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To celebrate the bicentennial of Poe’s birth, the critically acclaimed Radiotheatre is performing an ongoing series entitled SUNDAYS WITH POE, currently running through April 26 at 2 p.m. on the last Sunday of each month at Manhattan’s Under St. Mark’s (94 St. Mark’s Place). Each show presents three to four stories by the master essayed by the unique company, which uses traditional storytelling techniques along with music and sound effects to stimulate the audience’s imagination, much like the radio shows of old. Radiotheatre founder and 30-year theater veteran Dan Bianchi enthusiastically tells Fango, “I’ve had a bust of Poe on my shelf for the past 35 years. I guess he’s not only considered the father of the detective story, but the originator of psychological horror and even an early inventor of science fiction. Poe’s profound influence upon writers, artists and filmmakers spans centuries. I love to write psychological horror, but it’s hard to be original, since Poe did it all 170 years ago.”

SUNDAYS features many of Poe’s most famous tales, of all sizes. “I like the longer stories from ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ to ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat,’ but ‘Berenice’ is my favorite. It’s about a man who’s haunted by a girl’s smile. Even after she leaves the room, the smile remains floating in midair, until he becomes so obsessed with it that, when she dies, he digs her up and cuts out all of her teeth and keeps them in a box on his desk.”

The schedule for SUNDAYS is as follows:

Sunday, February 22: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “Morella” and “Hop Frog”
Sunday, March 29: “The House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
Sunday, April 26: “The Premature Burial,” “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Annabel Lee”

Tickets are priced at $18 and available here.

Meanwhile, a retelling of Blackwood’s THE WENDIGO, presented by the Vagabond Theatre Ensemble, runs next month at the Medicine Show Theater in the Ensemble Studio Theater Building (549 West 42nd Street, 3rd floor). THE WENDIGO tells the story of four hunters lost in the Canadian woods who begin descending into madness while under attack by an unseen creature. This adaptation of the 1908 tale was written by Eric Sanders and directed by Matthew Hancock, who have been working on getting the project staged for almost three years. “I was originally drawn to the story after I read Penguin Classics’ book of Algernon Blackwood’s collected best works,” Sanders says. “ ‘The Wendigo’ absolutely blew me away with its sustained atmosphere of tension and its periodic strikes of terror. I loved the way Blackwood personified nature and made it something nearly malevolent and hostile to humanity. I have often worried that human beings may be no more important or meaningful in the universal scheme of things than any other living—or non-living—thing, and ‘The Wendigo’ takes those natural human insecurities and pushes them to their extremes. I thought that I could do justice to the source material, as a playwright who is pursuing many of the same effects in theater that Blackwood was exploring in fiction.”

“After reading Eric’s adaptation, I felt he had successfully captured the tale—not simply the literal narrative, but the creeping dread and ominous menace that permeate the story,” Hancock notes.

The duo have taken all elements into account in bringing Blackwood’s prose to the stage, from the acting, directing and design to the lobby of the venue and positioning of the seats. “Horror theater is tough,” Hancock admits, adding, “What we essentially had to do was create an atmosphere where something horrible or scary can happen. From the beginning, we’ve been interested in building a world that is strange and unnerving, a world where the wendigo can exist.”

Sanders agrees: “The key to pulling off THE WENDIGO is making its concept tangible for an audience—putting them directly into the world and mindset where they are forced to confront their own smallness as human beings and reconcile that realization with their own sense of security.”

THE WENDIGO runs Feb. 5-28, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m. with Sunday matinees Feb. 8 and 22 at 3 p.m. and special performances Monday, Feb. 9 and Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 and available here or by calling (212) 868-4444. You can find more information about both productions at their respective websites linked above.