Thaddeus Phillips is many things – performance artist, actor, magician, tap dancer and puppeteer.
The guy’s, well, touched, creatively speaking. The 1994 Colorado College grad performed a one-man “Tempest” in a kiddie pool and a “Henry V” with toy soldiers. He’s taken on terrorism in a miniaturized desert, and he performed an entire show in Spanish in which he was a Bogotá doorman interacting with real-life Colombian soap stars portraying the tenants via videotape.
There’s little Phillips has not done in building his international résumé as one of the most innovative, accessible, and downright fun experimental artists anywhere. He has dazzled audiences in London, Prague, Havana and Berlin, and become a darling of the New York and Philadelphia fringe circuits.
But Phillips has never before been a director – at least not of something with him not in it. And he did not come willingly to this new role.
“I was fired from my own play,” Phillips said with a laugh. Well, he didn’t so much get fired as replace himself.
The new piece, Phillips’ largest technological undertaking to date, is called “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace,” which plays tonight and Saturday at Colorado College. It speculates on the legendary mysterious 10 days leading up to the death of Edgar Allan Poe. How the missing master of the macabre finally turned up unconscious, near death, on a Baltimore street has ignited the imaginations of many since his death in 1849.
“They were very bizarre circumstances,” said Phillips. “He would disappear for five days at a time and end up in the middle of a forest. At one point he was found completely disoriented on a train. When he was found for the last time, he was wearing burlap pants, a ripped shirt, a straw hat and his mustache was shaved.
“I mean, what the heck? The mystery is completely fascinating.”
Phillips has developed seven wildly varying incarnations of “Red-Eye,” but never fully staged one until his stepfather recommended he reconnect with Colorado College classmate Jeremy Wilhelm, who said yes, under two conditions.
“He insisted I also bring in his brother David to do the music. And that I not be in it. So I basically got fired,” Phillips said. “But it was great. It’s a lot easier directing when you’re not in it, and the guy we got to do Poe is way better than me anyway.”
The pair recruited Geoff Sobelle, a celebrated actor on the New York fringe circuit, to play Poe. Jeremy plays the narrator, a modern Park Service ranger.
The play is being staged as a psychedelic “action opera,” with a distinctively cinematic quality that requires a proscenium theater with fly space. That makes “Red-Eye” Phillips’ first creation that must be staged in a traditional theater. The lighting designer was recruited from the Philadelphia Opera Company.
“Believe me, it’s been really great to work in all these alternative spaces around the world, but finally you’re like … I want to work in a real theater,”‘ Phillips said. “But Poe’s parents were actors, so it all kind of fits in a weird way. And the Poe House in Philadelphia is under the jurisdiction of the Park Service, so that’s why the narrator is a ranger.”
Phillips said the artistic goal is to open up the idea of who Poe really was. “He didn’t just write horror stories,” Phillips said. “He wrote an essay called ‘Eureka’ with this whole theory about the interconnectedness of the universe. He felt that was his most important work – and no one has ever heard of it.”
Poe is depicted as schizophrenic who hears something on the train and goes insane. He goes through the wrong door, down the wrong street, and off on an existential adventure “The Twilight Zone” could never imagine.
“The main point is about the struggle of being an artist in the United States and how the whole system of making things and selling things and progress steamrolls over someone like Poe,” Phillips said. “He died in 1849, the same year as the Gold Rush. So while everyone else was going West looking for gold, Poe went off looking for himself. He was mining into the human psyche.”
If it sounds like you have to see it to believe it, you’re right.
“The goal is always striving to make something that the audience has never seen before and will remember forever,” he said. “That’s a really high goal, but that’s good because it will take forever to get there.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Red-Eye to Havre de Grace”
EXPERIMENTAL THEATER | Directed by Thaddeus Phillips | Starring Geoff Sobelle, Jeremy Wilhelm and Courtney King | Armstrong Theatre, 14 E. Cache la Poudre St. on the Colorado College campus | THROUGH SATURDAY | 7:30 p.m. tonight and Saturday |$5-$15 | 719-389-6607
