POE: A Dream Within a Dream

Read the Play (minus the ending)

by: Greg Jenkins

7M / 5F + A Voice

Approximate Playing Time:  1 hour, 45 minutes

Equal parts brilliant and troubled, Edgar Allan Poe fascinated people not only with his talent but with his erratic behavior.  Literary author and playwright Greg Jenkins reimagines certain key episodes from the final fifteen years of Poe’s life, beginning with a major clash between him and his hardheaded, practical stepfather John Allan.  Soon afterwards comes Poe’s outlandish marriage to his teenage cousin, Virginia (“Ginny”) Clemm, who inspired many of his best-known works.  We see that his young wife and his warmhearted stepmother Maria, known to him as “Muddy,” prove to be perhaps his only real sources of comfort.  His career as a magazine editor is colorful but unstable, and he butts heads with both his supervisor, Thomas White, and a journeyman writer, Morris Mattson, whose work Poe sharply criticized.  In an attempt to improve his finances, Poe seeks a position in a government customs house, but his obsession with the macabre keeps him from winning the job.  As always, he drinks excessively, a habit that marks him as one of the more literate and entertaining barflies imaginable.  Celebrity status finally comes to him with the publication of “The Raven,” but, unfortunately, he remains pinched for money.  After the death of his beloved Ginny, Poe dallies with a procession of women who are almost as eccentric as he is, and ultimately he becomes engaged to his former childhood sweetheart, now a well-to-do widow.  Life appears to be on the upswing for him, but despite the best efforts of Dr. John Moran (who serves as the play’s narrator), Poe dies at the age of forty.  Jenkins weaves a touching, often humorous but ultimately tragic tale of the short but revered life of the master poet, Edgar Allan Poe.  $20 Single Use Copyright Fee plus $60 Royalty per Performance for Amateur Theatre.  Professional Theatre Royalties Calculated on Application.