Theatre, literature & history meet haunted house genre; runs through Nov. 1

Brat Productions commemorates the 160th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death on Thursday, October 7th with the world premiere of Haunted Poe. This unique, theatrical take on a Halloween tradition – the haunted house – offers an immersive, multisensory experience devoted to Poe’s peculiar genius.

Costumes, masks, puppets, hidden passageways, magic lanterns, optical illusions, music and video – all created by an award-winning team of theatre artists, designers and actors – serve to take Poe’s themes of madness, suspense and the supernatural to a new level.

Haunted Poe opens on October 7 and runs through November 1, 2009 at 38 Jackson Street in Philadelphia. Timed tickets, ranging from $15 – $25, are available at www.hauntedpoe.com or 1-800-838-3006. The show is recommended for ages 13 and up.

Housed in a 10,000 square foot warehouse in South Philadelphia, Haunted Poe is grounded in some of the best-known and most chilling works ever written, including “The Tell-tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

While the show utilizes the form of a haunted house and offers surprises and scares as audiences move from room to room and down twisting hallways, Haunted Poe is a theatrical project that differs from typical commercial haunted attractions as it weaves narrative with thrills to create a unique interactive storytelling experience for the audience.

This project involves a wide variety of artists, from veteran theater artists like director Madi Distefano and dramaturge Greg Giovanni, to Edgar Allan Poe consultant Edward Pettit, well-known magician Matt Holtzclaw, sound and music composer Michael Kiley, costume designer Alisa Sickora Kleckner, Barrymore Award-winning lighting designer John Stephen Hoey, and Brad Helm, former designer and technical director for Eastern State Penitentiary’s Terror Behind the Walls.

The cast of about 30 features many notable Philadelphia actors, including Barrymore award-winner Kim Carson, Dave Johnson, Dallas Drummond and Nate Holt as three different versions of Poe, Patricia Bartlett, Greg Giovanni, Bruce Graham, David Howey, Matt Lorenz, and more.

Haunted Poe’s performance dates also coincide with the Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial, scheduled for October 8–10 at the Hyatt Regency at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. Poe flourished in Philadelphia in the early 1840s, and he wrote his most well-known works while living in the city. The six years Poe spent living in Philadelphia were the most productive and successful of his career, writing the stories we still read today, like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” and he began writing his masterpiece “The Raven” while living in Philadelphia.

Brat Production’s Haunted Poe has been funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative with additional funding from the Marketing Innovation Program. Additional support for Haunted Poe comes from the Independence Foundation; the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust “A” as recommended by Carole Haas Gravagno, and “B” as recommended by Leonard C. Haas; the Samuel S. Fels Fund; and the William Penn Foundation.

About Brat Productions
Founded in 1996, Brat Productions is committed to “thinking outside the proscenium” with performance pieces that are surprising and incendiary, entertaining and unsettling. Brat’s mission is to create an audience of the future by producing theatre that breaks the rules; theatre that tests conventions; theatre that rocks! Over the years, Brat has established itself as Philadelphia’s premier avant-garde theatre and is known for using unusual performance venues to enhance original and noteworthy productions. Its numerous productions have included Three Chord Fiction, winner of the Ted and Stevie Wolf Barrymore Award for New Approaches to Collaboration, A 24-Hour The Bald Soprano, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant and Eye-95: Retarred.