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Poe as Rip Van Winkle
"Edgar Allan Poe Comes Alive' at Fringe Festival
Steve Cohen
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, and Scott Craig Jones is Poe reincarnated.
Jones recites, from memory, eight of Poe's poems and short stories. His readings are dramatic but conversational, eschewing a moody, Vincent Price-style delivery. Jones also provides a lighthearted commentary, no doubt believing that the macabre subject matter of Poe's work might discomfort some listeners. I, however, would prefer a darker tone that would scare the crap out of us.
Jones's performance reminds us how modern and accessible Poe is. Although we're as far removed in time from Poe as he was from Shakespeare, Poe's words are remarkably contemporary, immediate and understandable. We should also remember that Poe was the father of detective stories: Sherlock Holmes owes much to Poe's brainy detective Dupin. The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire admitted being influenced by Poe.
Jones concentrates on Poe's familiar morbid and macabre stories of love lost, of insanity and death. All of it is powerful, but Jones undermines his material by presenting a Poe who has been revived in our time to comment on changes that he observes, like a McDonald's ("I thought it was a Scottish restaurant.")
He'd do better to remain rooted in the 1840s— the decade of his death— while we in the audience time-travel to meet him on his home turf. How powerful it would be for us to briefly experience a world where Tyler and the Whig Party ruled the nation, where Abraham Lincoln (born the same year as Poe) was an unknown Illinois lawyer, where gold hadn't yet been discovered in California and, consequently, Out West meant Wisconsin (which had just been admitted to the Union) and Texas (where the U.S. was fighting its first foreign war).
I was introduced to Poe's writings at Wagner Junior High School in Philadelphia, where all my classmates were fascinated by The Gold Bug. We were intrigued by Poe's use of cryptographs, or encrypted messages, that we attempted to decipher. So I was disappointed to find no young people at the performance I attended Saturday evening. The gathering of about two dozen in a small studio on Brandywine Street was mostly aged 40 and up. That's above the norm for Fringe events, and I'm not sure why.
Jones recites, from memory, eight of Poe's poems and short stories. His readings are dramatic but conversational, eschewing a moody, Vincent Price-style delivery. Jones also provides a lighthearted commentary, no doubt believing that the macabre subject matter of Poe's work might discomfort some listeners. I, however, would prefer a darker tone that would scare the crap out of us.
Jones's performance reminds us how modern and accessible Poe is. Although we're as far removed in time from Poe as he was from Shakespeare, Poe's words are remarkably contemporary, immediate and understandable. We should also remember that Poe was the father of detective stories: Sherlock Holmes owes much to Poe's brainy detective Dupin. The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire admitted being influenced by Poe.
Jones concentrates on Poe's familiar morbid and macabre stories of love lost, of insanity and death. All of it is powerful, but Jones undermines his material by presenting a Poe who has been revived in our time to comment on changes that he observes, like a McDonald's ("I thought it was a Scottish restaurant.")
He'd do better to remain rooted in the 1840s— the decade of his death— while we in the audience time-travel to meet him on his home turf. How powerful it would be for us to briefly experience a world where Tyler and the Whig Party ruled the nation, where Abraham Lincoln (born the same year as Poe) was an unknown Illinois lawyer, where gold hadn't yet been discovered in California and, consequently, Out West meant Wisconsin (which had just been admitted to the Union) and Texas (where the U.S. was fighting its first foreign war).
I was introduced to Poe's writings at Wagner Junior High School in Philadelphia, where all my classmates were fascinated by The Gold Bug. We were intrigued by Poe's use of cryptographs, or encrypted messages, that we attempted to decipher. So I was disappointed to find no young people at the performance I attended Saturday evening. The gathering of about two dozen in a small studio on Brandywine Street was mostly aged 40 and up. That's above the norm for Fringe events, and I'm not sure why.
What, When, Where
Edgar Allan Poe Comes Alive! Traveling Jones Theater/Fringe Festival production through September 19, 2009 at Studio 1831, 1831 Brandywine St. 215.413.1318 or www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=8943.
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