By Ashley Marinelli
Several years ago, I read a book that mentioned how much fun Edgar Allan Poe was at parties. How he loved to make people laugh, and never passed up the opportunity for a practical joke. This did not seem like the dark and brooding Edgar Allan Poe I had read about in school, and I wondered what else I had been missing. So I went digging through the historical record, and I was shocked by what I found.
What struck me most, however, is the amount of women involved in Poe’s story. Smart, capable women who, even when they are mentioned in the historical record, are painted as mere accessories to Poe’s genius, rather than fully realized people in their own right, with their own significant contributions to history.
That got me thinking.
I wanted to offer a new perspective on the mostly male-tended historical record; I wondered what this story would look like if we put it through a female lens. So, I gathered an all-female team and we started creating. What has come out the other side has surprised us all, and made us question the way history comes down to us in the first place.
Though our characters lived on the east coast of the USA during the mid-19th century, they feel incredibly contemporary, especially in their individual quests for early American celebrity, their polarized political opinions, and their struggles with mental health. Though we think of these as modern problems, they aren’t at all. The roots go way back to the days before our country ever experienced a Civil War, and probably way before.

With Projection Mapping technology finally able to create the optical illusion of performers morphing in real time, and scenery growing and changing around our eyes, it is the perfect time to adapt this story about truth and lies, fiction and non-fiction, fact and fancy.
With the help of these new methodologies, we are able to create magical realism in real time, and make our audience question whether they are watching a live or digital performer, and otherwise fool, bewitch and trick the senses, making for a wholly unique and otherworldly theatrical experience.

This isn't simply goodwill, or performative inclusivity. It's really about using performers' unique abilities and/or differently-abled bodies to enhance our show and challenge us to explore new, and possibly better ways of making creative work. and provide us with a more layered and complex creative process.
For example, our show has a series of non-verbal characters which speak a detailed physical language all their own. The idea struck us that, not only would dancers from the Deaf/Hard of Hearing/ASL-using community be particularly suited to help us create this wholly new physical language (complete with grammar, syntax and dialect), but would also be the type of performers that would bring layers of nuance and reality to these characters. Therefore, we are currently working with Deaf community advocate, sign language interpreter and performer Brandon Kazen-Mattox to employ people from the signing community as creative consultants and performers.