Edgar Allan Poe's death — he was found unconscious on the street in Baltimore and died shortly thereafter — has endlessly fascinated, partly because it was a medical mystery (alcoholism? epilepsy? drug addiction?), partly because Poe's poems and stories are so death-obsessed, and partly because he was a famous literary figure whose end was grotesque and pathetic. Now, adding to a century of morbid speculation is Thaddeus Phillips' remarkable show Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, the last Live Arts show of the festival.

This show begs and beggars description; it is at once high Romanticism — the impassioned creative soul in torment in a bourgeois world, defeated by disease and money — and extreme avant-garde, a new genre they are calling "action opera," filled with mysterious and often gorgeous effects, both aural and visual.

The show begins with a uniformed National Park guard (Jeremy Wilhelm) who announces upcoming events at the Poe House; he then bursts into song, a full-throated operatic baritone. He will sing Poe's letters — obsessively written to his aunt/mother-in-law — as a narrative commentary on events enacted onstage.

The superb Geoff Sobelle plays Poe in his last three days, haunted by Virginia (Charlotte Ford), Poe's dead child bride. He gets on and off trains, paces up and down streets, delivers lectures and recitations. "The Raven," indelibly imprinted in all memories in the Western world, continues independently as a voice-over, freeing Poe, in the midst of a public performance, to pursue other dreams. Virginia sings the almost-as-indelibly-imprinted Poe poem, "Annabelle Lee," but she sings it in French and while flying at the top of the stage. The original music is by The Wilhelm Brothers, who also perform on an impressive array of instruments, including a music-of-the-spheres bowed piano. Ford's hand becomes a bird in frenzied flight. There is a Neil Diamond entr'acte. There's all kinds of stuff to amuse and amaze, not the least of which is learning that Poe's last work, "Eureka," is a theory of an expanding universe, written more than a hundred years before physicists thought the same thought. Eureka, indeed.