Ric Averill brings Edgar Allan Poe back to life for Halloween

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Halloween, fast approaching, is that time of year when the American master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe is most fondly recalled. Getting in on the season this year is Lawrence playwright Ric Averill, whose newest piece — an opera called Midnight Visit to the Grave of Poe: A Grotesque Arabesque — bows this weekend.

Midnight Visit takes inspiration from Poe’s life and work, as well as an intriguing urban legend about a woman who leaves three red roses and a bottle of cognac on Poe’s grave each year. It wraps elements of dance, musical theater, poetry and opera into one mysterious, spooky package. I called Averill and asked him to break down this production ahead of its showings at the Lawrence Arts Center.

The Pitch: I know you’ve been doing plays for a long while, but have you done an opera before?

Averill: I was commissioned to write an opera for the Kennedy Center in 2001, based on The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was a five-person opera for youth, an introduction-to-opera piece. Very fun. I started out as a composer. That was what I went to KU for, originally, but went back and got my master’s degree in theater.

What led to Midnight Visit to the Grave of Poe: A Grotesque Arabesque?

When I was working on The Emperor’s New Clothes, KU put it up as a workshop and performed it for the Kennedy Center people, in order to show them that the piece would work. A companion piece to it was Gianni Schicchi, that wonderful Puccini comic opera. The actor that was portraying Gianni Schicchi was this beautiful, tall, Poe-looking guy. I approached him that day and said, “I want to write a one-man opera about Poe,” and he said, “Sure!” And I never saw him again.

I started writing it right away and realized you can’t have Poe without the women. The more I got immersed in Poe and the more I learned, the more he fascinated me, as an artist. Like, his mother was a child actress who died at the age of about 23. Poe was about 3 when she died, and he was there by her side. He has all of these stories of funereal women, and there’s this dark side of him, and there’s this addictive side with alcohol.

There’s the psychological aspects — like, “What makes this guy tick?” — and, combined with that, there’s the story that, up until a few years ago, on the anniversary of his [Poe’s] birth, a visitor dressed in formal clothes would come to the grave of Poe and put down three red roses and a bottle of cognac. I combined that ritual with some of Poe’s stories and some small details from his life and created this libretto.

Which Poe works do you include?

Two of the stories are very familiar to people: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” And the play concludes with “Annabel Lee,” which I think is one of Poe’s best poems. The play opens with a song that his actress mother made famous, called “Nobody Coming to Marry Me.” There’s also these two lesser-known stories about funereal women — women who die young is a theme of Poe’s — who come back from the grave to haunt the husband in different ways.

One of the stories is “Morella,” which is really Twilight Zone, and the other story is called “Eleonora,” and it’s one of Poe’s few pieces that has a small sense of redemption. The ghost comes back and tells the guy, “Go ahead, love the new woman. It’s OK. Love conquers all.” Poe wrote that after his wife died and he was trying to find a new one to support him. [Laughs.]

For a work that requires such deep immersion, what do you do to get the performers on the same page before a performance?

We’ve been having candlelight rituals before each rehearsal. Thirteen people die. We did a body count after we started working on the show, and in the course of these stories, there are 13 deaths.

It seems like this is going to be much more than a standard opera, encompassing quite a few other forms.

I worked with some visual artists who created these scenic background works for me, digitally, and it soon became a very collaborative piece. A lot of the early work on this was with Eric Mardis of Split Lip Rayfield, who was our original guitarist on this. There’s three modern dancers, and they’re choreographed by Gary Abbott, who co-founded Deeply Rooted, up in Chicago, and is currently an assistant professor at UMKC.

I really like to think of it like we’re staging a performance like Diaghilev did with Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Chagall, where all of these artists got together and put their art onstage at the same time. Wagner called it “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total opera,” where every art form is onstage at the same time. You’re being immersed, experiencing the life of Poe through his works.

What was the process like?

I started on it in 2001. It was one of the longest times of my life I’ve spent developing a work, and most of it was done in collaboration with other people. I worked it in San Diego at the Theatre of the World Festival, and then in Kearney, Nebraska, of all places. I took a modern dance company with me up to Kearney. They have a performing arts center, and we did a weeklong workshop and performed it there.

So is it something like a rock opera?

I wouldn’t call it a rock opera. If you call it a rock opera, people go into it expecting tunes. There’s some spoken word in it — “The Tell-Tale Heart” is mostly spoken — but there’s music throughout. It’s my neo-romantic music scored for guitar and bass, percussion, Steinway piano, toy piano, synthesizer and cello, and then these three amazing singers. It’s a combination of musical theater and opera. It’s very immersive. You can look at it as going to a modern dance piece about Poe that happens to have words and singing and digital scenery, or you can say you’re going to see this beautiful digital scenery in front of which there are actors moving. It’s really been fun to see the project come together.