Edward Gorey's earliest documented design for a stage set piece is a panel used as the 1940 Christmas Concert backdrop at the Francis Parker School. The "stained glass window" depicts three rotund monks, drinking wine that is being distributed by a flying Putto. It is amusing and telling that 15 year old Edward chose to depict the excesses of the holiday season for a Christmas concert backdrop, and that his teachers went along with the idea. Titled Cum Beatitudinibus Bacchi in pencil on the left side of the drawing, the title can be generally translated as With Blessed Wine.
The drawing has a grid drawn over the image that is ten squares wide and twenty squares high. The grid system is the simplest method of enlarging an image as each square can represent any measurement, so the artwork can be drawn at any size, gridded, and then enlarged or reduced in size.
To
enlarge this drawing, a 10 x 20 grid was drawn on the full size set
piece. The artist, or team of artists (presumably Edward himself) then transfered what appears on the
drawing to each corresponding grid square on the panel. In the school's yearbook photograph, the window appears to be about 10' tall, so in this instance each square would be be 6" x 6" and four squares together would be one square foot.
After high school, Edward Gorey participated in other theatrical endeavors throughout college and beyond. Other than some poster and broadside designs, I have been unable to find any records of actual set designs until 1973 when he designed a production of Dracula at the Cyrus Pierce Theater in Nantucket. There are only three known surviving drawings of set pieces from the Nantucket production of Dracula - the drop curtain, proscenium arch, and the back wall of arches. While the artwork is very precisely rendered, there is no indication of scale on these drawings, so it is unclear if these pieces were drawn to an exact enlargement scale to fit the stage or, like the high school window design, a grid system was used to enlarge the artwork.
This production was produced by John Wulp and directed by Dennis Rosa, who seems to have had mixed memories of the production. Carol Verberg (author, friend, and producer of many Edward Gorey production on Cape Cod in the 1990's) related a chance encounter with Dennis Rosa on a bus in San Francisco some years after his collaborations with Mr. Gorey on Dracula.
Ms. Verberg relates that when asked about the Dracula sets, Mr. Rosa stated that "Edward didn't "design" the set for Dracula, he just did the drawings, which an under-credited underling transformed into a functioning 3-D set design."
We can take this statement with a dose of salt as John Wulp spoke highly of Edward Gorey's involvement in the production. No doubt, Mr. Gorey was not fluent in stage design and needed to work with and be coached by an experienced set designer/constructor.
Some years ago, I chatted with John Wulp over the phone about the Dracula sets and asked why there are rugs on the stone floors in the Nantucket production but not in the Broadway incarnation. He said that they made the Gorey-designed rugs out of painted canvas and put them down, but that the actors were constantly being tripped up by them, so they decided to leave the floor bare. In the photo above, you can see that the rug is rather thin and does not lay flat.
Next post: More on painting the Dracula sets.
