THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Gothic Evening 1

by Edgar Allan Poe

Premiere: October 19 2007 Actors: Juan David Toro - Diego Sánchez - Nadia Silva - Sergio Dávila - Juan David Correa - Alejandro Vásquez - Margarita Betancur - María Isabel García - María Ángela Muñoz - John Fernando Ospina - Lina Castaño. Script: Luigi Maria Musati Musical Composition: Julián Henao Literature Advice: Oscar González Stage, lights, costumes and utility: Matacandelas Graphic Design: Adriana Fernández Production: Cristóbal Peláez Assistant Director: Rigoberto Giraldo - Diego Sánchez Direction: Luigi Maria Musati This work has been done with the Municipality of Medellin support, Creation Grants Program 2007 A Teatro Matacandelas’ production - 2007

Ended with his death, the work of an artist consists in the perception of posterity as a single corpus, a kind of Immortal Double of the Artist himself. For the performer, this corpus is a speech in which every work forms a unique word or phrase; as one word and one phrase has meaning and full effect only within a whole speech, so each piece reveals its meaning only in the context of the speech, born from the immortal corpus of the artist, or the set of all his works.

And as in every speech there is a phrase, a word, a central image, in all works there is always an interpretation that has a particular, emblematic value, a work in which the interpreter reads all the items, figures and images of that author. This book is the heart of the entire artistic corpus.

If working on a single work of an author is always working on all his works, this is particularly true when working on what is the heart of an artistic corpus. The Fall of the House of Usher, generally considered the masterpiece of Poe, represents for us this heart, the significant core from which is radiated a sense of everything he’s written. Beside it, a group of stories form the key phrase of Poe’s speech: The Tetralogy of the major female figures (Ligeia, Morella, Berenice, Eleonora), which decline in four different but similar views, the relationship between what happens with Roderick Usher and his sister Madeleine and the magical places of the trilogy (The Island of the Fay, The domain of Arnheim and Landor's Cottage), that decline in the theme of the moral nature of places and landscapes, which is so important in The Fall.

The scene set in The Fall, on the other hand, involves a more complex interpretation than that which is put into a normal text theatre scene and also one that takes place in a simple reading, even though it is dramatized publicly. In fact, it is about transferring, in a dramatic way, what has been imagined and realized by the author in another way, which could be regarded as an intolerable arrogance, although ultimately when a normal theatrical text is staged, what it meets (or should meet) is substantially the same operation, a re-write.

In our own point of view, there is arrogance (and how many times we have seen it!) when re-writing occurs without being at service of the text itself, when it overlaps by force the text, strange intentions to itself, not when it is questioned with conscience and competence, which does not eliminate the risk of re-write wrongly, and arrogance has not excluded the possibility of, perhaps, great creations (we rarely witness such a thing, but sometimes surprising results are shown).

POE ON STAGE?

Poe is, above all, image and suggestion of the word, constructed with a formal architecture of ruthless rigor (recall here his essay on poetic composition). Each of his stories transformed in to objectified images (either theatre or film) is constantly risking banality, kitsch or redundancy, all the paraphernalia of terror and cheap mysticism. This, indeed, is a risk we believe is part of his compositional technique, lying on a subtle line between sublime and ridiculous, between terrible and the Grand Guignol, a risk that the interpreter should run, because before him the author has run the same. Poe challenges us to think: maybe no other author has ever corroborated more the maxim of Gorgias the Sophist, for whom art is a lie, and those who know how to deceive are better than those who don’t, and one that lets himself be deceived is wiser than those who were not fooled. The written word of Poe is, in short, a word that creates worlds, and in this sense is for us, as we had previously experienced with Seneca, the maximum theatricality, at least when theatre does not seek a voyeur representation but the ability to re-present, bring back something to present time, reminiscent from the shadows.