Poe’s Shadows: Haunting the Lyric Theatre this October

Featuring two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the screening immerses audience members in the dark, shadowy world of Poe.

The work will be screened on Saturday, October 4th, from 10 AM – 2 PM (Free event!) and as a pre-show to the Lyric’s Late-Night Horror Fest on Thursdays throughout the month of October. Free admission with every ticket to the Late-Night Horror Fest.

Drawing from two of Poe’s best-known works, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” the installation explores what happens when literary texts are lifted from the page to the stage and then reimagined through the use of new technology. The selected texts were curated and directed by theatre faculty members Amanda Nelson and Natasha Staley in collaboration with English faculty member Ashley Reed. Audience members will hear recordings of the texts, which were performed and recorded in 2018 by now former Virginia Tech students. “Tell-Tale Heart” was performed by Austin Burch, who double-majored in theatre and computational modeling and data analytics. “The Raven” was performed by Reiss Gidner, who double-majored in theatre and animal and poultry science; Erika Koekkoek, who majored in theatre; and Liv Wisnewski, who double-majored in theatre and history. Virtual shadow puppets, projected onto the screen, were hand-drawn by graphic design faculty member Meaghan Dee and then transformed into moving graphics by Dee and Virginia Tech visual arts alum, Ethan Candelario. Central to the experience are the spatialized sound effects and music — designed and engineered by Tanner Upthegrove of ICAT. The design was inspired by 19th-century crankies, which used hand-cranked moving panoramas to tell stories. Poe’s Shadows brings the concept of crankies into the 21st-century. 

Poe’s Shadows was originally designed and produced in 2018 in The Cube at Virginia Tech.