A Cherry Hill woman has played Edgar Allan Poe for nearly 30 years. This weekend’s performance is special.

This Halloween weekend was going to be a special one for Helen McKenna. The actor had planned to take her one-woman Edgar Allan Poe play back to where it all began: The Ritz Theatre Co. in Haddon Township, N.J.

Then, just days ago, she learned that South Jersey theater legend Bruce Curless, who helped her launch the play at the Ritz, had died.

“My whole Poe thing starts with him — the whole idea that I’m allowed to do this,” McKenna said.

McKenna, 71, will reprise her role as the gothic American writer and poet Sunday at 2 p.m. in “The Tell-Tale Poe,” a special event made more poignant by the death of the Ritz founder. It’s the first of a series of Poe performances she has lined up for November.

The 1998 play is the product of a writing class at Rutgers, where McKenna earned a master’s degree. By this point, she was in her early 40s and a dedicated Poe fanatic.

McKenna could recite his poems, sure, but also was packed with facts about his life from years working at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Spring Garden.

Old biographies, books, and letters from his life had formed the play’s historical basis and brought life to her characters. The first act was from the perspective of Sarah Helen Power Whitman, a poet who’d briefly been engaged to Poe. The second act was all Poe.

» READ MORE: Bruce Curless, visionary leader of South Jersey theater, has died at 78

McKenna hired Curless to direct her as she honed the Whitman role. That was when Curless encouraged her to step into the Poe role as well. At the time, she recalled, it was less common for women to play men.

“It was a dream for me, because he was inviting me to be Poe,” McKenna said.

McKenna said her Poe fascination began as a brooding teenager attending a suburban New Jersey Catholic school.

“It was absolutely medieval,” McKenna said about her school. “They would say, if your father’s not going to church, he’s going to hell.”

McKenna turned to stories and poetry, and when she was 14, she memorized Poe’s poem “The Raven” for an acting class. She often used this and other Poe monologues as she sought acting gigs.

“One of the things that I would love about Poe is all the rage. I could really sink my teeth into it,” she said. “So anytime I could be spitting nails, I was happy.”

McKenna was working “some dead-end job” in her 30s, when she ran into a fellow actor friend and asked about paid gigs.

The friend directed her to the Independence National Historic Park, where she earned $50 a day playing an 18th-century woman warning people about yellow fever, the virus that decimated Philadelphia’s population in 1793.

She loved it. After one season, McKenna heard that the park was hiring a staffer at the Poe historic site, where the writer wrote “The Black Cat” and other short stories.

“I’m like, ‘What? I could get paid to be at Poe’s house?’” McKenna said.

» READ MORE: Philly’s Edgar Allan Poe house has been closed for 2 years. There’s still no reopening date.

She worked as a park ranger, but she also began performing at the site as Sarah Helen Whitman, and later as Poe.

McKenna enjoyed learning about Whitman, a spiritualist who believed she communicated with Poe through seances and took it upon herself to defend the dead writer from his critics.

“I see her as this very generous, caring, and slightly egotistical woman,” McKenna said.

As her repository of Poe knowledge grew, McKenna discovered that she could take questions in character.

“I realized I know a lot, and they always ask the same questions, and I know the answers to these questions,” she said. “And if I didn’t know, I would say, ‘I don’t recall, because I’m dead. And I’ve been dead a long time.’”

Soon she was getting calls from places as far-flung as Waukesha, Wis., to perform for the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read, and she got paychecks as high as $5,000 for her work. Not bad for a part-time actor and literature nerd.

Saturday, she performed outside her former workplace as part of Philly’s 52 weeks of Firsts celebration of the city’s history. The city tourism bureau claims Poe’s “The Murders In The Rue Morgue” as the first modern detective story.

McKenna estimates she’s performed all or part of “The Tell-Tale Poe” about 100 times over the years. But her upcoming performance will be a special one as she remembers Curless.

She said that, though Curless was a pivotal presence in her life, she was just one of the many people who “he believed in and nurtured” over the years.

“He did this kind of thing for so many people. He was amazing,” she said.

Years ago, they performed together in a comedy, “The Nerd,” McKenna said. Curless was so funny, she said, that she had to think about her own father dying just to keep her from busting out laughing while onstage.

“He was such a fun, lively, visionary guy.”