Approaching Poe: A Note From the Director On Collaborating With a Creative Team and Famous Text

I have long had an idea of dealing with Poe in performance in some way. That plan started with an idea of adapting works to tour high schools many years ago. It evolved in my thinking to an evening of Poe and then to a devised piece based upon the works of Poe, which was my intent with this project here.

We began just over two weeks ago after casting with a fair number of texts from people’s favorites list of poe short stories and poems. I used the ensemble, people I spoke to and my recollections of works I had read to form the foundation. These were copied and assembled. We broke our cast into two working teams, each team worked on a short list of texts. Our process began with reading the text then experimenting with ways to cast light--to open up and illuminate meanings within the text--with staging. In some cases text was broken up with a variety of speakers, in some cases there was a narrator of sorts and the text was performed. We worked on solving difficult problems with staging using huge pieces of fabric and actors.

After two weeks of rehearsal and intense discussions nightly (sometimes going until past 11PM) with the directorial team to clarify and solidify findings, we felt it was time that the directorial team assemble over two days and hone a general working text for the piece. It became clear that due to the quality of Poe’s writing, that the nature of the final text will be more dependant on the actual text of Poe than we at first may have considered. We had originally thought we might be creating some of our own verbally-expressed text. But, on examination and through some experimentation, it proved unnecessary when we looked at the bounty of writing Poe already provided.

The question then was, what was to be the form of the text? We had worked with and rough-staged various stories and poems and considered, what was their metaphoric structure? What was the tone and subject matter? Picking common forms, themes and ideas helped us derive a overall structure and sense of mood for a rough draft of a working script. This helped us reduce the amount of text we would use. I have always felt that the texts had a mystical aspect that was their central pull and had toyed with a ritual structure to the piece, however, we wanted a form that was in some way familiar but allowed a kind of metaphoric dissonance that would be both compelling and disturbing--similar to the way that Poe writes. Then, examining all the pieces in aggregate, we landed on an artistic and textual form that served the pieces: a mass (here meaning a service or ritual ceremony.)

As we head into tonight’s rehearsal we will be experimenting with a flow in mind, molding and shaping our staging while further winnowing down the text by focusing on what can be done and not spoken….