C.J. Verburg - Edward Gorey On Stage: Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer: a Multimedia Memoir

EDWARD GOREY ON STAGE

Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer

A Multimedia Memoir

CJ Verburg

Edward Gorey on Stage is a thoroughly enjoyable publication chronicling Edward Gorey's theatrical career...beginning in his youth and continuing throughout his life. [Ms. Verburgs] main focus is on Mr. Gorey's productions on and around Cape Cod in the 1980's and '90s. [She] was a hands-on participant (or co-conspirator) in most of these endeavors, and she has many stories to delight the Gorey enthusiast. --Irwin Terry, Goreyana

EDWARD GOREY ON STAGE. Fifth Printing. Copyright 2012, 2017 by C J Verburg. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice is at the end of this book.
ISBN 978-0-9834355-4-9

For a fictional look behind-the-scenes, see CJ Verburgs Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery series

How to categorize Edward Gorey? A writer with a flair for drawing? An artist who also told stories? A distinctive book designer and illustrator? A maker of odd ephemera, from beady-eyed beanbag animals to esoteric playing cards? A godfather of Goth? A sine qua non for Tim Burton, Lemony Snicket, and other macabre-minded line-straddlers? Twelve years after his death, booksellers still debate whether to shelve Goreys elusively plotted, obsessively penned little books under Art, Humor, or Childrens.

One label thats rarely proposed is dramatist. Yet ever since he arrived at Harvard University after World War II, Goreys stories have popped up persistently onstage. Starting in the late 1980s, when he moved full-time to Cape Cod, theater encroached on his creative life to the point of engulfing it.

In personover lunch at Jacks Outback, for instanceEdward Gorey was as hard to pin down as his work. He had a staggering ability to shift focus from a film he saw thirty years ago to todays menu to last nights episode of Third Rock from the Sun to Schuberts repetitions to Roman coins under Trebonianus Gallus. Every subject seemed to fascinate him, although you couldnt be sure, since he talked about each of them with the same cogency of perception and utter nonchalance of tone.

Being hard to pin down extended to new projects. Edward hated to say no. Rather than refuse a job, hed either ignore it or claim some other obligation he couldnt get out of. You formed the impression that, like his hapless characters, Edward Gorey was perpetually being stalked by unseen threats. Even when it was clear hed lavished enormous care on a drawing or story, he acted as though it had ambushed himleapt on him from an overhanging branch and dragged him into the shrubbery. Ask him why hed written this or that book, or what projects were on his drawing board, or even which had come first, the elephant on wheels or the woman standing under it, he was likely to mutter Oh, I dont know, and wave a heavily be-ringed hand in vague embarrassment.

As Edward Goreys neighbor, friend, producer, stage manager, instigator, and comrade-in-arts, I was involved in almost all of his theater work on Cape Cod. Our tastes were different, but we shared a passion for art as a way to investigate the world, particularly human peculiarities. In the hundreds of hours we spent talking about what we were doing, or wanted to do, I dont recall a single conversation about artistic influences, trends, formative experiences, or the like. As youll see in this book, one thing did very often lead to another; but our focus was active, not reflective. The idea was to DO IT, not record or analyze it.

I only started writing about Edwards thespian adventures after he died, when his executors asked me to help them publish a book of his scripts. Given that hed written, designed, and directed more than a dozen full-length plays and entertainments for Cape Cod theaters, plus half a dozen shorter pieces, that promised to be a challenge.

I started with a descriptive summary of our theater workalso a challenge. For one thing, there was Edwards reluctance to explain anything he did, or even to admit that hed done it on purpose. For another, reliving that extraordinary creative collaboration without my much-missed collaborator feltas he would sayiddy ottic.

More than a decade later, with the scripts still inching toward print, I published my summary as a sort of exhibition catalog for the Edward Gorey Houses 2011 show, Edward Gorey and the Performing Arts. A combination of niche biography and memoir, its called Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod: Puppets, People, Places, & Plots.

The obvious next step was this e-book: a four-dimensional 21st-century homage to Edwards marvelous pop-up books. His scripts, after all, were only the starting point for his entertainments. Minimal though his staging was, his mini-dramas all combined live actors and hand puppets, color and black-and-white, prose, verse, and music. The way everything looked, moved, and sounded mattered as much to him as the words. And he was curious about other forms as well as plays (and his beloved films and ballet): opera, video, animation...

Edward Gorey On Stage, then, is my personal multimedia chronicle of an extraordinary artists lifelong involvement with theater. It opens with his Chicago childhood and closes after the posthumous premiere of his dazzling swan song, The White Canoe: an Opera Seria for Hand Puppets. Here youll find reminiscences, photographs, drawings, quotations, and links to video clips and other useful sources of illumination. (Links have the advantage over embedded clips of keeping the books file size within the range of most e-book outlets.) Along its way Edward Gorey On Stage touches on the diverse work of his that others staged, but its central focus is the theater projects Edward himself wrote, directed, designed, and occasionally performed in.

Aside from a few in the text, most live links are in the Credits and Links section at the end of the book. Those related to images are flagged by bold red type in the captions. Links are provided with no guarantee that the destination website will still contain the same content, or even still exist, beyond the publication date of this book.

Although he shuddered to think of it, Edward Goreys theatrical career really did span half a century. And thats not counting his youthful involvement as a spectator at plays and the ballet. His ticket stubs (apparently he never threw one out) date back to a Saturday matinee of Brother Rat at Chicagos Harris Theatre on Sept. 19, 1937 (Had a swell day, he remarked in his diary) and a Tuesday evening show of You Cant Take it With You on Sept. 28 (Swell play and swell time). His active public participation didnt begin, though, until after World War II, with the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As a child, Edwardcalled Tedhad no siblings, and his parents marriage was, well, theatrical. They divorced when he was eleven, the same year he graduated from eighth grade, and then reunited sixteen years later. In between, his father married nightclub singer and actress Corinna Mura, best known for playing and singing La Marseillaise in the film Casablanca.

Edward depicted himself as a perfectly normal child, on the quiet and intellectual side but by no means solitary or introverted. His flair got a boost when he entered the Francis W. Parker Schoolknown, according to his fellow student, artist, and close friend Consuelo Joerns, for encouraging innovation and individuality and of course the arts. Although not big on performing, he was involved backstage with theater. He took a course or two at the Art Institute of Chicago, and spent a semester there after graduationhis only brush, he said, with studying art. Connie Joerns notes that the Art Institute opened other doors as well: We went to outrageous parties being given by his fellow art students, which shocked and delighted us. Bohemianism in the spirit of La Boheme, but wildly exaggerated. Decades later Ted said never had he run into anything again in his life quite so bizarre!