THE THEATRICAL ADVENTURES OF EDWARD GOREY
Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories
by Carol Verburg
Chronicle Books. 256 pages, $50.
THREE MUSTACHIOED detectives tiptoe across the TV screen, their flashlights casting yellow beams across an otherwise black-and-white world. A woman on a stone plinth waves a hanky, whimpering for help. A gun goes off, and a pair of legs sinks into a pond with a little gurgle.
This sequence is part of the animated opening that Edward Gorey designed for Mystery!, the long-running PBS series (1980–2007) that introduced American audiences to fictional British detectives. As a child in the 1980s, I was interested only in the cartoon. I didn’t know Gorey’s name then, but I was drawn to the stylized and strange world he depicted. I found more of it in books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which describes in rhyming couplets the deaths of 26 children (one for each letter of the alphabet). When I moved to New York for my first job in publishing, an art director friend took me to the Gorey Holy Grail: the Gotham Book Mart. I left not with a book but with a bat—printed in Gorey’s signature crosshatch style with red rhinestone eyes. In my hand, it had the flaccid heft of a pair of testicles. Like everything that came from Gorey’s imagination, it was simultaneously sinister and ridiculous, darkly beautiful and absurd.
Best known as a writer and illustrator, Edward Gorey (1925–2000) was also a theater enthusiast. He designed the sets and costumes for Broadway’s Dracula, winning the 1978 Tony Award for Best Costume Design. A new book by longtime friend and collaborator Carol Verburg, The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey (produced in partnership with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust), recounts this triumph as a natural extension of Gorey’s lifelong interest in the
theater. The book focuses particularly on his deep involvement in Cape Cod’s experimental theater community. Before its move to Broadway, Dracula took flight in 1973 on a tiny Nantucket stage. With the financial success of the show’s Broadway run, Gorey moved from New York to a rambling cottage in Yarmouth Port, Mass. He met Verburg in 1988 through the local theater scene. She went on to produce and assistant-direct more than twenty of Gorey’s “entertainments,” which were surrealist vignettes based on his writings, performed by local actors and primitive-looking puppets on small stages throughout the Cape.
Theatrical Adventures showcases some never-before-seen sketches, costume designs, and script pages. Firsthand recollections offer insights into Gorey’s creative process during rehearsals in church basements and firehouses. Writes Verburg: “Working with Edward was a delight; performing his scripts could be draining.” Linguistically playful, they were ambiguous in meaning. One scene had no relationship to the next.
Gorey’s productions often defied conventional narrative, and program notes rarely offered clarity. Verburg describes the work as both exhilarating and confounding: “Even if you loved what Edward was doing, staying with it required an intensity of concentration that led to quite a few dropouts during intermission.” While not uncritical, Verburg’s affectionate and respectful portrait reinforces the image of Gorey that most fans already hold: that of the eccentric artist, fingers jammed with rings, delighting in a world of macabre whimsy.
The book assumes a certain level of familiarity with Gorey, and the anecdotes sometimes have a “you-had-to-be-there” quality. From a distance, Gorey’s theatrical exploits can feel repetitive, self-indulgent, and a teensy bit tiresome. The book sheds light on how the artist worked, but not on what drove him to do it. As Verburg observes: “We know who and what but rarely why.”
What I enjoyed most was seeing Gorey’s hand-lettered posters, programs, and costume designs, which capture his pen-and-ink style at its most refined. His women look like silent film sirens, with kohl-rimmed eyes and heads topped with turbans and feathers. His men are often bow-backed, pinched at the waist, with upward-facing rumps and the splayed toes and high arches of ballet dancers, testaments to his well-known love for the New York City Ballet. (Gorey children, in contrast, are stubby and stout with big noses.) Everywhere we see the motifs he returned to again and again: black umbrellas, leafless trees, cats, bats, and oversized urns. These designs feel like the purest expression of his talent—meticulous, melancholic and wry, and unmistakably his own.
Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, mastermichaelquinn.com.
