Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor –

San Antonio playwright and actor Derek Berlin woke up one morning with a clear sense that he should write about Edgar Allan Poe.

“I follow my instincts, I allow things to come to me,” said Berlin, who proceeded to do just that – write a one-man show about the legendary author’s life. Titled “An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe: The Man, The Myth, The Legend,” the play is currently playing at the Overtime Theater through July 27.

In the play, Poe speaks to his listeners from Purgatory where he is reviewing and thinking about his life. It was not an easy one. His biological father left the family when he was a baby and a year later his mother died. Baby Edgar was adopted by a respectable couple in Richmond, VA, but, as he grew older, he and his father fought a great deal as Poe accumulated debts, gambled, enlisted in the Army, failed at West Point, and tried to find a place for himself in the literary world of his time.  In that world, he antagonized quite a few people, a fact reflected in his obituaries and articles written after his death in 1849 at the age of 40.

“I like to choose dysfunctional characters and then try to understand the complexity of their lives,” noted Berlin. I came to like him even though he was pompous, rude and arrogant, though brilliant. But inside, he was just a damaged little boy.”

Berlin spent a year researching Poe’s life and work. What surprised him the most was the writer’s self-destructive behavior? “He was a masochist,” noted Berlin. “He would provoke a big guy and would end up beaten up. It was difficult for me to learn all of this, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

The idea behind the play was to rehabilitate Poe’s reputation as a human being. “After his death, people tried to discredit him, all of his contemporaries. I wanted people today to see him as a human being, not a caricature, to see him as a real person,” said Berlin.

“An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe”; Fridays-Saturdays July 12, 13,19, 20, 26, 27 AT 8 p.m.; Sunday July 14 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, July 21 at 7 p.m.; Overtime Theater, 5409 Bandera Rd., Ste. 205, 78238; tickets $15, http://theovertimetheater.org’ 210-577-7562