Carol Verburg

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

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 his costumes for Frank Langella's Dracula won a Tony award, 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 Carol Verburg is a great gift to any Edward Gorey fan: full of color photographs, original drawings and notes, script and review excerpts, and live links to film clips of Gorey himself performing onstage.