These are his terrors, and yet he embraces them as he obsessively paints images of crypts and writes dirges of shattered joys and haunted palaces. Usher is dominated by the knowledge that the time will come when she must expire to her wasting ailment, and he dreads it as he awaits it, anticipating his ultimate fears-that he will lose his sole companion, and that he will inadvertently suppose her dead before death comes and put her living in the tomb. Upon the wary guest’s arrival, Usher apprises him of the character of his mysterious, mentally-induced malady of soul and body-as well as with the intelligence that his twin sister, the Lady Madeline, resides also within the crumbling walls succumbing to diseases of her own. Sensing and shrinking from his inevitable fall into madness, Roderick Usher summons an old schoolmate to stay with him and divert him from his disturbing phantasms and disconsolate meditations. From both, an eerie environmental gloom exuded, tainting all within their sphere and rendering everything cheerless, comfortless, and careworn. Roderick Usher was tottering on the brink of mental collapse just as the ancestral House of Usher tottered on the brink of physical collapse, as though man and mansion shared a common spirit and common state. There is a self-destructive motif in the guilty trepidations of Roderick Usher that was also a force in Edgar Allan Poe’s own tragedy. Roderick Usher, like Edgar Allan Poe, was a sick man, plagued by the expectancy of his greatest fears fears that were Poe’s greatest fears as well: the loss of love and the terror of premature burial (called “the most terrific” of quandaries by the author). Roderick Usher, like Edgar Allan Poe, was an aesthetic man.
Roderick Usher, like Edgar Allan Poe, was an artistic man.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is perhaps one of the strongest instances of how his stories mirrored his mind and his demons, participating in a Freudian death wish and the horror of self-fulfilling prophecy. He was a nervous creature who played out his paranoia through his protagonists and their grotesque adventures. Poe suffered under a rudimentary pathology: Fear. Edgar Allan Poe is the quintessential tortured artist.įrom murder to necrophilia, Poe peeled away social veneer and pried into the inhumanities of humanity while he himself wrestled with inescapable misery and misfortune. He became a writer as a means of survival and emotional release, and his writings were dominated by death, nightmares, corruption, madness, and by the haunting of the subconscious psyche. The young Poe was eventually driven from his foster father by hatred into a life of drifting destitution. For any civilized reader, there is no better way to usher in the howling fall than with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a tale observing its 175th anniversary of publication this September and there is no better way to encounter the terrors of this tale than with a glimpse of the terrors of its teller.Ī wealthy Virginia tobacco and tombstone merchant named John Allan took in the orphaned Edgar Poe, born January 19, 1809. Conjured over a century ago, Poe’s phantasmagorias remain unparalleled to this day in their rich, velvety, cerebral, and suffocating horror. He is the undisputed master of the macabre and the father of the supernatural and psychological thriller. Throughout his 40 tormented years of life, Edgar Allan Poe was widely hailed as a genius for the black brilliance of his art. Mellon Foundation.There is a notable nightmarish and intangible quality to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as there is in many of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpieces-a vague sense of foreboding, a floating uneasiness, or shadowy moodiness that is beyond the power of words to express…Įnigmatic. This program was supported by The Andrew W. Planning on dinner before the show? Check out restaurants in downtown North Adams or find a nosh right here on campus: Lickety Split Cafe, Gramercy Bistro, Bright Ideas Brewing, and A-oK Berkshire Barbeque.
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A full bar serves Bright Idea Brewing beers and Berkshire Mountain Distillery spirits.
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All Preferred Ticket holders also receive free museum admission on the day of or day after the show. Preferred Ticket buyers get the best seat in the house, general admission seats located in the first rows of the theater.
The work-in-progress presentation was replete with puppets, musicians, actors, and projections - and it was suggested for audiences 16 and older. This spellbinding stage version of Edgar Allan Poe’s masterpiece was written and directed by Arthur Yorinks and Jim Simpson and featured a score by Philip Glass, adapted from the House of Usher opera that Glass and Yorinks created in 1988.
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