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

Description
In the first part of Zombie Joe’s Theater of Cruelty—an inspired evening of works by horror master Edgar Allan Poe—the actors are white-faced and raccoon-eyed; they trade narration, execute strange scuttling dances, and sing in discordant unison. Later, sporting carnivalesque costumes and painted-on masks, they writhe orgiastically. Joe’s willfully perverse 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. Although only half of the show really works, the company has guts and a style of its own.—AF