An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe brings you face-to-face with an American icon as Poe reflects on his tortuous life. A child of actors, at age three he watches his mother, Eliza Poe, die of pneumonia. His father has abandoned them. Mrs. Allan, a wealthy, childless matron, adopts and makes a pet of little Eddie but her husband despises this “child of actors.” Searching for his birth family, he meets his cousin Virginia who is eight years old, and finds his soul’s companion. When she is nearly fourteen they are wed. Theirs is a marriage of the spirit infused with a scent of past lives. But they live in poverty, and soon Virginia is dying of tuberculosis. Asked by the New York City Historic House Trust to write a one-man play for the Poe Cottage in the Bronx, author and playwright Katherine Ashe put her formidable historical research skills to work in crafting this powerful monologue, capturing the voice of the enigmatic literary figure. Here you’ll find a speaking presence of Poe: “her eyes were bright with a dark glow, like lakes that hid strange dreamworlds in their depths. Her hair was damp and clung to her face like seaweed ’round the drowned.”
Regarding myself: writing is my family’s trade, my father was a staff writer for Cecil B. de Mille, my mother wrote poetry. What fascinated me about my father’s work was the research — though much of that never got into the films (The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth and, for Samuel Bronston, El Cid.) Perhaps it was those bits and pieces of real history that didn’t make it to the screen that have prompted me to be such an intent researcher, looking for those hints in old manuscripts that give insight into how the large events came about out of the day to day living of people’s lives.
- Publisher : Wake Robin Press (July 8, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 68 pages
- ISBN-10 : 069245103X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0692451038