NEVERMORE REVIEW
FFWD Weekly (Calgary)

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 Allan Poe taught the world anything it's that the dead make for fine entertainment, which is exactly what Nevermore is.

Click here for the original review.