Dreams no mortal ever dared to dream.
PREVIEW
Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe Theatre: Catalyst Created by: Jonathan Christenson and Bretta Gerecke Starring: Scott Shpeley, Gaelan Beatty, Shannon Blanchet, Beth Graham, Ryan Parker, Garett Ross, Vanessa Sabourin Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84th Ave. Running: Saturday through March 2 Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)
“Deep into that darkness peering , long I s tood th ere wond ering , fearing , Doubting , dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream be fore …”
— The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven, you may recall from Edgar Allan Poe’s famous 1845 poem, is not just some blabber-beak.
True, you can get a word out of him, but just the one. Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.
In the strange, dark dream of a Catalyst Theatre hit that returns home this week after nearly five years, we find ourselves in the macabre twilight world of Poe, where life and art, reality, memory and nightmare can never quite be distinguished. Named for the sole refrain of “the ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe is back in town, subtly altered, re-moulded, restrung with new songs.
Where have they been, Poe and company, and their playful, high-style gothic fantasia?
They were the opening night gala of the 2009 Magnetic North Festival at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. They’ve been a star attraction, and Goth magnet, at the cutting-edge Luminato Festival in Toronto, in honour of Poe’s 200th anniversary. In London they played the thousand-seat Barbican mainstage, home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In New York, they were at the New Victory, just off Times Square, the telltale heart of Broadway. They’ve been at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, and the Olympic Arts Festival in Vancouver. The list goes on.
Never say never more : that’s the Catalyst mantra. In the world of Canadian theatre, with its frantic three-week rehearsals leading to its opening night followed much too closely by its closing night and its burial rites, Catalyst works in an unusually expansive, evermore way. Each time Nevermore has re-emerged from the Catalyst repertory to arrive on a stage, its creators — writer/ composer/director Jonathan Christenson and scenographer Bretta Gerecke, along with choreographer Laura Krewski and sound designer Wade Staples — have tinkered.
“You edit, you rewrite, you clarify what you’re doing as a writer,” says Christenson, who has “added two major new songs, and half a dozen smaller songs to the show” this time out.
“You see the rhythm of the show, the moments when you might lose the audience … That’s a great gift, to revisit.”
“I’m interested in narration and how it happens onstage,” smiles Christenson, who along with Gerecke has found himself lured, theatrically, by the extreme 19thcentury narrative complications of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Victor Hugo (Hunchback) for Catalyst’s musical extravaganzas.
“We continue to play with the narrative voice, and the little ways for characters to come forward, more vividly to life.
“You invite the audience into the heart of the characters.”
Nevermore is a special-case intrigue, since it imagines Poe’s bizarre, death-centric life and his mysterious death at 40 as one of his own horror stories.
“What drew me,” says Christenson, “were the parallels between the events of his life and his stories, the blurring of lines between fact and fiction, the way recurring (life) events became his recurring motifs,” the ones that burrow directly into our primal fears.
You can see the attraction for a theatre company whose esthetic has a surreal bent, and whose storytelling unfolds in visual images.
To a degree that invites black comedy, Poe’s own life was a veritable catalogue of burials and bereavements. Poe’s mother, his foster mother, his first love and his wife all died of consumption; his foster father disowned him; his brother committed suicide.
Poe didn’t exactly shuffle off this mortal coil in a conventional way either. The author of some of the world’s most resonating horror stories, The Pit And The Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Mask of the Red Death among them, proposed marriage in Richmond, Va. He left for New York by steamer, but got only as far as Baltimore, where he vanished for five days. He reappeared, ranting and in someone else’s clothes; he was taken, delirious, to the hospital, and died two days later.
Scholars have proposed everything from drug overdose to poison to rabies.
“Poe never took hold of his own life,” thinks Christenson. “He cast himself as a victim of circumstance, a passive observer … He writes a lot about how dreams are more real than real life.
“I wanted to create a world of dreams onstage; I wanted the experience of watching the show to be like a waking dream, with its own logic.” With its sense of stories “happening in the mind of somebody,” inseparable from the imagination, Nevermore is a signature Catalyst show.
“Poe tried to have a conventional life, to have money and be respected, to love and have a family. But in order to be the artist he was, he had to live in a very dark place … His demons kept asserting themselves.”