“Although rumors persisted that Edward Gorey was British and dead,” Carol Verburg writes in The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey, “he regarded himself as American and very much alive, thank you.”
That sentence is a perfect distillation of not just Gorey’s appeal — a winning combination of mystery and absurdity — but the appeal of Verburg’s new book. The San Francisco author spent decades working with Gorey in the Northeastern U.S., collaborating on a plethora of theatrical productions, many of which Gorey wrote himself.
Theatrical Adventures offers a rich sampling of the many, many plays (or, as he called them, “entertainments”) that Gorey worked on throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. The book contains Gorey-illustrated programs, script pages, set designs, theater merch, posters, lithographs, as well as wonderful behind-the-scenes photos. As descriptions of these productions unfold, you’ll learn about Gorey’s collaborators, inspirations, creative processes, predilections for making soft toys (especially for the people involved in bringing his work to life) and his unwavering passion for puppetry.
Theatrical Adventures is, as one senses Gorey’s life was, organized chaos in the most delightful sense. The core that holds the book together is Verburg’s wry humor and tone. She revels in recounting the surreal (and often silly) nature of her shared projects with Gorey. She also happens to be in possession of a dry wit that feels very much like an extension of Gorey himself. (“Neither of us was big on seasonal sentimentality,” she writes of their Christmas productions, “Edward being an artist of discerning taste, and I being named Carol.”)
Verburg is careful to pepper the book with biographical essentials about Gorey — he studied at Harvard, holidayed in Cape Cod, worked in an administrative role during World War II and had a career in New York as a book designer and illustrator.
