Park Street Theatre is the venue at the center of Augustus Landor’s memory of Eliza Poe: a cold, crowded New York auditorium where the young actress’s performance overcame the discomfort and disorder around it. Recalled more than twenty years afterward, the theater is defined as much by its vividly remembered audience and stage as by the farewell performance that Landor witnessed there.

Setting and Atmosphere

Landor places himself in a fifty-cent seat in the eighth-row orchestra section on a winter evening. The theater was cold, and its galleries held shivering prostitutes; rats crossed his boot, a woman several rows behind him fed her crying baby, and a small fire began in the rear benches. He scarcely noticed these disturbances because the performance had absorbed him. The recollection preserves the venue not as a neutral backdrop but as a crowded, unruly place whose discomfort makes the attention gathered around the stage all the more striking.

Landor also associates theatrical spaces with a dense sensory memory. Recalling his long-standing enthusiasm for the theater, he evokes the wax, dust, peanut shells, and sweat-heavy wool of a New York audience. Those impressions explain how a name could return him, in an instant, to Park Street Theatre and the particular winter performance he had seen there.

Eliza Poe’s Performance

The play was Tekeli; or The Siege of Montgatz, a melodrama about Hungarian patriots. Landor remembers little of its plot, but he remembers Eliza Poe, who played Count Tekeli’s daughter. Her slight frame and thin voice initially seemed ill-suited to the strenuous part. As she performed, however, her conviction seemed to enlarge both her and the actors around her: her portly lover came to resemble the lover she envisioned, and the contrived plot took on the force of her spirit.

The audience’s response registered that change. A ripple of welcome greeted Eliza Poe’s appearances, and her death scene, in which she collapsed over her dead lover, drew outright wails. After the curtain fell, she alone was called back for an encore. Under the amber light, Landor saw more clearly the weariness in her lined face and patched elbows, and her nearly blank gaze suggested that she had momentarily lost her bearings. She nevertheless sang, standing still as the small, unadorned voice carried through the vast auditorium because the audience fell silent to hear it. She then curtsied, indicated that there would be no second encore, and began to leave.

The Farewell and Its Afterlife

As Eliza Poe walked toward the wings, she stepped backward as if caught by a sudden pull, recovered, and made the movement appear part of her farewell. Landor later understood that moment as a sign of what he had failed to recognize at the time: she was dying. The theater thus holds both the public triumph of an encore and the private physical evidence of a life nearing its end. The applause could summon her back before the curtain, but it could not restore her strength.

More than two decades later, Landor tells the story to Edgar Allan Poe, who listens intently and presses him for particulars, including the costume, the other players, the orchestra, and the song. Landor cannot remember the song. In the act of recounting the performance, Park Street Theatre returns as a place partly preserved through sensory impressions and gestures, but also marked by the limits of memory: Landor can recover the actress’s presence and final unsteady step, while the music itself has vanished.