Edgar Allen Poe's copyright expired long ago, leaving its content open to any number of revisions (will we see a "Zombie Edgar Allen Poe" soon?), but though The Mammals's aesthetic fully embraces dark-romantic sensationalism, it rejects spooky-tunes parodies. Audiences looking for cheap giggles might enjoy roaming the shadowy corridors and creaking elevator of the Zoo Studio's industrial quarters but won't find them in this program of performance pieces based on the Father-of-American-Gothic's greatest hits.
Some adhere to their text, like Anne Wilson's reimagining of “The Raven” as the guilty hallucinations of a Jack-the-Ripper serial killer haunted by a victim's ghost.
D.H. Currier and Sasha Warren dispense with text altogether for “The Masque of the Red Death,” narrating their story of a breached quarantine during the Italian Renaissance through music and dance. Warren incorporates faux-Nouvelle Vague film clips into a convicted murderer's recitation of “The Imp of the Perverse,” while Charlotte Drover enhances the Spanish Inquisition's physical and mental torture of a prisoner in “The Pit And the Pendulum” with silhouetted visions hinting at future state-sanctioned atrocities. Bookending the evening's slate are Chris Conley's adaptation of “The Black Cat” and M.E.H. Lewis's of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
For all the scholarly speculation on Poe's penchant for the macabre, rarely does it consider the economic practicality of recycling plots: first-person accounts of obsession-fueled homicide ending with the culprit's guilty confession and capture, for example, figure in four of the six playlets on display in All-Girl Edgar Allan Poe, making the most interesting interpretations those departing farthest from literal renderings to encompass visual and aural spectacle—in particular, “Masque of the Red Death's” richly textured collage of masked revelers who, one by one, fall under the contagion they seek to escape, as their host flees the party-crashing pestilence through a maze fashioned of his own folly.
Assigning a leotard-clad actor the role of feline nemesis in “Black Cat” solves the always-difficult task of replicating animals onstage, as does portraying The Raven's avian phantom as an Edward Gorey-esque wraith bearing an artificial corvid. Less successful is “The Tell-Tale Heart's” representation of the doomed man's cataract-afflicted eye with an oversized prosthetic not unlike the masks seen earlier, but still tending too much toward comic exaggeration. Anthology productions cannot help but vary in their quality, however, and the measure of inventive originality evident in this 90-minute collection is well worth the shivery creep up Ravenswood alley.
