The Raven and The Gull
“It was a dark and stormy night. . . .”
Actually it was rather cool and breezy, a fall evening surprisingly well-lit by the glow of a luminescent September moon in the year of 1849.
~
Presented in real time, the play’s story regards a matter of historical record and accurate chronology: Two actual figures, now of legend and mystery – each at a dramatic crossroads in their lives – are thrown together at the same moment in the old port city of Norfolk, Virginia.
~
The more eminent of the two is easily Edgar Allan Poe. A Virginian by early circumstances (and by his own description), he would be dying in Baltimore in less than a month. In Norfolk to deliver the last of his “Public Lectures,” at a time little-known in his storied career when it was only those gems of performance which enabled him to eke out his meager living, Poe encounters Lemuel Fentress, the fabled hermit of the abandoned Fort Norfolk.
~
After ten years of solitude at this fallen fortress he has come to consider his own, Fentress is on the verge of an enforced departure due to the impending return of the army.
~
Poe’s unplanned, nocturnal appearance at Fort Norfolk arrives as if he had fallen from the sky, while Fentress, wordless after years of the isolation he has chosen for himself, at first can only respond minimally and defensively to the dark, seemingly maddened presence that has unexpectedly descended upon his crumbling domain of ruins.
~
Ever suffering “the wounds of genteel poverty,” Poe is at this time physically and emotionally weakened. However, although completely exhausted after a lifetime of pain and frustration, Poe remains exuberantly rich in words, with this night charged by his desperate wealth of wit and works.
~
For one brief moment at this unforeseen time, their paths and affairs converge and collide with a stirring, gratifying intensity. Each in his own way, each man is an outsider, and both men are very much in need. During the course of the night’s exchange, each character gives and takes, not without flashes of humor, and each character manages to grow. Secrets grounded in historical fact (at least one revealed here for the first time) come to the fore. Like a cosmic burst within the inevitable periods of darkness in anyone’s life, a brief but illuminating experience is accomplished.
~
Their story is indeed “one rare night at old Fort Norfolk.”
| The Raven and The Gull | Available for download for $9.99 |
