The performance gets in the way of the story.

Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, this play follows a boy to boarding school, where his aspirations to be socially dominant are thwarted by a doppelgänger. Katie Hartman plays the first Edgar Allan with a coiled tension that is constantly bursting; her over-the top shouting and mannered facial expressions make the character impossible to care about. Nick Ryan is thankfully much more nuanced as the second Edgar Allan.

The show features some inventive staging, and the songs, with Hartman on ukelele and Ryan on trumpet, add musical colour, but the play lacks the narrative tension and suspense that drive Poe’s fiction.

At the Revue Stage on September 15 (8 p.m.), 16 (5 p.m.), 19 (9:55 p.m.), and 20 (5:25 p.m.)