Before the opening scene of “The Prince of Dark Corners,” his play based on the life of outlaw and moonshiner Lewis Redmond, Gary Carden addresses the audience: “The first play I ever did had a cast of 45 people and a choreographed set and different lighting changes,” he says. “That means that the available resources in terms of a stage are pretty limited.”

Carden consequently began writing plays that could be performed practically anywhere, which is why 35 people sat in the back room of a used bookstore in Sylva last Friday evening watching a play without a curtain, special lights or much scenery. “I once had a one-act play performed in a restaurant where the actor stood on a plank set up on some concrete blocks,” Carden tells the audience.

Watching a play under such conditions has several effects on the spectators. First, such a performance necessarily draws the audience closer to the actor; the front row of chairs this night were not more than six feet from the tiny set. Second, the audience must, as Carden urged them to do before the play began, use their imaginations to help the play create its magic. Finally, the lack of nearly all music and special effects — there was only the sound of a bugle offstage in “The Prince of Dark Corners” — forces the audience to depend on the actor and the words of the playwright for their entertainment.

Fortunately, Gary Carden has that gift for words, and the man in the role of Lewis Redmond, Milton Higgins, has the craft to bring those words to life. “The Prince of Dark Corners” should remind all of us of how powerfully poetic mountain speech once was and how storytelling on a front porch was once as much a part of the culture as is the television in the den today. Carden uses Lewis Redmond, a rascal of a man who became a folk hero to people in both Carolinas in the 1880s, to convey the English language as it once was used, a source of entertainment and folk wisdom. On reading one of the lurid accounts of his life as an outlaw, Lewis Redmond looks at the audience and says, “I was disappointed to read I’m a man of principles.” In telling the audience of how he approached his father with the idea of becoming moonshiners together, Redmond says that his father’s face beamed “like sunshine spreading through a foggy cove.” Right from the beginning, “The Prince of Dark Corners” offers these rich gifts of proverbs and poetry.

Carden is also skilled at moving the story of Redmond’s life along in such a way that the play never grows tiring. As Redmond recalls his life, first from the Asheville jail in 1881 and later from his porch in Seneca, S.C., in 1906, the audience learns of his hard life both during and after the Civil War. A brief contact with the soldiers of a Confederate camp leaves Redmond with the nickname of Major. After the War, he and his best friend, Amos Ladd, have a run-in with a nest of pack-saddles, which are stinging caterpillars found in corn fields. Fed up with their hardscrabble farm lives, Ladd and Redmond decide to become outlaws. Within a few years, the two have created their own gang, have found a hideout in Dark Corners, have begun a three-state moonshine operation, have cemented friendships in high places in the Carolinas, and have begun to be hunted by the federal government. To say more of the plot would be to give away the story.

Milton Higgins of Burnsville grew up across the road from the Parkway Playhouse and so was well acquainted with theater from an early age. His teacher in high school was Elizabeth Westall. Higgins, who has played many roles in his life, was also in one of Carden’s other plays, “The Raindrop Waltz.” He seems made for the role of Lewis Redmond; he stands tall, has Redmond’s looks, and has enough branch water in his native accent to make his character utterly believable.

In the play’s program, Carden notes that the “details of Redmond’s career are distorted by folklore, bias and conjecture.” Though he himself has altered some of the circumstances of Redmond’s life, Carden did make an effort to avoid the hyperbole that surrounds Redmond. “One woman told me that an agent had blown Redmond’s lungs right out of his body with a shotgun and that his wife had to stitch him back together,” he said, adding dryly: “That’s one tale we decided not to have in the play.”

“They just don’t make mountain men like they used to,” Milton Higgins added with a laugh.

Sure they do. Their names are Higgins and Carden, and you can see them when the play comes to your area sometime this summer.

“The Prince of Dark Corners” will soon appear at the Parkway Playhouse. The Haywood County Public Library is helping to arrange some performances.

— Jeff Minick