Nightfall with Edgar Allan Poe
Black Cat Theatre Café
October 30, 2026
If you’ve ever asked yourself the question “I’m not mad … am I?” you may be a) due for an appointment with your therapist or b) an artist or c) possibly both. The line between creativity and insanity is a well-trodden one in philosophy and literature, from Plato through Charlotte Perkins Gilman and beyond, but few writers have expressed the horrors of that question better than Edgar Allan Poe. In Nightfall, an original adaptation of four of Poe’s works, the freshly-launched Ninth Life Theatre Company stood right at the edge of madness and never flinched.
Ninth Life is different from other theatre groups in town; it’s what’s known as a “resident company” at Black Cat Theatre Café, made up of artists affiliated with Cody Mayo Studios, whose eponymous founder is building an interconnected hub on Studio Row for pretty much anything that can happen on a stage or a set. Everyone involved with Nightfall is part of the actor training program at CMS, which means they bring a distinctive shared set of skills and priorities to the stage, even beyond the eight hours a week they rehearsed together during the six-week lead-up to this show.
The exceptional cohesion and trust that can develop through this way of working were evident throughout Nightfall. With writing and directing by Mayo and Eden Blattner that pushed the actors to their limits, plus well-developed staging and sound design that went further toward truly “immersive” than nearly any other attempt I’ve seen in Tulsa, the production created a space where it felt safe for both the actors and the audience to go all the way into this world. Under spooky ambient noise that built an atmosphere of dread-filled curiosity, even the recorded pre-show announcement worked toward this end—it finished with a terrific rendition of the Evil Laugh Turned Coughing Fit trope, letting us know we were in knowing hands.
Poe himself (Zac Farrell, a haunt-eyed, heart-wrenching live wire in all black) was the throughline and the narrator here, but the first person we saw was his love, Lenore (Olive Meadows), barefoot and gentle-faced, moving silently around Poe’s writing space. In a perfectly timed moment, she flipped through the pages of one of his notebooks alongside a delicate scale in the piano music. Her simple solo dance, choreographed by Allison Soper, created instant intrigue that shifted into a minor key as she leaned through an empty picture frame to kiss the writer, who’d just emerged out of the darkness, on the other side. Soon after, a knock at the door, and “The Raven” began the night’s full descent.
The show established a blur between imagination and reality within its first few minutes—was this vision of Lenore a memory? A fantasy from Poe’s own mind? Or was it happening in current time? Poe and the audience started out on the same uncertain footing, and Nightfall never let that sense of uncertainty lapse.