Adobe Chapel Provides Perfect Setting For Poefest

Speaker 1: 00:00 Right out loud is hosting another PO fast at the Adobe chapel in old town starting tonight and for the next three weekends, KPBS arts reporter Beth Armando invited right out louds artistic director, Veronica Murphy and performer Travis RET Wilson into the studio and produced this preview of the show. My name is Veronica Murphy and I'm the artistic director of write out loud right out louds mission is to inspire, challenge and entertain by reading literature allowed this. October is the second year that we are producing PO Fest and PO Fest is a festival of the works of Edgar Allen Poe and we do this in partnership with the save our heritage organization. They are the managers of the Adobe chapel in old town. And if you have never been in the Adobe chapel, you are in for a big treat. We have candles lit all through the building and it just has an old creepy, spooky kind of feeling in it that makes it a perfect place to read these wonderful stories by the master of the McCobb. Speaker 1: 01:24 And in addition to performances of fabulous pieces by Poe, including the P in the pendulum Berenice, the imp of the perverse, the black cat and others. We are also doing some HP Lovecraft. We are doing an adaptation of the legend of sleepy hollow by Washington Irving. We decided that we wanted to do PO Fest because Poe is such a fabulous author, such a fabulous character and he is really the father of the mystery story and has written so many amazing pieces about the supernatural, about madness, about the mysterious. And we are very lucky to have an amazing performer who is actually an Edgar Allen Poe reenactor. His name is Travis Rhett Wilson and he will be performing on the 18th and the 19th of October. He will be performing the black cat. And here is an excerpt from Poe's masterpiece, the black cat Speaker 2: 02:42 for the most wild it most homely narrative, which I about to pen and another expect no. So they said belief, mad indeed. Would I be to expect it as a case where my or essentially is reject their own evidence, get mad at my notes, and very Speaker 3: 02:59 surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die. And today I would. And in my soul, my immediate purpose is the place before the world, the succinctly and without comment, a series of mere household events in that consequences. These events have terrified, have tortured, have destroyed me, yet I will not attempt to expand them to me. They have presented little but horror to many. They will seem less terrible than butter Oaks hereafter. Perhaps some intellects may be found, which will reduce my Phantasm through the common place. Some intellect, more calm, more logical and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive in the circumstances I detailed with all, nothing more than an ordinary succession of veteran natural causes and the effects Speaker 4: 04:01 [inaudible] Speaker 5: 04:06 [inaudible]. Speaker 3: 04:07 And this is the first stanza of everyone's favorite Poe poem. Of course, the Raven. Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary over many acquaint and curious volume of forgotten law, why did I not, uh, near the napping? Suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door, TIS some visitor. I muttered tapping at my chamber DOE only this and nothing more. Speaker 3: 04:50 My father read the Raven to me and I was just fascinated by the language of Poe and by the words he would use. And I, at the time I didn't get it, but I loved hearing it and I just started to read more of his works and I, I just was transfixed. I would think these words, why no one talks like this anymore. How come nobody talks like this? I wish people still talked like this. I want to talk like this. And so as I got older and I worked my way through, um, elementary school and, and junior high and high school, I became more fascinated and interested in Poe's works of fiction and horror and poetry and also, um, with his life. Uh, the, is this the pony, the man, it fascinates me and his, uh, struggles with madness and, and addiction and how he was able to translate that to the page and create some of these beloved works of horror. And a fiction and poetry that we've come to celebrate more than 200 years later. That was Travis Rhett Wilson and Veronica Murphy have right out loud. Pow fast opens tonight and runs Fridays and Saturdays through October at the Adobe chapel in old town.