Deep Into Darkness

At The Cultch until August 25, 2019
Advance tickets: $75 from deepintodarkness.com or $85 at the door

Posted August 17, 2019

The audience – all issued masks before venturing forth from the theatre lobby – is invited to open drawers and cupboards, examine the books, walk the dimly lit hallways and follow the action from room to room. Seldom does anyone – especially not the company of seventeen actors – speak. There’s a kind of hushed sacredness, a forced kind of holiness in this work, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, a major figure in 19^th century American literature.

But here’s the rub: there’s not a lot of action and after ambling up and downstairs, peeking in at, say, a tubercular young woman sponge-bathing an ashen old man or a madwoman in her knickers rocking and soothing a baby that turns out to be only a knitted blanket full of rose petals, many on the night I attended ended up sitting in the historic theatre where there was some action – albeit ambiguous: a dinner party, a drunk, an old man, a bodacious young woman who later went into an erotic frenzy in a doorway, a young man, a beautiful young woman who seems to be in love with the young man and is, maybe, rejected by him. And there’s some stately, formal ballroom dancing with women in gowns and men in tux.

But I was hungry for story and I suspect a lot of others sitting in the historic theatre were, too. You can only meander around for so long without something drawing you on. Perhaps knowing more about Poe would have made it more interesting. He married his 13-year-old cousin, wrote a tremendous number of short stories and he died at the age of 40 wearing someone else’s clothes and calling out “Reynolds.” These facts I learned from Wikipedia; I wanted to learn a lot more about Poe from Deep Into Darkness, an “immersive theatrical experience”, and I didn’t.

But, created by the team of Laura Carly Miller and Sydney Doberstein, co-writers, co-producers and co-directors of Deep Into Darkness, the show is tremendously ambitious and the large cast never for a moment drifts out of character. No matter where you come upon them, they are hauntingly Edgar Allan Poe-ish. Caught in an upper hallway by one young actor in a period black silk gown, I was embraced and poetry was whispered in my ear. The character seemed distraught so I told her all would be well – knowing well it would not be. Dead baby, a staggering drunk, a sense of forced joviality, Poe, as a young man, writing feverishly and well on his way to madness: all is not going to be well.

At the end Poe’s metaphoric descent into his personal hell is stylishly, physically, almost balletically rendered. It’s a macabre, unambiguous image that attempts to tie the whole event together.

People watching was interesting: some striding, some idling, through the various ‘stations’. Some opening all the little drawers, all the little cupboards and boxes while others simply ambled by, content to look. In the upper hallway, the audience was invited to write responses on little pieces of handmade paper to some questions that were scrawled on chalkboards like, “I Lie Awake and Dream of …..”. Written responses include, “…fabulous sex” and “…Death and Despare [sic]”. The responses were tied with hemp string to a wooden rod. Another question posed was, “If Death Came Calling, I would…” One wag responded , “Pretend I wasn’t home”. And some cheerful soul wrote, “…be grateful for the wonderful life I’ve Ied”.

Audience comments in the Guest Book, suggest that quite a few people thought the show was “fantastic”, “awesome”, “one of the best things I’ve seen in my life”.

Me? More story, please. More Poe.