Edgar Allan Poe may be most closely associated with the cities of Richmond and Baltimore, but the better part of his final years were spent in New York City, as he struggled to make a living in the heart of the burgeoning American publishing industry. While the great writer himself hasn’t officially been spotted there since his untimely demise at age of 40 in 1849, quite a few New Yorkers could be forgiven if they’ve lately seen his ghost around town. For this past Halloween, a familiar mustachioed figure in a frock coat (with a pocket containing a flask of Virginia rye whiskey) took the stage of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater—about 20 blocks down from the spot where “The Raven” was composed—for an evening of poetry, stories and confession.

So what brought Poe back after all this time? MORELLA-like mysticism? An event planner in league with the devil? Try making an inquiry with the same team who’ve been responsible for cinematically reanimating the work of another horror literary legend, H.P. Lovecraft. Since 2009, actor Jeffrey Combs and director Stuart Gordon—beloved by genre fans for their work on RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, among others—have been staging NEVERMORE, a one-man play in which a visibly troubled Poe shows up for an author event, only to end up sharing far more than just his latest compositions with the audience.

Let’s flash back four hours before the most unusual book reading of the month, as Fango heads over to the Walter Reade for a chat with Gordon and Combs. In fear of having misremembered the exact time selected in a brief conversation the night before, this writer arrives an hour earlier than expected (“Groooupie,” teases Combs) and finds the duo in the middle of preparations, but graciously willing to take a break. We sit down beneath the poster-plastered walls of the sunlit Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery to discuss the journey that has taken them from small screen to Los Angeles’ Steve Allen Theater and now here, for the New York debut of a performance that the Los Angeles Times called “so full-blown [Combs] does not seem to be so much playing Poe as channeling him.”

“I wouldn’t say I was a Poe fan in the ‘fanatic’ sense of the word,” Combs says, “but I always enjoyed his material. That’s the great thing about Poe—every kid in America is exposed to him, and even if they’re in the doldrums about the other things they’re exposed to in school, once Poe comes along, their interest is piqued. Because there’s something about Poe that speaks to people. He’s a great communicator, and breaks through all sorts of barriers. He doesn’t speak down or above people. He’s just the voice of America, I think.”

“There’s also the sense,” Gordon adds, “of what he called ‘the imp of the perverse,’ which was the idea that inside of each of us there is this little devil that wants us to do bad things. And, just when things are going really well, wants to mess everything up, makes us do things that will wreck everything. And that was kind of what Poe’s life was like. He could be his own worst enemy. Because of that, he lived in poverty his entire life, pretty much. But I think that’s one of the reasons why we find him so interesting. In all of us, we have that tendency, too. We can relate to that. This guy—his flaws are very human.

“Jeffrey at one point said to me that he was thinking he would like to play [Poe], and I said, ‘Hmm, that’s a good idea.’ My daughter is a high-school English teacher, and every year I go to her class on Halloween and talk about Poe. One of these times—this was a few years back—I read them ‘The Black Cat.’ And it scared the crap out of them. I thought, suddenly, you could take this story and make Poe the protagonist, because it’s all told in the first person. And the guy in the story has a drinking problem—you know, it’s about a guy who is normally very nice to his pets, unless he gets drunk, and then he does terrible things to them. And so I thought, ‘Why don’t we make that Poe?’ ”

That idea resulted in THE BLACK CAT, which aired as an episode of the MASTERS OF HORROR anthology TV series in 2007. “MASTERS OF HORROR had begun,” Gordon explains, “and I came to Jeffrey and said, ‘What about playing Poe in this episode?’ I talked to Dennis Paoli, my writing partner, and we started working on it. And you know, it worked out really well.”

Eerily well, in fact. Even Gordon himself was amazed by what turned out to be the actor’s uncanny resemblance to the few surviving portraits and daguerreotypes of the author. “When he became Poe, and I was working with him, I had this feeling that I was really hanging out with Poe. It wasn’t Jeffrey. It didn’t look like Jeffrey, didn’t sound like Jeffrey—it was Poe! And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could share this with an audience? Let an audience be in the presence of Edgar Allan Poe for an hour and a half?”

That led Gordon and Paoli away from the realm of fiction and back to Poe’s original words—especially his more personally revealing essays and letters—to draft the piece that became NEVERMORE. Once completed, it didn’t take long for Gordon to find the perfect venue. “I had gotten to be friends with the guy who runs [The Steve Allen Theater], Amit Itelman.”

“We’d done some events there,” Combs says, “like screenings of RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, so he kind of knew us and our vibe. I said, ‘What about this idea?’ and kind of explained it to him. And he said, ‘Great, let’s do it.’ We originally scheduled it for a four-week run. We opened in July 2009, because that was Poe’s bicentennial year, and so it was sort of our way of celebrating his birthday.”

Those four weeks stretched out into six months. “It was really great,” says Gordon, “because it seems like sort of a hard sell to get an audience to sit and listen to poetry for 90 minutes. But the fact that it’s Poe, I think, changes everything, because Poe is so unpredictable a character. What you think is gonna be just a simple recital, of course turns out to be a train wreck. And that’s, I believe, what kept the audiences coming back. The thing that’s also great about the show is that since we are recreating a recital, the audience are really characters in the story as well. Poe can respond to them. So you’re in the same room with him. It’s not like there’s an imaginary fourth wall between you and Poe.”

That interplay was conceived from the beginning as a possibility, but the combined forces of Combs and an enthusiastic audience took it to some surprising levels. “The thing that was really great,” Gordon says, “was watching Jeffrey develop it and get to do more and more with that interaction. And sometimes it would get to be really pretty…”

“Sometimes it gets a little out of control,” says Combs, staring off at a faraway point on the floor.

Out of control?

Gordon chuckles as Combs explains, “Oh, it’s just, sometimes some audience members maybe aren’t quite right in the head…”

“There are a type of people who, like, come and pat him on the back and say, ‘Come on, take it easy, it’s all right.’ ”

“The other night, I leaned on some guy, and I turned to him and said, ‘Who…who are you?’ And he patted me and said [in a reassuring voice], ‘A friend.’ ”

“People feel, when they’re watching the show,” Gordon says, “that they need to do an intervention.”

“They need to help.”

NEVERMORE has undergone additional alterations since its opening night, beyond those wreaked by overly involved audience members. “It’s still changing,” Gordon says, and Combs agrees, “Yes, it’s always somewhat different. It’s fairly consistent, yet at the same time, there’s room for play on my part. I’m still discovering levels that I wouldn’t have thought, and it only goes back to how brilliant Poe is. Because, for instance, I read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in the piece, and I’m still discovering amazing things about this apparently simple story—but it’s not, there are so many jumps and contrasts between madness and lucidity, and logic and irrationality, and high and low and fear and exaltation. It truly personifies all the things Poe talks about that makes a good story. And I’m still learning.”

With so many levels to explore, Combs still finds himself challenged by the role. “It takes a little delving on my part. It takes a lot out of me, to get to a place of…actually manic-depressiveness, I mean, high exaltation and low melancholy. It takes a toll. And I know that when I was really running this show, it was very tough. And now I have a new challenge, where I do it maybe once, twice a month or something, and it’s zeroing down into that zone, and it’s a different test. It’s like running a marathon when I’m done. Not only physically, but emotionally. It’s pretty raw.” “He’s covered with sweat!” Gordon adds.

Besides the emotional and physical toll NEVERMORE exacts, the performance also requires a nightly stint in the makeup chair to complete Combs’ transformation into Poe. “Really, it’s quite simple, but more complex than you’d think,” the actor says. “When we did THE BLACK CAT, KNB EFX were on board, and they took a mold of my little button nose, and created Poe’s nose, and a wig. That was basically it. Once a couple of years went by and we started getting serious about the live show, I called KNB and said, ‘Do you guys still have that mold?’ And they rummaged around for a few days and said, ‘Yeah, we found it on our shelf, you can have it.’ ”

When asked if he applies his own makeup, as Hal Holbrook is said to do for his one-man show MARK TWAIN TONIGHT!, Combs immediately interrupts, “No, it’s impossible! It’s a silicone nose, very film-quality, and there are really many steps in making it so it blends in—and stays on! There are long periods where I have to keep my eyes closed in order to do it. So putting it on myself would be a comedy. We always travel with a makeup person who comes through for me and helps me out.”

“And there has to be a nose creator for every performance!” says Gordon.

“Yeah, because they’re not reusable.”

Beyond this performance and the LA shows, Combs and Gordon have brought NEVERMORE to a number of other locations, including Montreal’s Fantasia film festival and Baltimore, where it was performed in the church that stands beside Poe’s final resting place. This may not be the last time it comes to New York, either, since Gordon says an off-Broadway run is definitely one of their long-term goals. “That would be fantastic. My feeling is that Jeffrey’s performance is of the same caliber as Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain. It’s something that really needs to be seen by mass audiences.”

When not working on NEVERMORE, both Combs and Gordon are busy on other projects—Gordon on RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL, a stage adaptation (also at the Steve Allen Theater) that he hopes to bring to New York within the next year, Combs on two films called MOTIVATIONAL GROWTH and WOULD YOU RATHER, as well as regular voiceover work on the animated series TRANSFORMERS: PRIME. And yet something keeps bringing them back to each other as creative collaborators, a partnership that has lasted 26 years and counting.

“I think it’s because Jeffrey is still constantly surprising me,” Gordon muses. “I never know what he’s going to do next.”

Combs makes an exaggerated show of patting his side. “Well, I have a gun in my pocket…”

Both laugh. “See, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second!” says Gordon. “And he’s such a chameleon, he can be anybody.”

“Stu is incredibly loyal to actors,” Combs adds. “Once he finds actors that he can work with, and push around…”

Does Combs feel pushed around?

“No! You know, I joke.”

Gordon leans over. “I think the answer is yes.”

“Yes! No! No! Yes! No… You know, he keeps coming back to them. Some directors are like that, and others are constantly moving on.”

“Although I think a lot of directors have their own little ensembles, like Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro. There’s always somebody you sort of glom onto, like this is your guy. And so…this is my guy!”

“It’s been good,” says Combs.

If Monday night’s several-minute standing ovation is any indication, that’s a sentiment shared by the theatergoers of New York City as well.

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