After 170 years of wondering, we finally know the identity of the unnamed penitent in Edgar Allan Poes cautionary The Tell-Tale Heart.'
Will Alexander, one of a handful of truly gifted comedic stage actors in the Lehigh Valley, unveiled his dramatic brawn in a monumental display of madness and muscularity before a startled and SRO crowd last night at The Macungie Institute in Global impACTORs Spirit of Poe: 13 Haunting Stories.
The lone speaker in this most melodramatic of Poes dreadfully beloved gothic horror narratives, he shook the audience off their stiff-backed chairs with an attack from the rear of the hushed and darkened theater.
Wrapped in a flowing gold robe and coiled like a pit viper about to strike, Alexander writhed his way with pained desperation down the side aisle, his eyes bugged and darting, and slithered at length onto the elevated stage from which he assailed the rattled throng with a convincingly rambling and thoroughly hypnotic insistence that his compulsion to smother and dismember his elderly roommate was not only necessary but justified.
His stage skills were so finely honed that had he been reading from the Macungie phone directory, you would not have permitted yourself to miss one single name and address!
When the robe was finally unwound, by creeping and all-but-unseen attendants, to reveal his tightly strait-jacketed torso, we realized for the first time the full extent of his psychic torment and shuddered in the anticipation of where it would lead us.
Over fifteen heart-thumping minutes, Alexander never violated the exquisite trust that was growing between him and his rapt audience. Other actors shared the stage with him, and they ably supported his unraveling; but they may as well not have been there, for he was creating a tableau so rich in substance and texture that all he seemed to need--- even as quivering follow-spots threatened at several times to lose him from their beams--- was the breathless collaboration of the crowd.
Spirit of Poe: 13 Haunting Stories plays October 25 at 8 PM, and October 26 at 4 PM and 9 PM, 2013 at The Macungie Institute, 510 East Main Street, Macungie, PA 18062.
Tickets are $17 and $15.
For information and tickets, visit http://www.gigtheater.com/index.php