// August 19th, 2009 // Comments Off // Stage Play
The play opens with music in the dark theatre, almost as a mediation, and then a lit candle, and Edgar Allen Poe emerges in a bravura performance at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. The team of Combs, Paoli and Gordon create a fascinating one man show.
Stuart Gordon said he got the idea to honor Poe because this the bicentennial year of his birth. Gordon began by engaging accomplished actor Jeffrey Combs, who he has worked with six times, on films like Re-Animator, and From Beyond. It was in Poe’s The Black Cat, episode of the Masters of Horror television series that he felt Jeffrey was channeling Poe. Stuart should know, as he also directed a version of the Pit and the Pendulum. Stuart said he has also worked often with writer Dennis Paoli, on Bleacher Bums, Re-Animator, From Beyond, The Black Cat, and Body Snatchers among other projects. Gordon likes to work repeatedly with people with whom he resonates.
Dennis Paoli lives on Poe Street in NY, and walks the five block street where Poe the man used to live. He does a great job of weaving the combination of Poe’s own story together with his work to create a 90 minute one man show without intermission, which is captivating, from beginning to end. Jeffrey Combs breathes life into a haunted man. He plays Poe, as poet, giving recitals as he would in his time, reading to crowds of as many as 3,000 people. The Los Angeles Times raved about the play in two articles.
Warp original WDC Poster
Stuart Gordon started the Organic theatre with his actress wife Carolyn in the 60′s. It was there he produced Warp, a science fiction space epic, which was a riveting play. He became friends with David Mamet, when he directed his first play at the Organic, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” Stuart said through the years, David would give him something to read, and say, This will win a Pulitzer Prize, and then five years later, it would win. Stuart wanted to bring Davids play, Edmund to the screen. David always felt too close to the play, to direct it as a film himself. We had discussed producing the film with him, but that did not happen, however we were all in Venice for it’s exciting premiere at the film festival. Stuart directed his first film in Hollywood in 1985, and brought Ray Bradbury’s “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” to the screen, starring Edward James Olmos, and Esai Morales. He co-created Honey I Shrunk the Kids which led to Honey I Blew Up the Kids, but it was his films Re-Animator and From Beyond, in the splatter horror genre, which brought him the most fame. Both films stared Jeffry Combs.
Gordon always had a fondness for Edgar Allen Poe from his childhood and read everything he wrote. He continues to read everything that has been written about him. Gordon said “Poe was a bitter man making a poverty level living writing short stories, and was at creative war with his arch rival Henry Woodsworth Longfellow, who always boasted he was America’s first and foremost poet and the first american poet to make his living from writing poetry”. Poe felt this was an idle boast and that Longfellow’s wife’s family provided the financial backing as well as a teaching position at Harvard so he had the freedom to write. Poe also considered Longfellow a literary thief, stealing from both Shakespeare and their contemporaries.
Poe always felt cheated by fate and the misfortunes of life. He was born in Boston but raised in Richmond, Virginia his parents were theatrical people not part of the aristocracy. His life corresponds to the period from the War of 1812 with Great Britain through the period leading up to the American Civil War in which the northern and the southern states were struggling for economic supremacy and the question of slavery. Within literary journals of the time the intelligensia were represented by Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and they were all New Englanders (northern). Poe didn’t relate to the Transcendentalists, and he laughed that people considered him and his works immoral.
All of the works heard in the show are Poes’ own. As a man, he struggled his entire life with depression and alcholism. He never recovered from the loss of his mother at the age of three, and his father’s desertion of the family soon after. Poe’s poetry was first published when he was a teenager “A Dream” was published in 1827 at the age of 18 as part of Poe’s “Tamerlane and Other Poems” and was lauded. But it was his short stories starting in 1832 that paid the bills. The public and the magazines clamored for them but these were the pulps and they were looked down upon by the critics and literary society. When his wife was dying he promised he would never remarry. Though he was engaged to a few wealthy women, he never did remarry, and died himself, a year after the recital performance we experienced on stage. Poe felt money separated people into classes, and gave them a false sense of self worth.
Poe returned to the theme of life as a dream later in his life with a two-stanza lyric poem that was published in 1849 the year of his death, and asks if all life is really a dream. The poem is recited in the play.
“A Dream Within a Dream”
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Edgar Allen Poe
The play is performed only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights and the theatre is already sold out for weeks, but Stuart just told me that it is extended in Los Angeles through September 26 at the Steve Allen Theatre in 4773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90027.
Stuart would like to find a theatre on the east coast to put the show up this fall. There are strong Poe connections to both New York and Baltimore so those should both be worthy future sites and a run in Boston would be poetic justice.
Unfortunately Jeffrey’s site listed below is no longer active and the run at the Steve Allen theatre has concluded. We will post updates to this story as we learn about them.
http://jeffreycombs.blogspot.com/2009/01/nevermore-evening-with-edgar-allan-poe.html
or here
http://www.steveallentheater.com/nevermore
Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Jeffrey Combs’ terrific work Nevermore, recreating a night with Edgar Allen Poe will next play Baltimore at the Westminster Hall on January 23 and 24. This is Edgar Allen Poe’s bicentennial year and it has been an momentous one for him. A far better year than 1849 when he died at the age of 40 under mysterious circumstances. Poe didn’t receive a proper funeral and his death was not even publicly announced. This year a public funeral was held and a tombstone was finally erected at his grave site at Westminster Burying Ground. Actors were engaged to portray friends and contemporaries to give a semblance of what should have occurred. All of this was accomplished by the Poe House and Museum of Baltimore, Maryland.
