Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams. Arkansas Classical Theatre is bringing us an imagined last night of Edgar Allan Poe's life. That October night, 176 years ago, will come to life in the Headquarters House in Fayetteville. Construction on that home, by the way, began less than a year after Poe's death.
The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe: A Love Story by David Rice will allow small audiences to meet Poe and see two of his stories come to life. Co-Directors of the production, Betsy Jilka and Steven Marzolf, came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News studio this week to talk about Poe and about the challenges of using a house as their stage.
Jilka: In this, you'll experience going through this space, which is at the historic headquarters house, where the audience will actually come into the rooms, and they at one point they split, so they'll half of the audience will watch The Pit and the Pendulum, and the other half will watch The Tell-Tale Heart. And they will watch the actors go through the rooms and through the spaces, and then they all come back together at the end. And we can only fit thirty people in the one space all at the same time.
Marzolf: The play itself is we've really been thinking of it as sort of the last day that Poe is alive, and as he's descending into madness, all of his stories are coming to life. So that's where you have The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death. It really is. These thoughts, images, and stories are sort of swirling around. Really, the heart of the play is the relationship that he has with his dead wife, Virginia, who was his cousin, and they married when she was thirteen years old and he was 24.
Jilka: Mhm.
Marzolf: A little scandalous, but you know, it's Poe. This piece that the through line is really the relationship between he and Virginia and this love story. It really is him, and we've sort of conceptualized it. It's the last day that he's alive, and he literally is going crazy. By the end of the play, well, I don't want to give away the end of the play- it is a wee bit of a surprise.
Kellams: Tell-Tale Heart is one of the most paranoid works I think anyone's ever gone into. You know, there's right and wrong there. There's guilt. There's conscience.
Jilka: All of that.
Marzolf: All of the above. It's been interesting to work on that piece because conceptually, what's happening is Poe takes us into this room, and throughout the play, he's doing “The Raven.” So that's a through line throughout the play. As we're moving from room to room, he's doing snippets of “The Raven.” So we go into this room and he starts.
As he's doing “The Raven,” this guy appears who ends up being the madman in The Tell-Tale Heart and sort of picks up on Poe's paranoia, takes them on, and then we launch into The Tell-Tale Heart. He's very paranoid.
But there's also a bit of a bravado, too. He constantly keeps saying, “Why? Why do you think me mad? Why am I mad? Why would you think that I'm mad? Because I've done all of these things.”
It seems like a real value of his that he's sane. And so he's fighting against it. And he talks directly to the audience in this piece. He's interacting with them and really challenging them by saying, “Here's what I did to this old man, how I did him in. And then I buried the body here. Isn't that brilliant?”
Jilka: A madman wouldn't be able to do that.
Marzolf: A crazy person could never do this.
Jilka: How calculated I waited to kill the old man. And I waited night after night. And finally, on the eighth night, I go in and I find the right moment to kill him. And the reason why I did it is because of his vulture eye. Otherwise, I loved the old man, and I wouldn't have done it. It wasn't him. It was his eye.
Kellams: You're in different rooms with two shows simultaneously in a place that's not a stage. It's a house. It's the Headquarters House. How do you do all that?
Jilka: So the headquarters house is already set up with this 1800s. It was built in 1856, I think. It has the perfect decorations and wallpaper and window treatments and everything. We knew that we wanted it to be more than just sitting in a proscenium space. The actual play itself is supposed to be an immersive, experiential experience for the audience. It was more of a site specific thing.
How do we do it? We have some chairs that are lined on the outside on the walls. And then there will be some people standing. We don't have quite enough for everybody to sit all at the same time. And then they'll watch one actor move from the main room into another room, and we'll have a couple of other actors. Who will. “If your card is this color, you will go this way. And if your card is this color, you'll go this way,” in character.
Then everyone will look at their card and they'll split. Half of them, when they go into The Tell-Tale Heart room, it's just big enough for fifteen people. The other half that goes into The Pit and the Pendulum is actually the old law office of Archibald Yell, which is on the grounds of the Historic Headquarters.
It's tiny, but we wanted that space because it's so confined. That the piece is claustrophobic in itself, it's really told through the dialogue, -the monologue- but also through the sounds and the lighting and that it's a really dark space.
Kellams: Well, I was going to bring up lighting because it's Poe, so we kind of begin to assume some atmosphere. It's a nearly two-century-old house. What are you doing with atmosphere and props and set and lighting?
Marzolf: Yeah. So we have a lighting designer. She's an MFA designer from the U of A, and we've had great conversations with her.
Of course, this is pre-Edison. Everything's going to be some sort of candlelight. Or, what we're not interested in seeing is when you go and see a play or you go to a concert or something like that, you're seeing LED lights, you're seeing booms, you're seeing all kinds of hanging lights. We don't want that. If we have anything, it'll be hidden.
It's more of creating candlelight, shadowing effects. We don't want the audience to really see lighting instruments. You can see candles and practical lights like that, but no lighting instruments that you would normally see at a play.
I think the thing that we've really been leaning into is the house itself is a character. I mean, it has so much character to it, having been built in the 1850s, that the house itself sort of takes on a life. So with just a little bit of lighting, whether that's candle lighting, whether it's some sort of hidden little LED light that we can control in some way and change the color.
For instance, The Masque of the Red Death, when death comes in, everything's got to go red. So we're going to hide lights in places, and then it's going to go and sort of surprise and shock the audience. But yeah, we don't want to see lighting instruments at all.
Kellams: It's almost as if the two of you got together and said, “You know what? Just directing a play, that's not a challenge anymore.”
Jilka: Exactly.
Kellams: Let's just try to do it times seven.
Marzolf: The logistics of it have really been hard.
Jilka: Yeah, challenging.
Marzolf: In some ways, we've been lucky because this play was originally done in Chicago. It was done by a company called First Folio Theatre, and David Rice, who's the playwright, was one of the co-founders of First Folio. So they did this. They did it maybe six or seven straight years, and it was massively successful. But he wrote that for an old Victorian home that had thirty-some odd rooms in it. It was massive, a massive mansion. So when we looked at doing this play, we contacted him and he basically rewrote the play for the Headquarters House.
Kellams: Really?
Marzolf: The original piece had two additional scenes, and really, the scope of it was so much bigger. But he rewrote this for this space, knowing that it was going to be so much more intimate that we didn't have, you know, the major spiral staircases and big rooms that we would be doing the scenes in. We're doing them in really confined spaces.
Kellams: What does that say about a playwright, too, that he's willing to change what he's created for a different venue, you know, ten hours away?
Jilka: Yeah. He's been so generous and kind, and he's just really excited to see his play performed again. We found out about it from an actor who was in A Christmas Carol with us at TheatreSquared. He had played Poe in the original production in Chicago.
He contacted Rice and got us connected. He's been really wonderful. We've had several Zooms with him, and he also wrote in two more characters because we had two people that we said, “Hey, we need them in another scene, but can they also be in this scene?” So, he wrote in these two extra characters and he's coming to see the play.
Marzolf: Yeah, he's coming from Chicago to see it.
Kellams: Well, that's exciting. You mentioned when you were talking about Tell-Tale Heart that you discovered that there's also bravado. How does that process work? Where do you discover something as you're putting it together?
Marzolf: That's the beauty of the rehearsal process is as you're going through that, you make all of these fun discoveries. It certainly isn't just the two of us. The actors are making discoveries design-wise. They've helped us understand the play. And I would think the big thing about the play is, yes, Poe, and the macabre- there are some really creepy moments in this play- but there's also humor in it.
One of the things I think that'll be interesting for people if they don't know a lot about Poe. An aspect of this is that you're going to learn something about him in the scene with Virginia. She really changes some of the viewpoints of how people looked at Poe and how contemporary people will look at them that he was actually pretty charming.
He had a massive career besides his macabre stories. I mean, he was the one that created the detective story that Sherlock Holmes came out of. He actually wrote comedy, but nobody thinks of that stuff. The reason for that, if I can just talk about this for a second, is Poe had a rival and his name was Rufus Griswold.
Poe was a literary critic and just hammered Rufus Griswold. When Poe died, Griswold got hold of his works and also wrote obituaries about him, making up all of these things that we now think of as the quintessential Poe. But he wasn't that at all. Now scholars have been able to go back and go, “Oh, no, he wasn't all of these things.” This is through the lens of his rival, who was really upset with him and didn't like him and tried to screw him over.
Kellams: Steven Marzolf and Betsey Jilka are co-directors of The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe: A Love Story by David Rice. It's the latest production from Arkansas Classical Theatre. The play will open at the Headquarters House at 118 East Dickson in Fayetteville, Oct 16. There are fourteen performances through Halloween night. You can find out more at Arkansas Classical Theatre. or at the social media platforms for Arkansas Classical Theatre.
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