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Halloween May Be Over but Don’t Bury the Horror Genre Just Yet

 

Alex Blair, Jess Uhler, Sam Lander investigate the Murders in the Rue Morgue in Prime Stage Theatre’s "Mr. Edgar A. Poe Presents: Tales of Mystery, Horror & Imagination” (photo by Laura Slovesko)

        You may be getting ready for Thanksgiving and the holiday season, but the mood of Halloween lingers still. At least until November 16 at the New Hazlett Theater on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

         At this venerable, much beloved theater, you’ll find an entrancing staging of four works by Edgar Allen Poe adapted for the stage by Pittsburgh playwright, Lawrence C. Connolly.

Like your theater outings to be tinged with the macabre and chilling? Then Connolly’s reworking of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Telltale Heart and The Raven is a quartet of chilling oeuvres from the master story teller’s canon. The play is currently being presented as a world premiere by Prime Stage Theatre.

Under the umbrella title Mr. Edgar A. Poe Presents: Tales of Mystery, Horror and Imagination, the four pieces of dark entertainment get to see the light once more under the capable hands of veteran actor and director, Art DeConcillis.

Playing the role of Poe, Sam Lander not only acts the part, but looks it as well. Dressed in black trousers and vest with matching ribbon tie around his white shirted collar (costumer designer, Ricky Lyle got that oh so right!), Landers bristly moustache and carefully coiffed hair, sweeping outward along his temples completes the Poe facsimile to a T.

Landers introduces each of the tales and even finds himself participating as characters in two of them – Usher and The Raven. He speaks with a soft Southern accent, made authentic to the ear by dialect coach, Lisa Bansavage. The latter also prompts Alex Blair (Officer Gaultier) and Justin Mohr (detective Dunpin) in the sounds and nuances of a French accent  in Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Did you know that Poe is considered the father of the detective story and that Dunpin preceded Sherlock Holmes and inspired his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, by close to 45 years?

While I have my qualms about Poe’s ratiocination, a word used several times throughout the evening, in penning the plot of Murders, you can hear and feel the germ of Sherlock Holmes’ characteristic use of "inductive reasoning” in the narrative,

As Dunpin, Justin Morh makes the cut as the savvy detective, whose analysis of the murders comes up with arcane conclusions at wide variance with that of the official police investigators. In this case, it’s Officer Gaultier (Alex Blair) who’s made the fool after Dunpin gets his assistant, the nonchalant Mrs. Smith (Jess Uhler) and grandmotherly landlady Duburg (Jenn Rian) to help reenact the crimes.

 Keep an eye out for the mysterious box that contains a rather gruesome clue cleverly fabricated by prop designer, Alex Keplar.

In The Telltale Heart, Blair dominates the stage as he tries to hide his crime in a relaxed vein, but as the story unfolds, his mental anguish rapidly takes hold and he becomes hallucinatory and eventually descends into madness.

We get more in the way of hallucinatory decay in Usher, which begins with a ghostly vision (or is it?) who answers the knock on the door. As the narrator, Landers brings the tale alive bolstered by some colorful character acting on the part of Rian and Uhler. Lighting designer, Jason Kmetic’s lightning flashes and sound designer, Samantha Magill’s peals of thunder only add to the overall sense of dread.

The drama’s piece de resistance, The Raven is acted out rather than recited as Landers becomes the overly agitated, grief-stricken lover, mourning the death of his beloved Leonore. A sharp knock, followed by others, awakes him out of his lamentations. Eventually, he finds the knocking comes from the window. After he opens it, a dark mysterious figure (Jenn Rian) dressed ominously in black with avian features enters his room.

Repeating frequently the word “Nevermore,” the creature spurs the lover into increasingly anguished torment until his hysteria descends into madness. As the lover, Landers becomes ever more frenzied, while the tormenting bird stands by stoically, silently except for that one menacing word, “Nevermore.”

Two Poe works unfold on each side of the intermission. While not imbued with the same degree of adrenalin charged plots of today’s horror films, they rather induce a sort of morbid, haunting melancholy perfectly suited to the seasonal segue from early to late autumn with its dark evenings and coolish temperatures.

Button up your overcoat and head down to the New Hazlett Theater for an arcane look at the writings of an esteemed mid-19th century poet and writer. There, Poe’s works, it seems, continue to be “Evermore.”

Mr. Edgar A. Poe Presents: Tales of Mystery, Horror and Imagination, a Prime Stage Theatre production is at the New Horizon Theater, Allegheny Center on Pittsburgh’s North Side through November 16. For tickets, go to PrimeStage.com.

Playwright Lawrence C. Connolly


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