To understand the power of Edgar Oliver’s storytelling, you must first hear his voice.

Answering the phone at his New York City apartment, a famously rickety Lower East Side abode stuffed with artworks, curiosities, and ghosts, he sounds exactly the same as he does on-stage, with a dramatic, quavering lilt that falls somewhere between Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff, with maybe even a bit of Gloria Swanson thrown in. It conjures black-and-white horror movies and the faded Faulknerian glory of the South.

Hearing his voice makes it immediately obvious why the playwright, poet, and actor has such a cult following, and why, with solo shows like Helen & Edgar (his monologue about coming of age in Savannah, Georgia, with his mother and sister), he is considered one of America’s great raconteurs. Oliver seems a natural-born storyteller, so it’s interesting to hear him admit, after a long pause, that it terrifies him.

“I write for the stage and I write because I find it very difficult to communicate by speaking,” he says. “I think it had something to do with me being a writer. It doesn’t come easily to me and I really have to work at it.”

The scariest thing he’s ever had to do is perform for The Moth, an unscripted, spoken memoir project for radio and live performance. He started participating in the popular New York initiative in the late ’90s, and eventually put together some of those shorter tales into his solo show Helen & Edgar.

“I’ve written many plays about my childhood, but they’ve been fictionalized—even though they’re very accurate,” says Oliver, who’s a legend in the New York theatre community. “With The Moth it’s the truth, so it’s very frightening. When you go up there you don’t have anything memorized and you don’t know exactly what you’re going to say. It’s true, I think, that it never gets easier, although with Helen & Edgar it is scripted, so it is different and therefore easier—it’s frightening, but I’m not in mortal terror anymore.”

He admits, too, after another pause, that he enjoys aspects of performing now. “I think because I’m inherently so shy that there is a sort of safety in being on-stage. That makes it exhilarating.”

Initially, Oliver says, it was hard for him to divulge such private events from his past. Helen & Edgar, which soon comes to the Cultch’s York Theatre, tells about growing up in an old house in Savannah, one choked by ivy, where his eccentric mother kept him and his sister, Helen, isolated from the outside world. It is a haunting story, with allusions to his mother’s paranoia and obsessive-compulsive rituals and his father’s traumatic death, as well as stinging recollections about being outcasts in 1960s Georgia.

But looking back, he doesn’t consider his childhood unhappy. “I really and truthfully loved my childhood. A lot of my show might seem very dark, but I loved growing up with Mother and Helen and it was fun. I think we all three revelled in our darkness,” explains Oliver, whose mother’s accomplished paintings appear in projections throughout the show—and surround him always, he says, in his home now, along with those of his sister. “I think Savannah is a magical place and I loved that house, with its beautiful porch and back yard, surrounded by trees and vines.”

It would be unfair to divulge too much more about that childhood, as the joy of Helen & Edgar comes in listening to his tale unfurl with his idiosyncratic rhythms, intonation, and elocution. What’s key, he points out, is that he speaks from the viewpoint of himself as a child, recounting his experiences and never passing judgment on what happened.

“I do have a real sympathy for things that my mother was going through now and that I probably didn’t have any idea of at the time,” he says. “One thing I do hope in this show is I’m trying to create a portrait of Mother. And although it speaks of some dark things, I hope it is a loving portrait.…I hope and I believe that almost everyone in the audience can connect with what I’m telling and identify with it somehow.”

Helen & Edgar is at the York Theatre from next Thursday (September 29) to October 8.