In The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey, award-winning playwright, theater director, and author Carol Verburg paints a portrait of a multifaceted artist, an exceptional friend, a grand collaborator, and a witty instigator. Verburg, a close friend and neighbor of the late Edward Gorey, produced and co-directed approximately 20 of his original plays or “entertainments” at Cape Cod.
Edward Gorey is often associated with the macabre, the sinister, and the gothic. For decades, his signature crosshatched black-and-white drawings lent melodramatic whimsy to the PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! title sequence. His costume designs for the Broadway revival of Dracula won him a Tony award. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events all nod to Gorey’s sensibility and wicked humor as their inspiration.
Verburg adds another dimension to these popular imaginings of Gorey. In contrast to his “dark” art, she recalls that Gorey was “kind and funny, a shy genius, who’d devoured thousands of books and films and remembered every detail, whose mind was so agile that I never could guess what he’d say next, and who adored animals, especially cats.” In a recent conversation about the book, William C. Baker, Archivist for The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, told me that Verburg’s book shows us Gorey’s deeply human and social side, which is often “left out of the frame”.
Edward Gorey was equally versed in Shakespeare and Jane Austen, as well as The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, giving his work depth and popular appeal. His “A Dozen Stupid Things to Do on a Wet Sunday Afternoon” appeared in National Lampoon’s June 1974 issue. The piece included a key that narrated absurd activities, including dropping grapes from an upstairs window, hanging yourself from a chandelier, setting fire to your toothbrush, mutilating the ornamental shrubbery, and sitting in a birdbath. Gorey repurposed the work as part of his Stuffed Elephants – his first “entertainment” as the director.
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey is a visual and intellectual treat: part biography, part meditation on the artistic process, and part “mini art exhibit” of previously unpublished material. Verburg collaborated closely with Baker and the Trust to create a “lavish sampler of whole texts and excerpts, notebook sketches and polished works of art.” She meticulously braids her first-person account and Gorey’s archival photos with rare sketches, unpublished scripts, and anecdotes from friends and collaborators to create a comprehensive, visually vibrant book.
Much has been written about Gorey, yet Verburg’s book makes a distinctive contribution. Not only was it written by one of Gorey’s close friends and collaborators, but according to Baker, Verburg’s book is the first publication to extensively use the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust’s papers, scripts, and unpublished files, which had been stashed away in a storage facility in undifferentiated stacks for years. Edward Gorey fans, scholars, and general readers will pore over the images, anecdotes, and artifacts. Verburg also includes a helpful chronology of Gorey’s theatrical “entertainments”, an index, and detailed notes for source material and images.
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey is a beautifully and thoughtfully designed book. A luxurious red velvet theatre curtain wraps around the book’s spine. Visual interludes divide the 18 chapters, a nod to Gorey’s love of ballet and his talent for translating three-dimensional movement to the page. Balletic urns, theatrical playbills, posters, droll children, and animals fill full-page transitions from one section to the next. Gorey’s Figbash opens several sections: he athletically leaps through the air, unsteadily reaches for an inverted comma, and floats gracefully down from the top of the page via an umbrella.
Verburg tells the story of Gorey’s “obsessive but largely unknown” work outside mainstream theater worlds, especially his “entertainments” at Cape Cod, where the two became friends and collaborators. The revue was his favorite form, and each production included “fifteen to twenty stories, poems, recitations, and dances with music, which he and his troupe molded into a two-hour entertainment over the course of rehearsals.”
In Chapter Four, readers get a close-up look at his first venture into playwriting. Verburg shows Gorey’s debut through the evolution of Lost Shoelaces. The “script” arrived in the hands of director Genie Stevens as a sheaf of papers without character tags, speeches, or stage directions.
As Verburg narrates the making of Lost Shoelaces, she keeps Gorey’s creative genius center stage – writer, poet, scriptwriter, artist, set and costume designer, puppeteer, and toy maker. Scans of draft posters and playlists, production notes, notepad sketches, and drawings of actors, characters, props, and furniture for a puppet play included in the Lost Shoelaces revue, “The Worsted Monsters”, are displayed. In sidebars, actors recall performing for Gorey’s entertainment, offering an additional behind-the-scenes perspective.
Children were often the target of Edward Gorey’s witty violence, and he drew inspiration from popular 19th-century English authors of humor and nonsense, including Hilaire Belloc, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear, who, according to Gorey, wrote “some really quite violent stuff, not necessarily for children.” While illustrating Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, he and Verburg staged the book for his puppet troupe Le Théâtricule Stoïque (named such because “the performers were small and blank-faced and because he loved diacritical marks”). The production included dog dances and music by Beethoven and Chopin. Belloc’s wildly funny parables showcase the crisp demise of children that make Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Hapless Child so funny: Henry King expires after eating little bits of string; Jim runs away from his nurse and is eaten by a lion.
Gorey could have cashed it in from the profits he made designing Dracula and illustrating T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Instead, he remodeled a decaying mansion on Cape Cod and made art for art’s sake, “surrounded by his books and cats, foraying out by night to ‘collaborate like a mad thing’ on theatrical adventures.”
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey concludes when Gorey dies in 2000. Verburg and the crew continued to rehearse for the show they were working on, The White Canoe. The last lines of the book encapsulate one of Gorey’s “unpredictable directorial flashes”: “You come out carrying this” (a baby-shaped bundle of rags). “Chuck it under the chin—coochie coochie! Then you look around, and you toss it over the screen.” Verburg fittingly ends her narrative with Gorey’s own words and wit.
