Un-Poe-etic

Into That Darkness: The Corrosive Hours of Edgar Poe

Into That Darkness: The Corrosive Hours of Edgar Poe is a labor of love one-man passion project written and enacted by Jacob Mundell that brings Edgar Allan Poe to life through dramatizations of his letters and book reviews, as well as a few of his poems.

The key theatrical conceit of this uneven dark comedy — the second Poe-centric play I have seen this fall, the first being the delicately poetic North & Sur — is that Poe writes, dictates and sends his missives by means of a laptop, smart speaker and email respectively, though whether the smart speaker goes by the name of Alexa, Siri or just “Assistant” is not clarified anywhere in the program.  

This conceit may have been a canny one, but its purpose (other than providing a convenient means for Poe’s letters and poems and reviews to be read out loud) largely escaped me.  It isn’t as if Poe himself had been transported by the writer and producer Mundell into the 21st Century (though Poe did write at least one time-travel story, and theories abound online that Poe himself could travel through time.) No, the Poe we meet in Into That Darkness is the Poe we know, the doomed and disturbed genius who lived and died in the first half of the 19th Century.  As far as I could determine — and thankfully — none of Poe’s actual words from his letters and reviews were “updated” for modern sensibilities.

But of the great American authors of the 19th Century — Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Dickinson, Twain, Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, to name a few — I can think of several who would’ve been more suited, ironically or comedically or dramatically, to the deliberate anachronisms of a laptop and an Alexa.  The cloistered Emily Dickinson, for example, who slipped her handwritten poems into an envelope for an editor at The Atlantic; it would have been interesting to hear her instructing Alexa to remove the commas from her unconventional poems and add dashes instead.  Or Thoreau, in his self-imposed exile on Walden Pond, nonetheless broadcasting to the world his famous essays.  But why Poe?  It was never clear to me what relevance or depth the contemporary technology added to this presentation of his poetry and prose.

As far as the words themselves, it is always good to hear Poe’s work revived for contemporary audiences.  Mundell’s recitation of Poe’s most famous work, the immortal “Raven,” is especially fine.  But too often, Poe’s words are conveyed by Mundell in the same forced, angry, overly insistent cadence.  It becomes wearying after a while.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see Poe portrayed as we see him here for much of the evening, as an indigent, immature college student, a beer-guzzling frat-boy type begging his substitute father, John Allan, for money and new socks.  We also observe him in a diaphanous cape studded with tiny light bulbs, as a witheringly dismissive literary critic and, later, in grief over the death of his wife Virginia, as a broken man.  These latter scenes are powerfully affecting.

Into That Darkness is directed by Robert Kauzlaric, and the excellent sound design is by Katie Hopgood.  Though there is no set, the stage is enlivened by colorful semi-abstract paintings by Breezy Snyder that look like exploded, Cubist-style portraits, a visual analogue of Poe’s own fractured personality. 

This show’s strength is in its exploration of Poe’s tortured, splenetic and self-defeating personality.  It isn’t a particularly “poetic” play, nor does it evoke or explore in depth the macabre and mysterious worlds that Poe invented in his stories.  This is a play that’s centered on Poe himself, more than on his works, and that’s probably sufficient — it adds something to the theatrical canon of works about this great American author and enigma.  

Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Privately produced by Jacob Mundell and presented at The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa Avenue, from October 27 through November 12.

Tickets are available at jacobmundell.com and at edgetheater.com.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.