Flapping Ankles, Crazed Teacups, and Other Entertainments
Gorey with two members of Le Théâtricule Stoïque.
(Photograph by Brennan Cavanaugh)
ASKED, IN A 1998 INTERVIEW, if he’d been bitten by the theater bug while designing Dracula, Gorey said, “Well, I think, in a kind of way, it’s been theater all along.”1 Of course it had been, from his high-school raptures over the Ballets Russes to his Dugway plays to his all-consuming affair with the Poets’ Theatre to his passion for silent film to his fascination with Kabuki and Noh to Dracula, Gorey Stories, and Tinned Lettuce. Then, too, many of Balanchine’s ballets had story lines, however loose, and some, such as The Nutcracker, were wordless plays, incorporating elements of pantomime and costume drama.
Tellingly, Gorey’s earliest literary efforts were plays. “Apparently I must have had a leaning toward theater at the very beginning and I didn’t follow it up,” he said.2 In a 1977 interview, he regretted the road not taken: “I tend to drift my way through existence, and if I had decided to direct myself a little more than I ever did, I think I probably would have worked in the theater more.”3
With Lost Shoelaces, a “musical entertainment” performed at the Woods Hole Community Hall in August of ’87, Gorey came full circle to the evening of entertainments “Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” that he’d staged in 1952 with the Poets’ Theatre. Genie Stevens, a director whose work with the Woods Hole Theater Company Gorey had seen and liked, had approached him about bringing his work to the stage. Gorey was agreeable but urged her to adapt some of his unpublished work rather than rehash ground already covered by Gorey Stories. He supposed he could do a flyer or a poster for the show, he said. Perhaps he could make the props, too. And the sets. And the costumes. Come to think of it, when was she going to hold auditions? He might as well pop by. Clearly he hadn’t forgotten the fun he’d had with the Poets’ Theatre, putting on arty plays in an atmosphere of goofy amateurism.
Riffling through the pile of pages Gorey had given her, typed on yellow legal-pad sheets, Stevens realized that Lost Shoelaces was going to be “really tricky.” “I’ve directed a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespeare is much more straight ahead than Edward’s work,” she says. “I couldn’t make head or tail of what to do with it, exactly. It was like an evening of Victorian entertainments, where somebody would come out and recite and somebody would sing and somebody would do a dance and often there was a tragic ending.” The question was, how to translate Gorey from the page to the stage? “What’s it about is a very funny question, because what are any of his books about? They’re about strange things happening, but they’re more about tickling your brain, having you become engaged with words and ideas.”
Consider “The Folded Napkin,” a send-up of the “rational amusements”—drawing-room recitals and Chautauqua-style lectures—popular with the Victorian bourgeoisie, a relentlessly self-improving lot. The silent skit featured an actor in black turtleneck and black tights solemnly displaying, for the audience’s edification, illustrations of napkins folded in various ways. “People were on the floor laughing,” says Stevens. “It built and built, there was music behind it, and it was just hysterically funny.”
Another playlet, “The Besotted Mother: or, Hubris Collected For,” was, in Gorey’s words, a “heart-rending little work about a mother whose child is eaten by a pack of wild dogs.”4 Scrimping and saving, the doting mother buys her little darling an outfit made of “bunny fur.” Confident that her dear one is snug against the elements, she leaves the child outside the greengrocer’s while she’s inside, buying eggplants. (Eggplants, like turnips, are surrealist fetishes in Goreyland, charged with occult significance. To Gorey, the eggplant was “an otherworldly fruit” with a portentous presence, says Eric Edwards, who performed in many of his entertainments, as he liked to call them.5 As an inside joke, he dubbed his stable of players the Aubergine Company.) Predictably, a pack of ravening dogs “tears this child in bunny fur to pieces!” Gorey told an interviewer.6 For the coup de grâce, he selected, as an ironic backdrop to the carnage, what Stevens recalls as a “very sweet, soothing” piece by Chopin.
A hodgepodge of unrelated playlets performed by actors and hand puppets, Lost Shoelaces was the mold from which nearly all Gorey’s subsequent entertainments were cast. Based, like Tinned Lettuce, on his books or on unpublished texts he hadn’t gotten around to illustrating, they weren’t exactly plays, he admitted, but neither were they revues, “because they don’t start and stop, they just sort of drivel along without interruption.”7 Somewhere between verse drama, Victorian parlor entertainments, and surrealist vaudeville, they were born of “a theatrical sensibility more illuminated by Dada, Beckett, and Japanese art” than by traditional theater, thought Carol Verburg.8 “I’m not at all interested in realistic theater,” Gorey confirmed.9 The stars by which he navigated as a dramatist included “old-time musicals,” “anything that emanates from Japan—Kabuki, Noh, anything of that sort,” as well as “ballet, opera”—in short, “anything that’s highly stylized.”10
Puppets were perfect for Gorey’s embrace of artifice, especially the enigmatic little heads he sculpted out of CelluClay, a brand of instant papier-mâché. Expressionless personages with pinhole eyes, a cursory nose (at best), and no more than a suggestion of a mouth (if that), they were as cryptic as the characters in his books. Their costumes—the glove hiding the puppeteer’s hand—were, by contrast, as eye-catching as their faces were unremarkable, hand-sewn by Gorey from material in wild patterns, from plaid to polka-dot, star-spangled to striped.
Gorey once claimed that the inspiration for his puppet plays struck when he was toying with the idea of staging the tragedies of the Stoic philosopher Seneca—closet dramas noted for their grisly descriptions of revenge killings. “There’s a famous collection of Elizabethan translations, which are absolutely quite wonderful,” he recalled. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this be fun to do Seneca with puppets.’”11
It’s just preposterous enough to be true. But a paper he wrote for a French class at Harvard in 1947, proposing a stage design for Pierre Corneille’s verse tragedy Horace (1640), is more revealing about Gorey’s vision of a theater whose “unnaturalist” aesthetic reveled in striking tableaux, special effects, choreographed movement, and poetic language rather than depth psychology, naturalistic acting, and the willing suspension of disbelief. He imagines automatons, remote-controlled by backstage technicians, that glide across the stage on rails like “a child’s electric train,” their prerecorded lines crackling through the PA system.12 Gorey’s thespian robots would create a jarringly ironic distance between the “passions and sufferings” of Corneille’s tragedy and their impassive features and “artificial” gestures, “synchronized with those of other characters” to create kinetic patterns reminiscent of classical ballet.13 As envisioned, his mechanized Horace would have had more in common with the Bauhaus choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Machine Age ballets than conventional theater.
At the same time, Gorey’s remote-controlled puppets realize the aesthete’s dream of an art about art, focused on form, fluent in historical allusion, rejoicing in the impulse to play (with images, words, ideas), and freed at last from the gooey sentimentality and showbiz hamminess that afflict commercial theater. It’s an aesthetic he would embrace to the fullest, some forty years later, in his Cape Cod entertainments.
Lost Shoelaces marked the debut of the puppet troupe Gorey called Le Théâtricule Stoïque (the stoic little theater), and of Eric Edwards, Vincent Myette, Joe Richards, and Cathy Smith—charter members of the close-knit company that for more than a decade would dedicate itself to the performance of Gorey’s entertainments. The show was notable, too, as the first—and last—time anyone but Gorey occupied the director’s chair. With Stevens’s departure—she’d taken a job in New York—he assumed the role, a part he’d continue to play throughout his decade-long involvement with community theater on the Cape.
Gorey’s approach to directing was laissez-faire—in the extreme. “As a director, Edward’s favorite maxim was that the director’s job is to keep the actors from running into the furniture,” recalls Carol Verburg, who began working with him in 1990, producing his shows and acting as director’s assistant.14 He “scoffed at motivation and character development,” she says.15 In her brief reminiscence, Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, she draws a parallel between Gorey’s refusal to connect the dots for his actors (or, for that matter, his audience) and the aesthetic of understatement, omission, and ambiguity that characterizes his books. It was his intent “simply to show what happened to whom,” she believes, freeing cast and audience alike to make whatever sense they might of his always oblique, often inscrutable texts.
In Gorey’s works for the stage, the spotlight is squarely on language—language at play, freed from the need to make sense (though not the requirement to make nonsense). “My stuff is fairly carefully written, so I don’t feel that anything needs explaining,” said Gorey. Thus his dictum “There is no motivation, just read the lines.”16
Paradoxically, Gorey demanded expressive subtleties from his puppets that would’ve reduced Jim Henson to tears. (We’re talking, remember, about the emotive possibilities of a lump of papier-mâché no bigger than a golf ball, with pinprick eyes, a perfunctory nose, and no mouth.) As if coaxing emotion out of a puppet with only rudimentary facial features weren’t challenging enough, the props were the puppets on occasion. Gorey’s surrealist eye for objets trouvés, as well as his bricoleur’s delight in transmuting whatever’s at hand into something wondrous, led him to scour “yard sales for promising objects—less for illustration than for provocative juxtaposition,” notes Verburg.17 Balls of yarn, strings of beads, bags of confetti, glass doorknobs—seemingly anything might be reborn as a prop or even a puppet.
Eric Edwards recalls a hilarious exchange between Gorey and Cathy Smith, who was puppeteering a pair of clothespins in the Théâtricule version of The Bug Book. “Edward was really quite annoyed, because we weren’t putting enough emotion into these clothespins,” he says. “Cathy was jiggling this clothespin for all it’s worth, and Edward would say, ‘I want to see this clothespin emote,’ and Cathy goes, ‘Edward, they’re only clothespins!’”18
Jane MacDonald, who’d spent years mastering the art of “filling out a character and giving it everything [it] needs to become real,” was bemused, at first, by Gorey’s demand that puppets—even clothespins—emote but human actors deliver their lines in a deadpan, declamatory style.19 His characters had—at least apparently—no more psychological depth than Lear’s or Lewis Carroll’s or the stock types in silent movies because Gorey, as always, is paradoxical: “He wanted the interior that was never spoken, so there was actorly work to be done there” after all, says MacDonald.20 The ideal Gorey actor managed the neat trick of hinting obliquely while revealing next to nothing. “Everything the surface could express he wanted; the rest was secret. That’s his whole thing: he liked what was withheld.” Unlike the Freudian repressed, Gorey’s repressed stays repressed, just beneath the surface of everyday life, irradiating it with mystery. “He wanted everybody to leave with questions.”
They did. Some simply left: on more than one occasion, half the audience decamped at intermission, baffled beyond endurance. Cathy Smith recalls, “Theater people would say things like, ‘Have you ever thought about pace? Are you trying to bore the audience?’” George Liles, a reviewer for the Cape Cod Times, warned “those not familiar with Gorey” that Stuffed Elephants, performed in 1990 at the Woods Hole Community Hall, consisted largely of “a lot of unhinged characters wandering about in gardens, peering perplexedly in and out of windows, haunted by vague memories.”21 Still, the show’s twenty little vignettes about “kidnapping, pederasty, incest, murder, and boredom” were “grim and prim and full of foreboding nonsense,” he conceded. “Parents briefly grieve the loss of a child, but it passes quickly, and they shrug and go dancing.” He was especially taken with the company’s treatment of The Nursery Frieze, performed in the dark by players equipped with those little toy wheels that spin, throwing off sparks, when you pump a plunger.
By contrast, Liles was less than charmed by Le Théâtricule Stoïque’s adaptation of Stuart Walker’s 1917 “portmanteau play,” Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil, when he saw it at the Theatre on the Bay in Bourne in 1995: “The puppet show is a shrill and pointless little drama that begins with the provocative title and then goes downhill.”22 The whole thing was “a plodding and self-indulgent exercise,” he decreed.
Gorey settled the score, after a fashion, with Epistolary Play. An eye-rolling retort to A. R. Gurney’s schlocky Love Letters, which he loathed, it was also a wry comment on middlebrow theatergoers—the “I laughed, I cried” demographic, whose appetite for sentimental flapdoodle, with a side serving of pseudosophistication, encourages the worst in commercial theater. “It’s like a disease,” he said of the Gurney warhorse in 1997, the year his takeoff on it premiered at the Cotuit Center for the Arts.23 A chronicle of two intertwined lives, told in letters, Love Letters is a perennial favorite with actors, since the dialogue is read, not memorized; cash-strapped community theaters love it, too, since it requires a cast of only two and little more than a suggestion of a set. As a result, Gorey groaned, “it gets done about five times a year” on the Cape, “whose population is well under 200,000.”
Driven to distraction by Gurney’s “perfectly appalling piece of gibberish,” he decided to dash off a play for two players reading letters aloud. “Well, needless to remark, it ran totally and completely amok,” he admitted.24 Instead of two characters, Gorey’s Epistolary Play has sixteen, played by two overworked actors, not to mention an “incredibly complicated plot” that went “absolutely nowhere” in the usual convoluted manner.25 He recalled audience members wandering dazedly up after performances, asking if they could have a copy of the script to read, which he took to mean, “I couldn’t follow this! I’m exhausted!”
Gorey seemed airily unconcerned about audience reactions or even whether there was an audience. “I went to a play in Provincetown and there were two people there—and Edward—in the whole theater, and it was a good-sized theater,” Rick Jones recalls. “He laughed away and enjoyed himself, had no care whatsoever—he had his own private theater and loved it.” On the other hand, there were audience members who got it, says Jill Erickson, who joined the troupe in 1994. They were the ones who “came repeatedly because they wanted to see what we were going to do on any given night.”
As it happens, it’s that very unpredictability—the ever-evolving nature of a live, collaborative art form like the stage play, so dramatically unlike the static, solitary art of pen-and-ink drawing—that glued Gorey to his seat night after night. Staging his entertainments was “very satisfying in a way that doing a book isn’t,” he said. “No matter how many performances you see of it, it’s sort of different every time. With a book,…it may strike you differently, you know, at one time or another, but it doesn’t have the kind of wonderful open thing that the theater does.”26
Unbound from the page, refracted through the idiosyncratic sensibilities of his actors, Gorey’s work took on a life of its own, a sea change that charmed him. “Edward sits in his little room and does this all by himself,” Genie Stevens observes. “It must’ve been fairly enthralling to see a group of people bring his two-dimensional characters to life, before his eyes.” In fact, Gorey was so captivated by the experience that he tinkered incessantly with his scripts, adding bits of dialogue and driving his actors half mad in the process. “He liked to invent everything as it went along and invent it all over again the next day, if time permitted,” Verburg recalls.27
Challenging as they were, Gorey’s entertainments attracted a small but fervent following. They enjoyed their most rhapsodic reception in October of ’98, when the troupe performed English Soup at Storyopolis, a bookstore and art gallery in Los Angeles, on Halloween weekend. (It was the first and only time the troupe left the Cape. Gorey, naturally, refused to travel.) “It was phenomenal,” recalls Jamie Wolf, who served as stage manager for the West Coast shows. “We ended up booking two more shows [at Storyopolis]; we did five shows in three days. The cover of the LA Times Magazine was Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. We had people like Dweezil Zappa in the audience. Smashing Pumpkins showed up. I was hanging out, getting ready for the first rehearsal, and I realized I was with Gabriel Byrne.”
The company played to standing-room-only crowds. “People expected something dark and creepy and all of the actors came out in white, the stage was totally white,” says Wolf. “It was not at all what they were expecting—which was really good; it was what Edward liked. It took the audience the whole play to understand what they were seeing.” But by the time the curtain fell, they “understood that they’d just had an evening with Edward Gorey. They were expecting ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears…’ and they didn’t get any of that.”
The troupe’s rapturous reception in LA turns out, in retrospect, to have been the capstone of Gorey’s theatrical career. Jane MacDonald believes his work for the stage was just coming into its own, and after “seeing the impact and the receptivity for him and his work” at Storyopolis, she thinks it would have reached a wider audience if its momentum hadn’t been cut short by Gorey’s death a year and a half later.28 Gorey’s puppet shows would have been perfect for TV, she believes. To be sure, Le Théâtricule Stoïque would never have played Sesame Street or bumped Cirque du Soleil off the Vegas marquees. But Gorey’s writing for the stage had evolved, evincing a growing awareness of what made for good theater. His “original vision,” realized in Lost Shoelaces, was “very two-dimensional, very book-derived,” says Verburg.29 By Flapping Ankles (1991) and Crazed Teacups (1992), both performed by the Provincetown Theatre Company at the Provincetown Inn, he was responding to actors’ and audiences’ reactions, she points out, writing “pieces that were somewhat more theatrical in a conventional sense, although without ever leaving his fundamentally episodic, kaleidoscopic, juxtaposed-rather-than-connected approach to making art.”30
Sadly, his breakthrough work didn’t see the light of day until after his death. Two days after he died, Verburg, who was staying at Strawberry Lane to keep an eye on Gorey’s five cats, took a distraught call from the composer Daniel Wolf. He’d only just learned of Gorey’s death, days after finishing the score for something called The White Canoe: An Opera Seria for Hand Puppets.a
Wolf had written Gorey in 1999, asking if he was interested in collaborating on a piece of musical theater for puppets. Gorey’s answer was The White Canoe, a libretto based on “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” a lachrymose piece of verse by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). The poem takes its title from a vast marsh that in Moore’s day sprawled over southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. An uncanny place, the Dismal Samp inspired tales of haunts; Moore spun the local lore into an eerie, atmospheric poem about a young man who, driven mad by the death of his beloved, goes looking for her in the trackless wastes of the swamp and is never seen again.
“I spent that grim summer rehearsing with Le Théâtricule Stoïque,” Verburg recalls in Edward Gorey Plays Cape Cod, “sewing puppet costumes, trying to guess what Edward meant by such cryptic marginal notes as ‘Spirits of the swamp: insects: Loie Fullerb sleeves’ and ‘alligators have tails.’”31 On September 1, 2000, five months after Gorey’s death, The White Canoe opened at Freedom Hall in Cotuit.
Verburg still thinks it was the best thing he wrote for the theater, reconciling his eclectic interests with “enough dramatic structure to make the piece really successful.”32 The show “represented a real triumph of his constantly shifting approach to theater, all the different things he tried: the parodies, the meaningless things, the books that he dramatized,” she says. “By The White Canoe, he knew what he was doing, and that broke my heart, because he really got it, [but] didn’t get to see it and we didn’t get to go on from there.”33
Apart from a handful of reviews in local papers such as the Cape Cod Times and scattered mentions in his later interviews, Gorey’s entertainments have received scant notice and virtually no in-depth analysis. This has largely to do with the decision by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, which oversees his copyright, not to publish his plays. Why the trustees haven’t seen fit to do so is unclear, though there is the perception, in some quarters, that Gorey’s entertainments were silly little fribbles, the self-indulgent diversions of the semiretired. Since only a half dozen or so of the Théâtricule’s performances survive, captured on video by Christopher Seufert, it’s difficult to judge the merits of Gorey’s theatricals in the context of his larger oeuvre.
Are they “so avant-garde, so completely original” that they’ll be recognized one day as “a seminal theatrical movement,” as Verburg contends?34 It’s a tall claim to make for such a slight body of work. More to the point, it’s unfair to burden Gorey’s studiously frivolous little bagatelles with the historical significance of a trailblazing movement. Does Omlet; or, Poopies Dallying,35 a puppet play stitched together from Gorey’s “favorite nonsensical bits of early pirate Hamlets” (Verburg), really belong on the timeline of experimental theater, alongside Richard Foreman’s raw, confrontational Ontological-Hysteric Theater and the postmodern spectacles of Robert Wilson?36 Yet if we view Gorey’s works for the stage as a wonderfully stunted branch of the genealogical tree that yielded the closet drama and the verse play, we can give them their due as a kooky, irrepressibly Goreyan portmanteau of poetry and theater without overinflating their importance in relation to his more enduring work as an author and illustrator.
For his part, Gorey was unquestionably invigorated by his rediscovery of the theater at a time when his commercial illustration had become mere drudge work. By all accounts, he found the opportunity to experiment—to play—with words and images and ideas in a medium associated with amateurishness, and in a location far from anywhere, giddily liberating. Both the setting and the shoestring unpretentiousness of community theater ensured that his efforts would be written off by the smart set as mere dabbling, which suited him just fine. “After half a century, he was going back to what he had done in college—this position…of having nothing expected of him and nobody particularly paying attention, judging in any high-stakes way the work that he was doing,” says Verburg. “He was completely free to experiment. By this time, his position as a New York artist involved things like, ‘Will you please sign ten thousand book plates?’ which was mind-crushingly boring for him. So he blossomed all over again, which I think is the story of Edward’s life—he was perpetually blossoming all over again because of his ceaseless curiosity and boundless intellect and imagination.”37
a Opera seria (Italian for “serious opera,” as opposed to opera buffa, “comic opera”) appeared in Naples in the late seventeenth century; Alessandro Scarlatti is perhaps its best-known practitioner. Works in this genre featured expository sections sung in a recitative, or “talky,” style, alternating with dramatic arias sung in the highly ornamented bel canto style, often by castrati.
b Loie Fuller (1862–1928), a contemporary of Isadora Duncan, was the most famous protomodernist dancer of her day. Her delirious Serpentine Dance, performed in a billowing, translucent costume of China silk under innovative colored lighting (which she invented), made her the darling of belle époque Paris, an inspiration to Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec.