Lots of people think they know Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ But what most of them really know is Roger Corman’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ the 1960 film adaptation that starred Vincent Price as the creepy and unsteady doomed Roderick Usher. Poe’s original 1840s short story is an eerie Gothic-style narrative that piles up images of ‘gray sedge … ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows’ as he elaborates on a tale of the demise of the last members of the doomed Usher family. Poe’s strength is his ability at setting scene and mood, not drama. From beginning to end, it’s a slow saunter down the winding staircase of malignancy and decay to its concluding shock of horror. Local playwright Michael McGovern is the latest artist to take up the challenge of dramatizing the final days of Roderick and Madeline and their family’s mansion. He opens with Thomas giving a lecture on the rituals of burial and proper entombment, setting us up for what will follow. Expanding the cast to four, McGovern adds a wife, Valerie Winters, who accompanies her husband, Thomas, on a visit to his old school friend, Roderick. Roderick suffers from heightened sensitivity that makes touch and sound painful. Conversely, his sister Madeline is losing her senses and sensitivity. The house is developing some alarming cracks, creaks and symptoms of its own wasting disease, made vivid here through some very forceful sound effects. In an interview, McGovern said he wanted to probe the psychological side of the tale with a ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ spin on the story. He overlays Poe’s story with details of incest succumbed to and resisted, adds a variety of sexual games physical as well as mental, refers to a basement full of torture instruments and suggests some creative uses for a feather duster. But he never really probes below surface actions to what drives anyone. Slowly paced, lugubrious and obscure, it adds little to our understanding of the Ushers or their visitors. Have the Winters been invited so the Ushers can enjoy a last – or first – sexual fling, or are there deeper matters at work here• Is Madeline’s deterioration real or imagined• Jay Smith’s Roderick and Deborah Casciani’s Madeline don’t give us a clue. Why does no one investigate the sounds coming from the undercroft• What keeps Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys’ Valerie and Mike Murray’s Thomas from fleeing at the first opportunity• For all its sexual talk, what we’re actually given is remarkably chaste and repressed. All of the titillating activity takes place offstage, although it’s occasionally described onstage in excruciating detail. Onstage, characters behave with distant restraint, uneasily pacing figuratively and literally around the boundaries of their passions and intentions, barely touching or making eye contact. Sparely staged with an odd match of contemporary furniture and quasi-early 19th-century garb, ‘Usher’ lacks focus, energy and significance. This is McGovern’s first fully staged production of his play. Perhaps now that he’s seen it with live actors in real time, he will rework it to answer some of the quandaries that this adaptation raises. The Edgar Allan Poe Theatre’s production of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ continues through April 28. Performances 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Tickets: $10. Gemini Theater, 7501 Penn Ave., Point Breeze. Details: (412) 243-6464. Alice T. Carter can be reached at (412) 320-7808 or acarter@tribweb.com .

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