Review: A TELL-TALE HEART Mesmerizes Up Close at Pittsburgh Public Theater

Do you remember the pandemic? How much of that weird year, year and a half, two years of a totally alternate universe do you really recall? For instance, I'll bet many of you readers have already forgotten "theatre at home" variants like audio drama podcasts, live streams, Zoom readings and so on. I haven't. I'm a writer and composer, plus a theatre critic, so new ways of doing things will ALWAYS capture my attention. During that dark period, the Pittsburgh Public Theater ran a series of video and Zoom presentations, some original and others reimagining classic works of literature. Of those, the one that stood out to me the most at the time was Alec Silberblatt's one-man show, A Tell-Tale Heart. The presentation was simple: a man sitting in a chair, telling you a story. And the story was captivating then... but it's so much better now. 

To house this intimate production, the Public has constructed a basement man-cave beneath the O'Reilly stage. Descending via a trap, the illusion is perfect: other than the stage lights overhead, it's a completely functional and realistic seventies house, perfectly lived-in and livable. (Premium ticket holders get in a few minutes early to hang out in the rec room and have a drink with the star of the show.) The atmosphere is chummy, casual, a little slovenly in an appealing way. The set design by Jennifer J. Zeyl is totally immersive and convincing, lulling us into a sense of security that gradually seeps away. Are we in the room with a supernatural presence? A dangerous person? Or both? Are we guests or prisoners?

Based extremely loosely on a variety of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, the show initially appears to be a bull session with Perry (playwright Alec Silberblatt). Perry is a typical working-class yinzer approaching middle age. He's affable, a little scummy, a good guy to drink with and just tell stories. He's also gifted with the ability to tell when people are lying by picking up the way their heartbeats speed up when they're not telling the truth (shades of Poker Face, though this show predates it by two years). The trouble is, Perry has some things on his mind. He's been given reason to question his moral compass, and needs to unload. Perry has done a bad thing, and wants to get it off his chest. A large part of the drama- and the fun- is trying to figure out exactly what is plaguing Perry's conscience before he reveals it. The constant Poe references are both hints and red herrings.

Silberblatt is a gifted actor and writer, and he performs this show with an arrestingly realistic layer of faux autobiography. In Silberblatt's hands, under the directorial aid of Marya Sea Kaminski, the show feels sometimes like theatre, sometimes like standup, and sometimes like real life. It's an incredibly intimate experience. Very rarely in the show does the capital-T "Theatre" interject itself into the lo-fi goodness, but when it does, it's bracing; this isn't a horror story except when it is.

Immersive theatre is a relative rarity in Pittsburgh, and this kind of event, in a space custom-built for it, is basically unheard of. Please, people, get tickets to this one. You won't regret it, and maybe if we're lucky there's an immersive Alec Silberblatt Christmas show in our future.