Edward Gorey on Stage: Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer: a Multimedia Memoir

Carol Verburg, Cj Verburg

Boom-Books, 2012 - BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY - 88 pages

Renowned as an artist, author, and godfather of Goth, Edward Gorey was first and last a dramatist. This ingenious multimedia memoir is a homage to his famous pop-up books, and a rare backstage tour of his lifelong involvement in theater. From Harvard, where Gorey and roommate Frank O'Hara helped found the Poets' Theatre, to New York, where he designed the Tony-award-winning costumes and sets for Frank Langella's Dracula, to Cape Cod, where he steered his troupe of actors and puppets through twenty-odd original "entertainments," Edward Gorey delighted in uncoiling weird little stories into four-dimensional mini-dramas. Some were his familiar alphabet books and tales such as The Insect God and The Curious Sofa; others, such as Blithering Christmas, he composed specifically for venues from Provincetown to Cotuit to Woods Hole. This affectionate recap by his longtime friend and collaborator CJ Verburg is a great gift to any Edward Gorey fan: full of rare original drawings and notes, color photographs, script and review excerpts, and live links to film clips of Gorey himself performing onstage.

About the author

Carol Verburg wrote her first prize-winning play at 16 and her second, a rock musical, in 1968. Alongside a career in academic and trade publishing, she helped found the Provincetown Playwrights’ Lab and headed Cape Cod theater companies in Provincetown, Bourne, and Cotuit. There she produced the late artist Edward Gorey’s many original “entertainments,” and directed scripts ranging from Hamlet (with a Gorey set design) to the U.S. debut of Peter Shaffer’s The Gift of the Gorgon. Carol’s own plays include The Whistling Pig (Cotuit; honorable mention, Jane Chambers Award), The Abduction (Bourne; Utah Shakespearean Festival), and Lady Day in Love (Bourne, Sandwich, San Francisco). She currently works as a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco, and leads the Mechanics’ Institute Library’s indie publishing workshop. Recent books include Croaked: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery and Silent Night Violent Night: a Cory Goodwin Mystery.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Edward Gorey on Stage: Playwright, Director, Designer, Performer: a Multimedia Memoir
• Authors: Carol Verburg, Cj Verburg
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Boom-Books, 2012
• ISBN: 0983435561, 9780983435563
• Length: 88 pages
• Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General