran

October 12 – November 3, 2007

Produced by

Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre

Cast

Dell Domnik · Ben Koucherik · Amy Ratliff · Jeff Simpson · Peter Trinh · Amanda Van Nostrand

About the production

Reader’s theatre asks almost nothing of a building and everything of a room, which is why a basement with plaster walls and a low ceiling was an upgrade rather than a compromise. Poe’s tales were written for exactly this kind of delivery; he read them aloud on the lecture circuit himself, a period of his working life documented by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

The production returned to the Vic and a separate set of press photographs from the 2007 run was published on the original site. The Halloween slot became a fixture of the house’s autumn.

What the press said

“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…a commanding and near faultless performance.”

Where it sat in the season

It was production 7 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed The Feast of the Flying Cow (Sep 7 – Oct 6, 2007) and was followed by Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol (Nov 16 – Dec 23, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.