Edgar Perry, The Coldharts, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Edgar Perry (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I presume that everyone present has heard of me,” says the tense little swaggerer with the carnivorous smile who stands before us.

Yes, actually, we have. With Edgar Perry, the Brooklyn duo The Coldharts, Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan) bring the Fringe the final instalment of their gothic trilogy devoted to the eerie interface between the strange haunted life of horrormeister Edgar Allan Poe and his strange haunted stories.

The premise on which all three “minimalist musicals”get their shivers is double-ness, dark and light, pursuit by a relentless doppelganger. Poe’s unnerving story William Wilson is the inspiration. In Edgar Allan, precocious young Edgar discovers, on his first day at boarding school, that his plans for group domination are thwarted by a rival — a boy with the same name and equally formidable gifts. In Eddie Poe, the teenage Edgar is off to the University of Virginia, lured by his double — or is it the other way around? — into ruinous dissolution.

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And now, in Edgar Perry, the minimalist weirdness continues. Booted out by his rich guardian, facing destitution and devastated by the loss of his only friend (a Burmese orangutan named Berenice, shades of The Murders in the Rue Morgue), Edgar undertakes a self-reinvention. He’s still haunted by his mysterious hoarse-voiced rival, who cannot save him from his worst impulses. He enlists in the American army, home of a lot of people’s worst impulses, a renamed super-being anticipating a meteoric rise to the top. And he sings a song of context that starts with the Trojan War.    

Edgar retains his manic not to say mad glitter in Katie Hartman’s performance. He snatches up a ukulele from time to time to sing very odd, un-metred, songs of mental disturbance. Edgar’s dreams apparently do not include leading roles in pop musicals.

Despite the routines of the military world and the tug-of-war with his double, played gravely by Nick Ryan (who also takes on a variety of roles in the story), Edgar continues to slide into sinister friction with his world. A macabre incarnation as an engineer-cum- landscape gardener is a sort of hallucination turned into a nightmare. Murderous struggles in the dark ensue. And the bare-stage theatricality of the production on a dark empty stage, with shadow-play behind a curtain (that’s where we meet Berenice) and hand-held lights, adds to the creepiness.

Asking a show about galloping madness to cohere has its contradictions, I realize. But with its multiple characters, expository annotations, and scattered activity onstage, I find Edgar Perry unravels in a way that doesn’t quite command attention and galvanize unease the way the first two shows do. But having said that, it’s a pleasure to welcome the Coldharts and their distinctive vision and theatrical ingenuity back to the Fringe. They are in a class of their own.