Macabre Readings for Poelite Company

by Tony Fonseca

02/23/2007

Three Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849. Performed by David Cade. Music Composed by Roberto Barzini, and Performed by Floriad. Tales of Orpheus Productions. Copyright 2006 by David Cade. 50X2-2; 50X2-3. 2 Audio CDs.

Let me begin by stating that I was impressed with virtually every aspect of Three Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe. I especially like the literary choices made by producer and narrator David Cade. Rather than stick solely with the same usually chosen Poe pieces, he placed two standards (“The Tale-Tell Heart” and “The Raven”) on the same CD as the lesser known “Berenice,” cleverly positioning “Berenice” between the others. This means that the casual listener will end up being treated to a Poe story with which he or she may be unfamiliar. The other three pieces Cade chose for this set are “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Bells.” While none of these are what one would term lesser known works, I don’t believe that “The Masque of the Red Death” is often transformed into a spoken word piece, so I applaud that decision. Of particular interest here as well is the fact that Cade chose poetry as well as fiction, another good production decision in my book.

As far as overall production quality goes, I can without reservation state that listeners who buy this set will be treated to a very professional work. The music works well to set atmosphere, without being distracting, and the sound quality is excellent (which is not a given, by the way; there are some production “dogs” out there). Cade also avoids the overuse of distracting sound effects. While sound effects (knocking, etc.) certainly do add to a performance, too many of them simply get in the way. Kudos to Cade for that as well.

However, after listening to Three Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe, I am inclined to attempt to coin a new term for spoken word performance—Frasier Craning. This term I believe describes what can best be termed an overly affected performance, particularly in cases where such affectation and insistence on melodramatic delivery are not necessary to a production.

You heard me right. Poe’s writing relying as heavily as it does on melodrama and what has often been termed a “heightened sense of perception,” it seems hardly necessary to base an entire vocal performance of any of his tales, much less six of them, on an insistence of “acting!” (you have to imagine this spoken by Jon Lovitz’s famed “Thespian” character of Saturday Night Live to get the effect). In fact, I was unable to listen to either of these two audio CDs for more than ten minutes at a stretch before I grew weary of the vocal choices made by David Cade. Among other choices made by Cade in these recordings, there was what seemed to me an unfortunate decision to read every single tale with the same voice, using the same vocal range, character voice, and intonation. While I won’t pretend to be a Poe scholar, I think I can state with a high degree of certainty that his tales are not all narrated by the same persona. I would, for example, imagine a very deliberate and logical delivery, with a self-assured voice, for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a fairly disinterested, matter-of-fact delivery for the third person tale “The Masque of the Red Death,” a slightly nervous and tenuous voice quality for the narrator of “Berenice,” and a very, very nervous narration of “The Raven.”

Don’t get me wrong here. I know it is bad practice for a spoken word performer to too closely mimic a voice quality when various characters are involved (for example, a male reader should not do a high falsetto when reading a female character; rather, he should soften the voice and use female vocal mannerisms to indicate a female narrator). I have heard some very good narrators create varying voices, sometimes in the same work. Just recently in fact I have been exposed to two excellent examples of this practice in Bob Harper’s Twisted Rhymes performance and Will Patton’s reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (mainstream fiction, albeit it quite dark and disturbing). In both cases, the reader clearly indicated different characters from piece to piece, as well as within the same piece (this was done masterfully by Harper, who must have had some stage acting training), simply by changing vocal patterns: volume, pauses, speed of speech, slight accents, etc.

Despite my preference for a more realistic sense of vocalization for Poe’s tales, I am looking forward to seeing more in this series. In my opinion, Poe should be heard as well as read, since he had such a strong sense of the dramatic, so I applaud loudly the decision to bring his works to life this way, particularly since Cade is well known for his professional and thoughtful productions. Because I am ex-teacher of literature (I got out of the business because of the grading, not the subject), I always appreciate any gesture that results in the average person’s being exposed to the written word. I look forward to Cade’s continuance of this series (especially the recording of my personal favorite, “The Cask of Amontillado”).