Poe-sitively terrifying

The joy of being scared is one of the core aspects of the Halloween season. Typical thrills such as witches, ghosts and haunted houses can grow tiresome and repetitive when experienced year after year.

Yet the stories concocted by the twisted imagination of Edgar Allan Poe more than 150 years ago have come to define the holiday and have proven creepy and timeless.

Starting tonight, Rep Stage at Howard Community College will feature The Poe Show, a reading of a number of Poe's most popular and dark pieces. The famed author, who lived in Baltimore, wrote stories and poems revealing what occurs in a person's head when he loses his mind and attempts to maintain his composure in society.

The one-man show stars Tony Tsendeas — the actor-in-residence for Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum — reciting each story and poem as either the story's narrator or as the author himself.

"It's sort of a guided tour through Edgar Allan Poe's writing and time," said Michael Stebbins, the producing artistic director of Rep Stage.

The show opens with Tsendeas on stage as himself. He then proceeds to speak to the audience about Poe while transforming into the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by slightly altering his appearance with simple costumes, make-up and hair adjustments. Once properly outfitted, Tsendeas begins to recite and perform the piece verbatim.

Other pieces performed include "The Raven," "The Conqueror Worm" and "Annabelle Lee."

Each contain elements of gothic horror and are commonly read and analyzed in English classes. The Poe Show also touches on aspects of the author's tragic life, much of it spent in poverty despite his fame.

Seeing the works performed provides the audience with a different perspective, especially when the performer becomes both the author and the narrator.

"Because Tony is so invested in Edgar Allan Poe as a historical figure, as well as being a fine actor, I think ... this is as close as you can get to having Edgar Allan Poe himself being present and sharing his work with you," Stebbins said.

Tsendeas is also a teacher in a more traditional sense. He has taught theater classes at the Baltimore School for the Arts since 1990. He has directed and performed in countless plays in the area and served as the artistic director of Action Theater from 1991 to 2001.

According to his website, his special skills include wielding rapiers and daggers and speaking in Southern, standard British, cockney, French and Russian dialects.

Tsendeas first recognized the performability of Poe's work when he read "The Tell-Tale Heart" in eighth grade. Years later, Tsendeas still recognizes the skillfully crafted language of Poe's poems.

"‘The Raven' has to be [read] letter perfect," Tsendeas said. "If you need one syllable, you can tell because it's so mathematically precise in the way it's put together."

As a performer, he acknowledges the audience and seeks to involve them in the performance, speaking to them directly as Poe. Toward the end of the play, when discussing Poe's life as a traveling lecturer, Tsendeas, as Poe, stands behind a lectern and invites the audience to pretend they are at one of the author's lectures in 1846.

"He tries to make it a bit more of a communal experience, as if we were all sitting around the camp fire or as if we were all sitting inside the home of Edgar Allan Poe," Stebbins said.

Tsendeas has traveled the country performing The Poe Show at various venues. All he needs to depict the stories of madness are two chairs, an audience, a performance space and some lighting, according to the website. The show is no-frills, and the focus is on Tsendeas' performance.

"Mr. Poe has such a great sense of the psychology of the characters he was creating that if you really just invest in it and let the words take you along in the journey, you end up going to that very interesting and dark place the characters often go," Tsendeas said.

The Poe Show opens today and runs until Thursday at Rep Stage at Howard Community College in Columbia. Tickets are $12. For more information, visit www.repstage.org.

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