'Madness' returns to First Folio in fine form

Seeing First Folio Theatre's remount of its meticulously adapted “The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe: A Love Story after a three-year hiatus reminded me how significant its subtitle is.

Incorporating Poe's stories, poems and letters, David Rice's adaptation is part drama, part oral interpretation, part biography and all romance. The show brilliantly showcases such chilling tales as “The Pit and the Pendulum and “The Masque of the Red Death and celebrated poems “The Raven and “Annabel Lee. But at its core, “The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe is a deeply felt celebration of the love between a husband and wife, and an examination of the profound grief felt by Poe over the loss of his soul mate.

Death underscores every part of this show, and the juxtaposition of the romantic and the macabre tips its hat to the writer who inspired it. The result is an artfully structured, revealing literary and biographical revue of a hugely influential and ever-potent storyteller. It consists mostly of dramatizations of several Poe stories which unfold in different rooms throughout the Mayslake Peabody Estate, and which are linked together by lines from “The Raven. The exception is a domestic interlude, set in designer Aaron Laudermith's comfortable and cheery parlor, that reveals the relationship between Poe (hauntingly played by John Sanders), and his wife, Virginia (the sweet, playful Diane Mair), the cousin who was 13 when they wed and 25 when she died from tuberculosis.

Sanders takes over for Larry Neumann Jr. who originated the titular role in 2006 and reprised it the following year. Neumann's Poe embodied a weary, prolonged sorrow. But the younger Sanders who underscores the writer's melancholy with a trace of mania suggests a more youthful widower (Poe was 38 when his wife died), whose grief is still fresh. Not yet devastated by alcohol and despair, Poe is nevertheless poised at the precipice. That state is vividly expressed in “Ligeia, about a man mourning his dead wife. Sanders' Poe “stands in for the protagonist, who replaces his exotic first wife Ligeia (played with a hint of menace by Jennifer T. Grubb), with the more familiar Rowena (Mair) who soon suffers her predecessor's fate.

In fact, life informing art (and vice versa) is a constant throughout “Madness, even in stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart and “The Pit and the Pendulum which director Michael Goldberg, like his predecessor Alison Vesely, stages in claustrophobic, near total darkness to chilling effect. Each invites comparisons to Poe in that the former is about obsession, the latter is about desperation, and in both the protagonist endures a type of torture.

Robert Allan Smith as terrific a storyteller as he is an actor plays the Madman and the Prisoner, reprising the roles he originated in 2006. His performance is now as it was then: a fierce, pitch-perfect manifestation of madness and terror.

Goldberg's scrupulous staging, Laudermith's detailed set (note the featherlike accents where the curtains close) and Elsa Hiltner's jewel-toned gowns and grotesque, gilded masks merit praise, as does Christopher Kriz's richly evocative sound design. The beating heart that seems to envelop the Madman's bedroom, the ominous whir of the pendulum, the scurrying of rats and the moaning cello that recalls the human voice add the requisite ambience to a masterful take on a master's work.