The art of storytelling

SPRINGFIELD — It’s a tale he’s been telling most of his life.

“I’ve been telling this story longer than I can believe,” Christopher Leebrick told the small audience who came to hear him tell Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” on Saturday at the Springfield Public Library. “And one of the things I love about it is it’s filled with irony.”

When October rolls around, and Halloween is just a couple of weeks away, Leebrick, a 1980 South Eugene High School graduate who in 1992 co-founded Eugene’s Lord Leebrick Theatre Company, now Oregon Contemporary Theatre, is all about Poe.

And it’s always a bit of a workout for the 53-year-old, a trained and talented actor who now lives with his family in West Linn and has been making a living as a national award-winning storyteller for about a decade.

“In fact, that’s one of the reasons that every October, when this starts up for me, my wife always says I’m back on the ‘Edgar Allan Poe Weight-Loss Plan,’ ” Leebrick joked with the audience of about 15, after his 15-minute performance of the famous short story by Poe (1809-1849). “Because every time I tell that, I burn about 1,000 calories.”

Leebrick’s visit to the library was part of its “A Year of Stories” program, said Emily David, the Springfield Public Library’s youth and adult services associate manager. With a $1,500 grant from the Lane County Cultural Coalition, it includes monthly stories, five of them from professional storytellers such as Leebrick.

Leebrick has been telling stories since he took a Beginning Storytelling class at Eugene’s Roosevelt Junior High School at age 13 in 1975.

One of the first stories he memorized? Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a terrifying story published in 1843 by the Baltimore writer.

It’s told by an unnamed narrator, who describes a murder he has committed, the killing and dismembering of an old man with a filmy, “vulture eye.” He hides the body parts under the floorboards of the home they presumably share. But the narrator still can hear the beating of the old man’s heart, or so he thinks.

The story is not for those younger than 12, Leebrick said, and he told the library so. Yet, sitting in the first row on Saturday, with his father, was 8-year-old Zack Barnhart of Springfield.

That concerned Leebrick, who does about 100 to 120 shows a year, mostly in the Northwest, but who also has performed across the nation, as well as in France and Australia.

“How old is this guy?” he asked Zack’s dad, Jason Barnhart, 39, who was holding a copy of an old book Zack had just checked out at the library, “Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.”

They’d been reading the first one, yes, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

When Jason Barnhart said Zack was 8, Leebrick cautioned what the story was about, and said it would be OK if he could sit still.

Zack not only got through that, with many gleeful looks upon his face, he also heard Leebrick tell his “Skeleton Woman” story and “the spookiest story I know” — about a woman with a ’60s beehive hairdo filled with black widow spiders.

Was Zack scared?

“Um, a little bit,” he said afterward, a Batman hat on his head. “It was the most awesome,” he said of the Poe tale. “It got me started for Halloween.”

As he discussed the many ironies in the famous story with audience members, Leebrick, whose parents, Dick and Sandy Leebrick of Eugene, were in the audience, asked to whom they thought the narrator speaks?

“I think it’s his father,” said Karen Januszewski, of Springfield.

“Well, you can create that,” Leebrick said, “but there’s no textual indication. Sometimes, when we write stories, we think, ‘I’ve got to tell the audience everything.’ No, you don’t have to tell them everything. Leave mystery in there. Poe was the most awesome at that.”

Leebrick was his usual intense and animated self as he moved around the room, his eyes wide, his long black hair as wild as a madman’s.

“Oh, god! What could I do!?” he screamed, describing the ceaseless, beating heart beneath the floorboards. “I foamed! I raved! I swore!

“I swung the chair upon which I’d been sitting,” he said, swirling his arms wildly in the air, “and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose overall and continually increased, and grew louder and louder,” he said, throwing his arms in the air, “and AHHHHH! ….

“And still, the men sat pleasantly and smiled,” he said, referring to two police officers who have come to investigate but do not hear what the narrator hears.

“Was it possible they heard not? Oh, mighty god — no, no! Here, here!” he screamed, slapping his hand on the carpet and then pointing downward.

“It is the beating of his hideous heart.”