If Edgar Allen Poe proved anything in his short 40 years on the planet it was that the dark depressing and the dead can be a decadent thrill. Our worst fears it turned out also made great reading. And so it’s appropriate that Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe Catalyst Theatre’s biography of Poe manages to spin the real-life tragedies of the American gothic writer into a sumptuous musical that’s as striking as choked-up blood and full of life as the spasms of a waking nightmare.
Created by Catalyst Theatre and presented by Vertigo Theatre at this year’s High Performance Rodeo Nevermore is the brainchild of Jonathan Christenson Catalyst Theatre’s artistic director who served as the play’s writer director and choreographer. At the heart of the play is a straightforward biography of Poe a none-too-simple task given the convoluted nature of the facts of the writer’s life — Poe himself and “friends” like his embittered editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold often deliberately contributed to the myths of the man.
The basics as selected by Nevermore are these: neglected by an alcoholic father (Garrett Ross) and a self-involved actress mother (Vanessa Sabourin) Edgar (played by Scott Shpeley) grows from a sweet polite child into a traumatized poet with an obsessive love of the macabre. Haunted throughout his life by consumption — which claims variously his mother his brother (Sheldon Elter) and his first wife (Beth Graham) — Edgar eventually manages to find fame and alcoholism at nearly the same time before he ultimately falls into madness and dies. Narrated in sometimes rhyming couplets by the production’s ensemble cast Nevermore whisks through Poe’s lifetime with barely any dialogue at all — so much tragedy after all and so little time to tell it.
Notwithstanding the anachronistic spiked hair and strapped tall boots that might be found accessorizing a Nightmare Before Christmas backpack Nevermore’s aesthetic is a dead ringer for the impressionistic flair of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari . With soaring top hats and skeletal frames hanging from various limbs its monochromatic world is only interrupted by the occasional red accent. And like Catalyst’s last Calgary production Frankenstein Nevermore’s material of choice seems to be paper. Both props and costuming are made from the stuff from expansive web-like women’s hats to the enormous pop-up book held by Poe himself.
But if the production’s costuming and sumptuous musical numbers make Nevermore feel darkly decadent its set is anything but: eight translucent sliding panels framed by a small metal lattice. Given the two-year-old production’s existing touring history — it’s toured across Canada and was engaged in New York — it’s a lightweight look that’s both practical and consistent — with voices and production values like Nevermore’s the play hardly needs further embellishment.
And in spite of the play’s dark aesthetic and the relentlessly downward trajectory of Poe’s life (and it’s no small task getting more tragic after being orphaned by consumption) Nevermore always finds lightness if only to make the tragedy that inevitably follows more tragic. As Edgar’s sister for example Beth Graham experiences disappointment after disappointment with a smile that looks like it’s been nailed to the sides of her cheeks. In a world of darkness enthusiasm and hope is always heavily weighted with dramatic irony. The biggest laughs come because the audience already knows they’re here to for the tragedy.
In fact if Nevermore’s script suffers anywhere it’s only in the almost mechanical formula that defines the timeline of Poe’s life. From disaster to hope down and up and on and on again the story of Poe’s life is never really expressed as more than a sequence of vignettes. The show tries to really on a final musical number centred on Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream” but it’s not clear how beautiful as it might be the sentiment ties into what amounts to a fairly straightforward biographical narrative about a tragic life.
But episodic or not it’s hard to be disappointed by a sequence of vignettes as beautiful and haunting as Nevermore’s . And if Edgar Allen Poe taught the world anything it’s that the dead make for fine entertainment which is exactly what Nevermore is.
