Theatre review: Wordless journey into Poe's darkness frustrating but fun
Credit to Author: Jerry Wasserman| Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2019 20:31:49 +0000
When: To Aug. 25
Where: The Cultch
Tickets and info: From $75 at tickets.thecultch.com
If you’re looking for something different to end the summer theatre season, head over to The Cultch to be immersed in the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination.
Don’t expect recitations of The Raven or staged versions of Poe’s Gothic tales. Deep into Darkness is an elaborate but wordless, unstructured journey through what the press release calls Poe’s “fever dream,” taking place in 20 rooms on three floors.
Donning white plastic masks, audience members are told to “go forth and wander.” You follow the action according to your whims. Watch a scene or a character as long as you want, leave it when you want, go up and down stairs, through closed doors. Take a break in the bar whenever you choose.
With 17 actors, extraordinary sets from John R. Taylor, Sean William’s spooky music, Nicholas Harrison’s fight choreography and some exceptional dance, Deep into Darkness lacks only a coherent narrative. Without dialogue, an evident plot, recognizable characters or a program, it’s hard to know what’s going on, and sometimes more frustrating than fun.
In the Historic Theatre I watched six characters in Victorian dress dancing a minuet. There was tension between the men but about what I couldn’t tell. From there I went into a room filled with bookcases. A man frantically looked through the books, tossing them aside. In another room a woman and two men mimed a violent fight.
Along a narrow upstairs corridor I was almost run into by a dishevelled woman in a red corset looking distraught. She proceeded to do a remarkable dance of anguish on the floor and along both walls. Later I saw her in another room being attacked by a man.
I followed sounds — diabolical laughter, groans and shrieks — and found a man being mesmerized by another, then covered with a sheet and tormented by a group of people. An older man wandered in, a noose around his neck.
Baffled by the story, I gave myself over to the characters. Along with red corset, I was fascinated by a woman in black staggering about in deep distress, who stopped and stared in my face, at my mask.
Being masked transforms you. Watching other audience members, anonymous in their eerie white masks, adds to the mystery.
My favourite character was a woman in a beautiful turquoise gown. I followed her into a bedroom where a maid slowly, erotically undressed her. She then undressed the maid, and in their unsexy Victorian underwear they danced a ferocious dance of love, eventually broken up by a man’s violent attack.
Counterpointing the violence, I watched a woman gently bathe the older man and carefully put him to bed.
Laura Carly Miller, Sydney Doberstein, Fraser Larock and Blaine Anderson of Third Wheel Productions deserve high praise for their ambition and imagination in jointly writing, producing and directing Deep into Darkness.
They follow in the path of the long-running off-Broadway hit Sleep No More, Macbeth staged in multiple rooms of a house. Before that, audiences were free to go where and when they chose in Vancouver’s The Haunted House Hamlet, and the international success Tamara, a room-to-room tale of Italian fascism.
The difference: All those shows featured strong stories, identifiable characters and dialogue.
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