Review by James Wilkinson
‘My Fascination with Creepy Ladies: A collection of horrors by Edgar Allan Poe’ – Conceived, adapted and directed by Bryn Boice. Devised by Anthem Theatre Company. Costume Design: Theona White. Lighting Design: Bridget K. Doyle. Presented by Anthem Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Black Box Theatre, 539 Tremont St., Boston through November 3, 2019.
When seeing shows to review I typically try to keep my notebook in my bag until the show is over. However, while waiting for Anthem Theatre Company’s production of My Fascination with Creepy Ladies to begin, there was a detail in the theater that caught my attention and seemed worth breaking this rule for the sake of remembrance. A song with an electronic synthesizer sound and a pulsating drum machine beat (what other decade could it be from but the 1980s?) was coming out of the theater sound system. It seemed an odd choice for a play that was going to be diving into the dark abyss that is the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Then I listened a bit closer and caught some of the lyrics. Nestled within that hypnotic beat, the singer chants out, “And I want you/And I want you/And I want so/It’s an obsession.” A Google search later that night revealed the singer to be Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, the song, “Love is a Stranger.” I’ll leave you to look the rest up, but suffice to say, when Lennox starts howling the lines “Love is a danger/of a different kind/To take you away/And leave you far behind” you start to understand its placement in relation to Poe’s work. That a darker tale of obsession is hidden within a pop song connects with the cheeky title of Anthem Theatre gives its production.
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t have some basic understanding of Poe’s poems and short stories? Even if you somehow managed to avoid catching his greatest hits in your high school English class, his persona as a spinner of macabre tales has permeated pop culture. He’s perhaps just as known for that haunting photograph, taken near the end of his life, as he is for the number of dark obsessions he intimately explored through his writing. For what they’ve described as “a collection of horrors by Poe,” Anthem Theatre dives into one particular thematic strain found in his work, namely (as the title suggests) his narrators’ fixation on haunting women.
A collection of twelve actors bring to life (or is it, ‘read out’? More on that in a second) a series of Poe’s tales and poems all around this central topic. “We are trying to spook you” the preshow announcements proclaim just before the lights go down. I went to this production excited at the prospect of being spooked, at spending an evening sinking into the gruesome world of Poe’s writing. A few years ago, I had been a fan of I, Snowflake, a shorter devised piece that director Bryn Boice had put together as a response to the 2016 election. Its staging managed to create images and juxtapositions with a degree of pop and the same sensibility is clearly at work here. All the same, about fifteen minutes into My Fascination a little nagging voice spoke up in the back of my head. “You’re not enjoying this as much as you should be,” it said. The voice grew louder as the show went on, eventually forcing me to concede, “You’re right, I’m not.” So why is that?
For me, it’s not that Anthem Theatre’s production is necessarily lacking in anything. Rather ironically, my issue with the work stems from the fact that there’s too much of the play’s guiding saint, Edgar Allen Poe. Anthem’s production is a continually shuffling deck of cards, in more than one sense. The play begins with the actors ordering and reordering themselves before finally settling into a configuration that allows them to begin. The acting company is split with one group portraying the narrators or Poe’s tales and the other standing in for the women who were the object of their dark obsessions. As we follow the thread of each story, we bounce from actor to actor as the pieces of the story are pulled together, never deviating from Poe’s language.
On the one hand, I can admire director Boice’s decision to commit to Poe’s original text but the choice has the unfortunately effect of hermetically sealing the production. You can’t get away from the fact that the language was meant to be read, not spoken aloud (at least, not spoken in the kind of theatrical context Anthem is putting it in). As narrators wind down paths of obsession and madness, Poe’s prose stretches on and on like the wide-open plains of the mid-west, (themselves said to cause a kind of madness). Rather than feeling like we’re going deeper, it feels like we’re spinning our wheels. The audience doesn’t have any way into the story because the speaker is content to speed on ahead without us.
Events are never allowed to stand on their own, but always be seen through the prism of the narrator. Again, that’s perfectly fine when you’re reading prose, but theater is a medium that’s at least fifty percent visual. Boice’s staging has a couple of really brilliant moments of storytelling (I especially appreciated an early bit when three actors are used to show the narrator at three different points in his life, forming a kind of theatrical montage), but more often than not, you end up seeing that staging fighting (and losing) for dominance against what we’re hearing. There’s a moment late in the show when actress Olivia Z. Cote, playing one of the titular creepy ladies, crosses the stage, zombie-like, towards our doomed narrator. It’s the sort of moment where you want the language to hold back, for the silence to allow a sense of dread to seep into the room, but the image is broken by the narrator, describing to us in detail what we’re already seeing.
There’s an impressive collection of actors assembled here, many of whom I’ve enjoyed watching in other productions (some, fairly recently). But because in many cases the role of narrator of a tale is split between up to five of them at a time, they’re never given the chance to bring anything of themselves to the role. They all have to play the same person so they all collectively have to hit the same rhythm. And that rhythm never quite seems to get to the level of obsession that Poe is reaching for. Being very much a 19th century writer, his language is dense as all hell and prone to a kind of literary verboseness that the actors have to fight their way through. They’re not the only ones. I frequently found myself involuntarily turning away from the stage to try and focus on what was being said just so I could piece together just what was going on.
Where I think the play does succeed is when it shifts its focus away from Poe’s short stories toward his poems. Given the more abstract nature of poetry (and the fact that it’s meant to be spoken), the recreations of Poe’s poems find a better balance between language and staging. An early selection has a series of Edgars reaching for his beloved through a sheer curtain as if reaching out through the veil that separates this world from the next. And a haunting moment late in the show makes great use of a ring candlelight to eerie effect.
The most unsettling moment I ever experienced in the theater came a few years ago at an original staging of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep being performed at Salem Theatre Company (R.I.P.). That adaptation managed to keep a fair chunk of Lovecraft’s original text, (which can often be so baroque and convoluted as to give you headaches), while also figuring out how to refit the story to a theatrical context. It culminated in a final stage image that nearly had me running for the door. I don’t mean to suggest that Anthem should have approached the play just as Salem Theatre did (and it’s perhaps unfair to directly compare two entirely different works), but that production keeps surfacing in my memory because its proof that the kind of show that Anthem is going for is possible. It just doesn’t lift and the cheeky, spooky fun promised by the title and that preshow song never materializes. Somewhere, beneath all of this, is the heartbeat of a terrifying tale. It’s just not being unearthed. For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.anthemtheatre.org
