Philly Fringe 2026: Cannonball presents William Trevino’s LIGEIA

Trevino, who teaches theater and communication studies at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn, is also a Poe afficionado, as well as a 6th degree black belt and certified master instructor of the Korean martial art Soo Bahk Do.

Losing our literature?

He says that while he was growing up, it seemed like a majority of people had read Poe before starting high school: “Poe was so ubiquitous in our culture 30 years ago.” He points to The Simpsons, which parodied “The Raven” in its second season in 1990, as well as The Munsters, which often paid homage to the same poem. Inside the family’s cuckoo clock lived a raven, who frequently popped its head out to utter “Nevermore!”

But now, Trevino says things are different. Young people don’t have the same familiarity with literature, and he’s not kidding. English teachers report that students have less patience and stamina for longer, complex, or older literary texts today. Classrooms increasingly focus on short literary excerpts, summaries, or articles rather than complete books or stories, to prepare for standardized testing.

Text becomes movement

“I hope that audiences leave with a greater familiarity with Poe,” Trevino says of his new show. He uses martial arts to help tell his story. (Poe aficionados in Philly may have visited his former home, now a historic site at 7th and Spring Garden Streets.)

“I take the text of Poe, and I treat it like movement,” he says. “I use my movement vocabulary from martial arts to create a choreography, which flows along with the storytelling. Sometimes when people do movements for plays, it comes out as a reenactment of the past—just a storytelling of the plot. I try to create movement that makes the struggle of the narrator come out to life with the story.”

A key reason Trevino picked Ligeia to adapt was the richness of its plot, which, in his Fringe listing, he calls “Poe’s most haunting story.” (He has also done a one-man version of Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart.) An unnamed narrator falls in love with a beautiful, learned, and mysterious dark-haired woman named Ligeia, but he watches her become sick and die. He quickly gets married again, this time to the fair Lady Rowena, but realizes she does not love him. After a month, she, too, becomes ill and eventually dies…but seems to re-awaken as someone else. Is this truly happening? Or is the narrator seeing through a haze of opium?

It’s an “intimate and emotionally intense” show, according to the materials, with Trevino’s choreography embodying the psychological struggles of the poem’s narrator. The show is intended for ages 13 and up.