Edgar Allan Poe is having a moment.
Last year, Netflix’s popular miniseries “The Fall of the House of Usher” was based on the Baltimore Bard’s short story of the same name. The show actually blended together most of Poe’s works including “The Raven,” about a talking bird that appears in a lonesome man’s home, and “Tell-Tale Heart,” about a man who kills someone and hides the body beneath the floorboards but swears that he hears the heart still beating.
Poe’s most famous stories and poems (“The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Annabel Lee,” “A Dream Within a Dream”) dealt in the macabre, lost love and madmen committing murder for no real reason, perfect for the Halloween season.
This year, Stray Dog Theatre is capitalizing on Poe’s gothic horror with the musical “Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.”
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“It was just something I stumbled upon when I was searching for new shows, and I kind of fell in love with it,” says Justin Been, who will be directing the show and is associate artistic director for Stray Dog Theatre. It was originally produced in Canada in 2009 and had an Off-Broadway run in 2015.
“Nevermore” opens shortly before Poe’s death. He is headed to Boston for a job interview and runs into a troupe of actors who say they saw his mother, the actress Elizabeth Poe, on stage. They agree to re-enact his life story to help him remember it, but the actors are not what they seem, according to Been.
He also says the show shouldn’t be taken as biographical. “It’s more of taking (Poe’s) work and relating it back to his life, so looking at things that happened to him that could have informed things he wrote.”
Poe’s life was pretty dreary, to use one of his favorite words. His father abandoned the family and his mom died all before he was 2. (The timeline in “Nevermore” is different.) He was adopted, but his adoptive mother died and he was estranged from his adoptive dad.
Poe also struggled with drinking and gambling. His brother died when Poe was 22. When he was 26, he married his 13-year-old cousin, but she died after 11 years of marriage.
A lot of Poe’s poetry is about men pining after beautiful dead women, like in “The Raven.”
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,” the narrator begins, he heard a rapping on his chamber door. The raven comes in and says one word, “Nevermore,” which gets the narrator more and more agitated.
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us — by that God we both adore —
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
The circumstances of his death were also strange.
When he was 40, Poe was found feverish and hallucinating in Baltimore in clothes that weren’t his. He was taken to a hospital and died after repeatedly calling out the name Reynolds. He wasn’t coherent enough to explain what had happened to him.
“One of the leading theories is that he was caught up in a voting scheme,” Been says. “Back then it was common for people to ply others with alcohol to take them to different polling stations and cast multiple votes, and part of that was changing their clothing. So, that’s one of the theories that exists.”
The show tackles the mystery, but much of its appeal lies in setting Poe’s rhythmic and dramatic writing to music.
“Just about every word that is spoken probably has some tie to Edgar Allan Poe,” Been says. “A lot of lyrics come from pieces he’s written. There’s an entire musical number of ‘The Raven.’ There’s even one song from an article that he wrote.”
Fans of Poe will be excited by the hidden Easter eggs as the show works in some of his lesser-known works and detective writing. Plus, the show will visually be quite spooky, Been promises.
“It falls into the dark category,” he says. “It’s very much in the realm of Tim Burton-esque where it’s a lot of exaggerated things; stuff that is a little off kilter; things that fit into this creepy world. It’s not necessarily scary, but it’s unsettling.”
Just the way Poe would have liked it.