Sure, you can make pumpkin soup, buy some fall-spiced candles or purchase some candy for the imminent trick-or-treaters, but nothing really puts you in the Halloween spirit like a little Edgar Allan Poe. And a simple but clever little production over at the Playbill Café on 14th Street serves up just the right dose of humor, horror and just plain creepiness to put you in a sufficiently macabre mood for October.

Poe 2000, staged by the Meat & Potato Theatre, a new troupe boasting its second production in the D.C. area, takes ten of Poe’s tales, many of them well-known, and puts its own unique spin on them. From bare-bones readings to modernizations to, well, rap interpretations, the various takes largely succeed in capturing the spirit of Poe’s works, while doing something a little different and still keeping them accessible.

The director has many tricks up his sleeves to individualize the pieces, from costumes to sound effects. A day-glow reading of “The Raven” articulates the shifting state of mind of the narrator by giving him different pairs of glowing eyes throughout the poem, their expressions ranging from shocked to menacing. Actors gracefully use a marionette to enact “The Pit and the Pendulum,” awarding an almost ballet-like feel to the movements of the captured prisoner. And Poe 2000 rightly draws attention to some of Poe’s lesser-known classics, from “Ms. Found In A Bottle” (definitely the show’s spookiest offering) to the great detective story “The Purloined Letter”.