Edgar Allan Poe

Our class recently saw the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe performed at the Center for Puppetry Arts. Now, I'll admit my love for puppets. I've been a lifelong Muppets fan, and I often put on my own puppet plays from the staircase balcony in my childhood home. However, my views of puppetry were very limited. I was excited to see the show, but I was expecting something along the lines of hand puppets or marionettes moving about a tiny stage with the actors hidden behind a piece of scenery. How wrong I was.

Rather than hiding, the actors moved freely about the stage along with their puppets. I never once, however, felt like the actors were overshadowing the puppets. The show was so incredibly seamless, and the actors became an extension of their puppets. It was a very clever way of performing Poe's works, many of which contain little dialogue. The actors became the narrators while the puppets performed the actions of the stories.

I also liked that they used several of Poe's short stories and poems and blended them into one longer performance. It became a riveting mash-up of his works. Mash-ups are quite popular these days in music, and the T.V. show Glee uses them frequently. It would be a fun and exciting exercise to have my own students create a mash-up of their own and perform it for the class. The students would have to find common themes or ideas that tie the various works together, and this would give them a chance to see how the same author, or different authors from the same movement, have common threads that run through their works. I could easily see taking several Harlem Renaissance poems or Flannery O'Connor short stories and creating a longer work to perform in front of the class.

I might even make them use puppets.