"Remember your place. Remember who and what you are!"
The year is 1996 and wealthy industrialist Milo Manderson has built a special retreat atop Lookout Mountain to house and hide a small and very select group of friends and family (and those descriptive terms are used very loosely) from the Red Death, a hemorrhagic disease where the victim literally sweats blood before dying.
Manderson's guests are son-in-law Jack (an organic farmer who violently resents being forced to stay in the house while so many others die), daughter Doreen (who worships her father, but still manages to love Jack, which is why Milo forces Jack to stay) and Milo's fiance (and future Trophy Wife #4) Flossy. New arrivals Nils and Magda (a deaf mute) don't really count, as they are just servants.
With the doors and unbreakable windows locking the group inside the house, the view grim and the news reports even grimmer, nerves begin to fray. Jack becomes more and more insistent that he be released "to do something," while Doreen can't keep quiet about her disdain for Flossy and her jealousy at the friendship growing between her husband and her father's fiance.
Then Magda collapses while serving the bickering group dinner drinks...she has the Red Death.
As effective and brilliant as they may be, few, if any, of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre do not lend themselves to dramatic adaptation. Poe considered himself to be primarily a poet, and I think that many of his stories reflect that. The emphasis in his tales are mostly on emotion rather than any kind of dramatic complexity. His story The Masque of the Red Death really isn't a story at all, it is more of a narrative tone poem. A decadent Prince walls himself and his compatriots into a wing of his castle, to hide from the scourge of the Red Death. But the Red Death finds them anyway. Poe spends most of the story describing the various rooms in which the Prince's final masque is being held. A great deal of attention is given to a clock. No attention is given to the Prince, his guests, or any sort of connection to reality. Poe's tale is a described phantasm. A dream of Death crashing a party that attempts to forget that Death even exists. Not exactly prime ingredients for a plot driven audio play adaptation. So the adapter needs to flesh out the background, the setting, and the character's motivations...
Author George Lother (I hope I am spelling that correctly, I currently do not own a copy of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater series guide) sets his adaptation in the then (1975) distant future year of 1996, with the cause of the Red Death hinted at being pollution. The only futurist touch is the oddity of Manderson's house being able to rotate at the turn of the button. When I first heard the episode broadcast back in the early 1980s, I turned it off (big mistake) because I was wanted a more traditional take. The strange touch that Manderson has a house he can rotate with a press of a button, so it can face whichever point on the compass he so chooses, seemed silly to me at the time. Today it still seemed silly, because, after its mention in the opening, nothing is made of it. It certainly illustrates, albeit in a very ham fisted way, Manderson's need to control his environment, but it drops from the story, never mentioned again. Pity, for when Jack points out the dead animals in the farms in the foothills, or the gradually failing lights in the nearby town, Manderson does not callously turn the house around to make a "better view" for himself. Such touches would have given the barking and snarling between Jack and Milo (and later between Nils and Manderson) a sharper edge.
The play does give Flossy a nice character arc, as she goes from callous and shallow gold digger to a more thoughtful and caring woman, and Manderson and his daughter Doreen have some nice human shading. The aforementioned view of the dead animals and failing lights, and a second act news broadcast that has a television news anchorman succumbing to the disease, keeps the Red Death at the center of all conflict until its literal arrival in the third, when Manderson holds his Masquerade, and the identity of which guest is the Red Death is revealed. Yes, one of the guests is the Red Death.
While there are some obvious construction weaknesses, the play overcomes them with a nice, gloomy atmosphere, well developed characters, and a punchy moment or two of horror that make for a solid and entertaining episode.
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