BRATTLEBORO — Just in time for Halloween, director Josh Moyse presents stage adaptations of two stories by Edgar Allan Poe at the Center for Digital Arts space at 74 Cotton Mill Hill.
Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th-century author and poet best known for his tales of gothic horror. Moyse admits he chose the project largely due to the idea that it would be fun to examine Poe's works during Halloween, which Moyse calls his “favorite holiday.” But he was also drawn to the themes of social terror in the two stories he selected to adapt.
“Poe's work is often relegated to high school study or earlier. Some people may not have even read him since they were teenagers,” says Moyse. “Yet many of his works examine timeless issues that have appeal to mature audiences.”
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of Poe's most well-known works, a young confidant (played by Heather Reed) of a wealthy, elderly man narrates her decision to take the old man's life and her ensuing capture by authorities. The narrator attributes her undoing to a supernatural occurrence while all the time denying that her own emotional instability is caused by an undisclosed disease.
Moyse puts Reed in vintage clothing on a set with nothing more than a lamp and a chair, allowing her to explore the psychological undertones of the drama.
“Sometimes when you insulate yourself, you're actually locking yourself in with the danger,” says Moyse.
On the other end of the spectrum, slide projections of graphics and photography are part of the staging used to articulate the nuances found in “The Masque of the Red Death,” a story of mass seclusion.
The tale is set in an unnamed land whose people are being ravaged by a contagious disease.
The ruler, Prince Prospero, gathers 1,000 knights and dames of his court in an abbey and welds the doors shut to protect them from infection. Another anonymous narrator (played by Jennifer Moyse) recounts the sumptuous lifestyle of the courtesans sequestered in the abbey, leading up to Prospero's fateful decision to hold a masquerade ball.
As the celebration reaches its peak, he is forced to confront a figure whose costume, as Poe writes, had “gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum.”
“Privilege does not buy you security,” Moyse summarizes. “You can't be an ostrich sticking your head in the ground. You have to live in a community.”
A Brattleboro native, Josh Moyse has worked extensively with several New York and Los Angeles theaters and with film companies in Los Angeles and Vermont over the past 20 years. He received his B.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts.
In 1998, he used Windham County locations and actors to make his horror movie, Blood Rites, which secured domestic and international distribution.
He returned to the area in 2009 as a guest director at Marlboro College, where he staged an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.