No Mo' Poe: Wilson and Reed's POEtry Closes at BAM, Dec. 8 | Playbill

Related Articles
News No Mo' Poe: Wilson and Reed's POEtry Closes at BAM, Dec. 8 The eight-foot raven and the huge dangling eyeball will be moved out of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House on Dec. 8, as experimental director Robert Wilson and rocker Lou Reed's second collaboration, POEtry, comes to an end. The show began on Nov. 27.

The eight-foot raven and the huge dangling eyeball will be moved out of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House on Dec. 8, as experimental director Robert Wilson and rocker Lou Reed's second collaboration, POEtry, comes to an end. The show began on Nov. 27.

In case you can't instantly parse that title and its very Wilsonian capitalization, the musical is drawn from the stories, poetry and life of writer Edgar Allen Poe. Reed, who penned the lyrics, music and libretto, incorporated language from 11 Poe works into POEtry. Among the raided works are the poem "The Raven," and the horror tales "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado." Some of the characters from these famous pieces of fiction — including the aforementioned raven, "The Raven" protagonist's lost love Lenore, Roderick Usher, and Annabel Lee, the subject of one of Poe's saddest and most beautiful poems — populate the stage, crossing paths with a headless man, a shade from the Catacombs and young and old versions of Poe himself.

POEtry's dialogue is in German, reflected the fact that the project began at Hamburg's Thalia Theater before traveling to BAM's Next Wave Festival. The 12-song score, however, is sung in English and played by a band featuring a cello, hurdy-gurdy, flute, piano and didgeridoo.

Wilson and Reed previously worked together on Time Rocker, which played BAM in1997.

Jacques Raynaud did the costume and mask design. Heinrich Brunke worked with Wilson on the lighting design. Volker Canaris committed the German text to paper. Tickets are $25-$80. BAM is located at 30 Lafayette Avenue. For more information, call (718) 636-4111.

—By Robert Simonson

 
RELATED:
Today’s Most Popular News:
 X

Blocking belongs
on the stage,
not on websites.

Our website is made possible by
displaying online advertisements to our visitors.

Please consider supporting us by
whitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.
Thank you!