CREATOR | WRITER | SOLE-PERFORMER
THE RAVEN
At THE AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. A New York City landmark across from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alba Albanese, credited as Ava Lee Scott plays Edgar Allan Poe in a one-woman show with emerging technology, and immersive theater.
The Raven included over 50 of Poe works and personal letters | In partnership with Microsoft. An official selection of the 57th New York Film Festival.
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many but few will be grieved by it.” So begins the infamous Rufus Griswold obituary of Poe, who died penniless and unhappy days after being discovered delirious in the gutter on a cold fall morning. The author’s legacy, his ghosts, and even the mysterious circumstances of his death are examined in this immersive theater experience that blends, elements of game play, cutting-edge audio technology, and first-rate storytelling.
Actors Theater of NYC is excited to announce the collaboration with Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab and the Film Society of Lincoln Center on an immersive storytelling experience that reimagines one of Poe’s seminal works – The Raven.
Over the course of 2019, Actors Theater of NYC ensemble members will perform with visionary game designers, creative technologists, experience designers, artists, directors and makers to create a prototype experience that will be staged during the NYFF’s Convergence section in 2019.
Set within a special secret location from the 1800s, The Raven will be an immersive experience that mixes storytelling, performance, and emergent technology.
170 Years after America’s literary genius tragic death, Edgar Allan Poe reveals the mysteries that plagued his life; his duel with death, his lost love, his tortured soul, his descent into madness, and the manifestation of The Raven.
BY TONY PERROTTET | SEPT 18, 2019
The most memorable moments blended the traditional and futuristic. I wandered into a tent for “Annabellee,” a multidimensional exhibit inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s last poem about a doomed young woman, to find a mysterious, elfin grotto of babbling fountains, ancient herbs and dangling crystals. Creator Ava Lee Scott put me through a “cleansing ritual,” with incense melodies wafting around me; I then put on a headset to meet an avatar for a virtual tarot reading. “Nothing will ever replace live theater,” Ms. Scott said later, when she had stepped out of character. “But technology is providing the tools to go further into the intimate experience.”
Charles Melcher, FoST’s director, sums up the appeal of immersive theater another way: “To explore beautiful sets and see stories unfold and choose how to navigate them—it brings all your senses alive. And that doesn’t get old.”
Imagine a show that has no audience, only characters and an invisible thread that guides them through the story in real-time. This is the premise that drove the storytellers behind The Raven, a first of its kind tech-empowered immersive theater experience.
The narrative chronicles the epic life of famed Gothic author Edgar Allan Poe, and weaves his fantastical works into an interactive plotline that all participants play a part in. Director Lance Weiler, actor Ava Lee Scott, writer Nick Childs, and technologist Nick Fortugno collaborated to create, as Scott puts it, “something that is beyond an immersive show, it’s an intimate human experience.”
Charles Melcher, FoST’s director, sums up the appeal of immersive theater another way: “To explore beautiful sets and see stories unfold and choose how to navigate them—it brings all your senses alive. And that doesn’t get old.”