FIXATIONS : Devotee of the One-Man Poeformance : Author’s Dark Musings Inspired Santa Ana Actor and Educator to Pursue a Singular Role

Thomas Vize has the second nicest lawn on his suburban block, less verdant only than his in-laws’ lawn just across the street. There’s a wrought-iron fence, but it’s painted a glossy white, not quite giving the impression that the man who lives inside has spent much of his life with the dark musings of Edgar Allan Poe.

An actor, educator and public speaker, Vize has written nine scripts about Poe, from a music-less musical (the composer flaked out) to a one-man show in which he has acted for decades. It all springs, the comfortably graying actor says, from the fourth grade.

“The nuns in parochial school said, ‘Don’t read Poe, it’s all bloody and bad all that sort of thing.’ So of course all the kids went right out and got copies of Poe’s stuff. With the other kids it didn’t take, but with me it did. ‘A Descent Into the Maelstrom’ is pretty tough reading for a kid. I’ve never been an aficionado of horror films or anything like that, but I loved his writing.”

The poet William Carlos Williams maintained that Poe was the first true American writer, the pioneer who broke free of the mannered constraints of European letters to arrive at a new realism and sense of place. Most kids of the ‘60s, rather, know Poe as the guy whose writings allowed director Roger Corman to make movies so scary they’d give you a tummy ache. You’d never have caught the Bronte sisters writing about a guy who maniacally digs up his dead love’s grave, finds she’s still alive and then uses archaic dental tools to pull out all 32 of her teeth.

Vize prefers instead to dwell on the brilliance of the man’s poetry, citing the invention of couplets such as, “Surely that is something at my window lattice, Let me see, then, what thereat is.” And indeed, without such bold precedent would Chuck Berry have ever rhymed “Riding along in my calaboose, still trying to get her belt a-loose,” or Bob Dylan have offered “They want to put his ass in the stir/They want to pin this triple mur-der on him/He ain’t no Gentleman Jim”?

Poe could easily have been the first rock star. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, he married his 13-year-old cousin. Like Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and others, he drank himself to death. And like an abundance of heavy-metal artists, his words alternately place women on a pedestal or, along with menfolk, in the most grisly of situations.

Los Angeles native Vize--who also goes by the stage name Tommy Morgan--just kept Poe as a private pleasure until the early ‘60s, when he was moved by Hal Holbrook’s depiction of Mark Twain: “I saw his ‘Mark Twain Tonight’ and thought it was dreary, but I was impressed by him making $3,500 a performance and doing eight of them a week. I thought, ‘Hey, that’s the way to go! You don’t have to beat on doors looking for work every day.’ ”

He considered basing a one-man show on the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, a distant relative, then on Stephen Crane or Stephen Vincent Benet. A teaching associate wisely advised him: “Tommy, nobody knows those guys. Who the hell knows of Sidney Lanier?” He went on to suggest that Vize looked like Poe.

“I went straight to the downtown L.A. library and looked up every picture of him, and it was like looking in a mirror. It was kind of spooky,” Vize said.

These days, it must be noted, Vize looks about as much like Edgar Allan Poe as Ed McMahon does Elvis Presley. In a 1977 KOCE TV production of his “The Haunted Mansion: A Visit With Edgar Allan Poe,” however, he looks passably Poe as he quotes from his works and letters, and drains a decanter of watered-down Coca-Cola.

With perhaps a more salubrious liquid on hand, Poe did pretty much the same thing himself, doing readings on the lecture circuit that bouyed many literary figures of the 1800s. Though Poe needed the money, he had been reluctant to do such performances, Vize said.

“It was too much like what he’d already been doing: He never really had enough to eat, but was always getting invited to these wealthy dinner parties where he’d be expected to recite after dinner. Everyone wanted ‘The Raven,’ and after his wife passed on, the death in the poem would get him so emotionally involved that sometimes he could not even finish it, and he’d just go dashing out the door.”

At least that gave Vize a handy precedent. Once while doing his one-man show for a women’s club, “I got about two-thirds of the way through ‘The Raven’ and went absolutely blank. I couldn’t have told you my name, let alone the next line. So I just put my hand up in front of my face and said, ‘Ladies, I’m so overcome with emotion . . . and ended it there.”

Though he’s done some of his hundreds of Poe performances in professional theaters, the majority have been presented for women’s groups and on college campuses. The college shows have often been followed by master classes, in which the former speech, English and theater arts teacher would lecture and field questions.

His complete Poeformance is nearly two hours, though he cuts it down to a “psychiatrist’s hour” of 50 minutes for the women’s clubs. Along with dozens of stage appearances in stock works, Vize appeared in many vintage TV shows, including “Sea Hunt” as a marine fireman, “Perry Mason” as a peeping tom, “Highway Patrol” as a gas attendant and “Divorce Court.” Like many bit actors, he is in the habit of referring to stars with the most familiar of nicknames: Vinnie Price; Lloyd (Bud) Bridges; Jimmy Whitmore.

Vize has quite a gift for digression, which does yield some gems, such as his recollection of shooting a “Highway Patrol” episode with Broderick Crawford: “We were on location at a gas station out in Ventura County. We’re shooting the scene, I come up to the car, put my hand on the open window to talk to him, and look down and ruined the scene with a double-take when I saw that Brod Crawford had his shoes off and was holding an open bottle of vodka between his feet. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Brod was a big, big drinker.”

His full-cast play of Poe that he hopes to see staged some day is based on Poe’s final drinks, on his mystery bender that was the last five days of his life.

Vize said, “He disappeared. He left Richmond to go to Baltimore, and that was the last anybody saw of him until he was discovered in the gutter. Those five days are a complete and absolute blank, so those were the five days I wrote about, so I could have anything happen that I wanted.”

Though Vize may make some special exceptions, he has pretty much hung up his cape when it comes to performing as Poe. He’d rather get his play staged and believes that the world is overcrowded with one-man tribute shows.

Vize is incensed that there’s someone on the East Coast also doing Poe. “I hear he’s about 75 years old, with snow-white hair (Vize doesn’t care to discuss his own age). He charged the Poe Museum in Baltimore $1,800 (Vize’s best haul was $875) and was pretending to sniff coke and smoke hash onstage, presenting Poe as a narcotics addict, which he wasn’t. That had nothing to do with Poe at all,” he said bitterly.