Exploring Poe's Plutonian Shore

[Dave Monroe]

>From Ben Brantley, "Lou Reed, Exploring Poe's
Plutonian Shore," New York Times, Monday, November
29th, 2001 ...

"The past never stopped singing in the fevered brain
of Edgar Allan Poe, always chanting on about things
lost, things dead, the women (starting with Mother,
who died when he was 3) who got away. 

"So it seems fitting that in the midst of 'POEtry,' a
disjointed gray mass of a celebration by the rocker
Lou Reed, a classic song from Mr. Reed's own past
insinuates its way into the audience's ears....
 
"It's another piece from the late 1970's, 'Perfect
Day.' The song is sweet and gentle, at least by the
snarling standards of Mr. Reed's earlier days, a
grateful evocation of one couple's simple shared
pleasures on a weekend afternoon.

"For 'POEtry,' which has been staged by Robert Wilson
at the Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of
Music, the song has been woven with a deep blue
melancholy. As sung with whisper-edged amplification
by a character with the familiar name of Lenore, that
perfect day of the title seems to have slid forever
into the abyss of the unreclaimable.

"The song is also, by the way, the preface to a
recitation of a Reed-icized variation on Poe's most
famous work: 'The Raven,' the hymn to that lost Lenore
of yore. And it says a lot about this latest
collaboration between Mr. Reed and Mr. Wilson that
'Perfect Day,' with its double-edged backward glance,
turns out to be infinitely more haunting than this
'Raven,' which lies on the stage here like a dead and
distinctly nonthreatening bird.

"'POEtry,' which runs through Sunday at the academy,
is not, for the record, a scary show. It has been
directed and designed by Mr. Wilson with his beloved
team at the Thalia Theater of Hamburg, Germany, in a
style that might be called 'The Cabaret of Dr.
Caligari.' Imagine the mad scientist of German
Expressionist film indulging a secret passion for show
biz and stiffly stepping forward to tell a few jokes
and sing a few ditties.

The Thalia Theater ensemble members, who perform Mr.
Reed's songs in English but speak mostly in German,
look like Weimar automatons, with their chalky white
faces, bride-of-Frankenstein coiffures and jerky
mechanical movements. They are a formal, cadaverous
lot given to mirthless giggles and convulsive, rasping
gasps. Sometimes they literally lose their heads or
sprout reptilian claws.

If this sounds like divine decadence, you've
misunderstood me. The production is slow (glacially
slow), painstakingly deliberate and almost clinical in
its retelling of favorite Poe stories ...

[...]

"If you're not a student of Poe, you'll spend much of
the night at sea. Why, for example, do those wilting
women keep showing up in configurations of three? Any
confusion is compounded if you don't speak German,
since your eyes keep straying from Mr. Wilson's stage
imagery to the supertitles above it. This would matter
less if the images had the rapturous tidal sweep that
Mr. Wilson at his best can generate.... 

[...]

"Poe is deconstructed into clean-cut modernist images
—rectangular towers, Milanese-style furniture and
trapezoidal frames are much in evidence — but not
subsequently reconstructed into the whirlpool that is
Poe's prose.

"In other words, the show never simulates Poe's gift
for creating the most seductive and suffocating of
nightmares.... 

[...]

"... But despite the varied, deep- toned lighting of
Mr. Wilson and Heinrich Brunke, most of "POEtry" takes
place in an annoyingly murky landscape. This probably
was not what Poe meant when he wrote about that fabled
"midnight dreary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/29/arts/theater/29POET.html

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