NEVERMORE written and directed by Jonathan Christenson (Catalyst Theatre/Luminato). Winter Garden Theatre (189 Yonge). Friday-Saturday 7:30 pm, matinee Saturday 2:30 pm. $40-$50. 416-872-1111, luminato.com. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Think that scary stuff can’t be poetic and beautiful, too?
Check out Nevermore: The Imaginary Life And Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer best known for his chilling short stories and rhythm-and-rhyme-emphatic poems like The Raven and Annabelle Lee.
The show marks the local premiere of Edmonton’s Catalyst Theatre, a troupe whose work blends text, movement and design in a fascinating manner.
You couldn’t ask for a more theatrical life to portray than Poe, whose parents were stage actors and whose interests, infatuations and recurring personal tragedies read like a list of the melodramatic and the unbelievable, including a five-day period near the end of his life when he apparently vanished from the face of the earth.
The writer’s history is filled with unhappy liaisons with women, melancholy, alcohol, madness and consumptive relatives. But writer/director/composer Jonathan Christenson and his remarkable cast of seven give the material a light touch, a kind of playful Grand Guignol presentation that’s largely sung or recited. The result, with references to premature burials, loudly beating hearts and imps lurking in the shadows, is a piece that haunts on a number of levels.
Bretta Gerecke’s striking design – mostly black and white, a la Edward Gorey, with a touch of red here and there to emphasize tubercular coughs – adds to the piece’s tone of fantasy, not just for the nightmare creatures of Poe’s imagination (often with clawlike hands) but also the “everyday” figures. At times Gerecke’s costumes seem inspired by a variety of lampshades.
While Poe (Scott Shpeley) is onstage nearly the whole show, his tale is told by a chorus who become the other figures, real and imaginary. At times the central figure seems a puppet, manipulated by those around him.
Christenson draws on Poe’s own poetic rhythms for much of the text, using a three-beat cadence that translates musically into the show’s eerie waltz melodies.
The company, finely coached by the director, gives the production some of its dazzle in their detailed handling of multiple roles.
The style may seem repetitive in much of the first act, though Christenson knows when to vary the rhythms and the tone of gloom by adding comic moments. By the second act I realized that his chosen style echoes one of the play’s themes, that life is a dream inside a dream. The cyclical narrative episodes in the show – Poe pins his hopes on someone and loses that person – have their parallels in the verse and the music. Neither Poe nor the audience can escape the sense of waking from one dream only to be caught in another that turns equally chilling.
If you think you’re going through a hallucination along with the increasingly morbid title figure, the effect is intended.
Can’t wait for Catalyst’s Frankenstein, which comes here next year as part of the Canadian Stage season.
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