GLR May-June 2025

WhenGorey Really Got Creative

T HREE MUSTACHIOED detec tives 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

of Gorey’s “entertainments,” which were surrealist vignettes based on his writings, performed by local actors and primitive looking puppets on small stages through out the Cape. Theatrical Adventure s showcases some never-before-seen sketches, costume de signs, and script pages. Firsthand recollec tions offer insights into Gorey’s creative process during rehearsals in church base

M ICHAEL Q UINN

THE THEATRICAL ADVENTURES OF EDWARD GOREY Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories by Carol Verburg Chronicle Books. 256 pages, $50.

ments and firehouses. Writes Verburg: “Working with Edward was a delight; performing his scripts could be draining.” Lin guistically 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 in tensity of concentration that led to quite a few dropouts during

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 styl ized and strange world he depicted. I found more of it in books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies , which describes in rhyming cou plets the deaths of 26 children (one for each letter of the al phabet). When I moved to New York for my first job in publishing, an art director friend took me to the Gorey Holy

intermission.” While not uncriti cal, Verburg’s affectionate and re spectful portrait reinforces the image of Gorey that most fans al ready 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-in dulgent, 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 ob serves: “We know who and what but rarely why .” What I enjoyed most was see ing Gorey’s hand-lettered posters, programs, and costume designs ,

Grail: the Gotham Book Mart. I left not with a book but with a bat—printed in Gorey’s signature crosshatch style with red rhine stone eyes. In my hand, it had the flaccid heft of a pair of testicles. Like everything that came from Gorey’s imagination, it was simul taneously sinister and ridiculous, darkly beautiful and absurd. Best known as a writer and il lustrator, 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 Cos tume Design. A new book by long time friend and collaborator Carol Verburg, The Theatrical Adven tures of Edward Gorey (produced in partnership with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust), recounts this triumph as a natural extension

Cover of a 1961 book by “Ogdred Weary” (an anagram).

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, testa ments 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 over sized urns. These designs feel like the purest expression of his talent—meticulous, melancholic and wry, and unmistak ably his own.

of Gorey’s lifelong interest in the theater. The book focuses particularly on his deep involvement in Cape Cod’s experi mental 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 Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brook lyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, master michaelquinn.com. May–June 2025

45