Masque of the Red Death & The Tell-Tale Heart & The Bells

CAUGHT RED-HANDED Denise L. Devine, Billy Minogue and maria Olsen, from left, palm off some Poe.

Photograph: Zombie Joe

Zombie Joe’s willfully perverse evening of works by horror master Edgar Allan Poe is destined to scare away some of its audience. At the performance I attended, about ten older couples fled at intermission: “I think painful adequately describes it,” muttered one gentleman to his lady friend as they sailed off, like ships from a sinking rat. Perhaps it does. But since Joe and his Underground Theatre Group—a Los Angeles troupe making its local debut—derive inspiration from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, “painful” is a backhanded compliment.

In the show’s first half, the actors are white-faced and raccoon-eyed; they trade solemn narration, execute strange scuttling dances, and sing in discordant unison. After intermission, sporting carnivalesque costumes and painted-on masks, they mingle with the audience and writhe orgiastically to a live duet between a violin and didgeridoo. Sometimes they scream; often they grimace. Joe’s unusual emphases distort the shape of Poe’s suspense—in ways that are sometimes clever, sometimes self-defeating—but when the performers commit fully to the macabre dementia of the event, the effect can be quite striking. (I was especially taken with the gleefully ferocious Maria Olsen, who sometimes suggests a succubus version of Annie Lennox.) Although only half of the show really works, the company has guts and a style of its own. It is willing to risk looking ridiculous, and it pushes forward: no pain, no gain.