It’s difficult to think of a more influential bad writer than Edgar Allan Poe. He moved Gothic romance from the faraway castle to the house next door, replacing the terrors of the sublime with the neurasthenic spasms of the diseased modern imagination. While Emerson was busy championing pragmatism, Poe zeroed in on everything we routinely deny in ourselves: the perversions, degradations, and deformities Harold Bloom calls “the uncanny unanimity in our repressions.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Or both. In the end, Poe had such a genius for constructing vivid, profoundly disturbing images—the best of which reverberate with myriad psychological and mythic meanings—that the stories galvanize in spite of themselves. As Bloom writes, “The tale somehow is stronger than the telling, which is to say that Poe’s actual text does not matter.”
And that’s what makes him the perfect guy to blow a hole through Poe’s hoary, dreary, inert 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Still, the show roars through like a freight train, clocking in at almost exactly an hour. Joseph Wade’s wooden-slat set is fittingly battered and claustrophobic. And the cast (Tien Doman, Halena Kays, and Christine Stulik) are precise, bold, and indefatigable. As an exercise in style, the show is quite an accomplishment. But as an act of literary or cultural engagement, it’s disappointingly thin.
Through 9/23: Mon and Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-989-7352, $28.
