STAUNTON — When Davey White first read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the two main characters — the narrator and C. Auguste Dupin — inspired him to create a play.
White is a playwright and performer who taught at Temple and Rowan universities before he and his partner moved to Staunton in 2022. The next year he founded The Off Center, an organization that creates and supports art that is, well, off center. According to the organization's website, participants will see something "askew, possibly something previously unconsidered, maybe something uncommon or even disquieting."
The Off Center gathers people to experience curious stories through theater, puppetry, literature, and storytelling.
About a year ago White, along with a group he works with in Philadelphia, traveled to Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where they collaborated with Papermoon Puppet Theatre. He was taken with the way the theatre animated its puppets.
"We all think of puppets either like children's puppets and they're animated flopping their noggins all about," White said. "Or we think about (Jim) Henson, which was brilliant, but to me it is very different than what they were doing."
What he saw in Indonesia gave life to the puppets. He was obsessed.
When he returned to Staunton, White created Edgar Allan Puppet to host a Halloween event at Poe's Place in Staunton. He had already been exposed to puppets, but between the trip to Indonesia and the Halloween show, White really got excited about the art form.
The next puppet show he did was a very abridged version of "Wuthering Heights," a performance in conjunction with The Virginia Festival of the Book at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse. It was a 30-minute performance.
His third show with puppets, and clearly the most involved, will be an adaptation of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." White wrote the adaptation. The performances will be at The Off Center Aug. 10-11 and 14-17, each evening at 7 p.m. at the theater's space inside Poe’s Place, 16 W. Beverley Street in downtown Staunton.
Tickets are available at offcenterstaunton.com .
"I just saw these two men in this sort of rotting Parisian mansion, and I was looking for a visual story," White said of the narrator and Dupin. "I'm always looking for visual stories to play with puppets and just something about the elegance and the tenderness being confronted with the barbarism of the murders. It really, really compelled me to start playing with these characters and this story."
The adaptation will feature large, fully jointed three-dimensional puppets, created by White, as well as shadow puppetry and original accordion music. The story follows Dupin, widely regarded as the first literary detective hero, as he investigates two gruesome and impossible murders. White said Poe's work certainly must have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
It explores the friendship between the young man who tells the story and the eccentric genius he invites into his home.
White first sketched out what he wanted the puppets to look like. He drew Dupin with a sweeping nose.
"It kind of feels like his soul is falling off of his face somehow," White said. "But I don't have an answer to why I made his nose that way."
White said the full-bodied puppets were probably too ambitious. Ideally they need four people to operate each, but with only four people in the cast, that isn't possible.
The show will feature the talents of Diana Black ("Underneath the Lintel" at Silk Moth Stage), Maria Leckey (a member of the band The Hot Mamas), Marisa Strickler, ("Something’s Afoot" at ShenanArts), and White.
The skeletons are wooden and fully jointed. He used rattan on top of that and covered it with hosiery and plastic wrap before adding paper mache. Once he got the puppets looking like he wanted, he painted them.
"A lot of it I'm figuring out," White said of the puppets. "A great lesson that I've taken to heart from my friend was ask the puppet what it wants to do, don't try to tell the puppet what you want it to do."
The adaptation differs some from Poe's story, including naming the narrator, who is unnamed in the short story.
"He was very important to me because he is the one that spoke with such amazement, which is really what connected me to the story in the first place," White said of Allan. "Monsieur Auguste Dupin, he's a poor but brilliant Parisian who Allan invites into his mansion. They live quite a decadent Bohemian life until they discover a news story about two impossible murders. Dupin becomes obsessed and Allan watches in wild wonder as Dupin dissects the the murder."
Black is excited about performing in the play.
"I think what intrigues me the most about it is the combination of different media that we're using," Black said. "And how creatively Davey approaches storytelling."
Black said she enjoys working with White because, while many directors claim to be collaborative, not many are. White is, she said.
"If I come and I say, 'Hey, I have an idea,' he says, 'Let's do it,'" Black said. "Even if some of it is working we will keep it. If all of it is working, we will keep that. There is no one person whose ideas seem to have a dominating edge."
When first opened, The Off Center presented an excerpt from "Oh Perilous Gravity," an original play that explores the mystery surrounding aviator Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, in conjunction with the Staunton International Women’s Day celebration.
"The Greatest Weakness Story Slap," a community story-telling event, was held in May of that year. Since then they have presented a workshop reading of "Dad’s Original Tangy BBQ Sauce;" three iterations of An Evening with Edgar Allan Puppet; Bookish Black History, a community poem drawing inspiration from Black authors; and "Wuthering Heights."
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— Patrick Hite is a reporter at The News Leader. Story ideas and tips always welcome. Connect with Patrick (he/him/his) at phite@newsleader.com and on Instagram @hitepatrick . Subscribe to us at newsleader.com
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Staunton puppet show adapts Edgar Allan Poe short story
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