Those fever-dream moments admittedly do credit to director Paata Tsikurishvili and his creative team, which includes choreographer Irina Tsikurishvili and resident dramaturge/adapter Nathan Weinberger. A vulture on a tricycle. A blizzard of cardboard boxes. A twitchy eye glaring through a giant magnifying glass. Such striking images lure us into the unhinged mind of protagonist Edgar, portrayed by Alex Mills in one of the production’s zesty performances.
Heard early on speaking lines from Poe’s story (the show includes some speech but mostly adopts the wordless-riff-on-literature mode that has won Synetic deserved acclaim), Edgar is a young man who works as a caregiver. His charge is the Old Man, who lives with dementia in a shabby home, atmospherically rendered in Daniel Pinha’s set, dominated by walls of cobwebbed, knickknack-cluttered cubbyholes.
Initially patient and affectionate, Edgar soon takes a dislike to the Old Man’s disfigured eye (resembling a vulture’s, Poe wrote), and their relationship tanks. A paintbrush with a pointy handle is involved.
Fleshing out Poe’s yarn and adding scope for the evocative movement that is the company’s specialty, Synetic’s “Tell-Tale Heart” introduces phantasmagoric vulture characters (a nod to Poe’s bird-of-prey simile) who bedevil Edgar. The black-and-red vultures (Lev Belolipetski, Kaitlyn Shifflett, Tony Amante, Josh Lucas, Zana Gankhuyag and Vato Tsikurishvili) can look arresting, especially when they conjure a nightmarish carnival complete with a carousel. Restlessly avian, the scavengers’ movements fuse comedy with menace.
Still, the drawn-out hauntings of the foul fowl feel monotonous after a while. Similarly repetitious are sequences in which the cubbyholes zoom around, although the effect is valuably disconcerting the first time it happens, helping us share in the disorientation that Edgar experiences as his sanity ebbs.
That advance of madness echoes through the modulating musical landscape, now spare, now broodingly symphonic, now droning and always just right for Poe, whom Synetic most recently channeled in 2021’s “The Madness of Poe.” (Koki Lortkipanidze is resident composer and Kavsadze, music supervisor.)
The lead performances also build engagingly. Tottering around in a ragged bathrobe (Erik Teague is costume
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Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
