Theater News

Continuing the celebration of Edward Gorey's 100th birthday year, the Florida base acting troupe Pantasmagoria will be presenting PHANTASMAGORIA XVI "Hauntingly Whimsical Tales" from October 3rd through November 8th at various theaters in various cities in Florida.

Echoing Edward Gorey's own theatrical entertainments from the 1990's, Phantasmagoria combines "Evocative Storytelling, Phantastical Dance, Puppetry, Projections, Original Music and MORE" into an evening of entertainments based on Mr. Gorey's books.

To view the performance schedule and purchase tickets, go HERE. 

Auction News

Considering that 2025 is the centennial of Edward Gorey's birth, the auction market featuring original art by the artist has been a bit quiet. 

Notable exceptions include the Femme Fatale with a Cigarette drawing from Leaves From A Mislaid Album (Gotrham Book Mart, 1972) that sold at Bohnam's Auctions in April (see my post from April 13, 2025), and the collage of Vampire Bat Drawings and Sketches that sold at Swann Auction Galleries Illustration Art auction on June 18, 2025.

Edward Gorey designed the sets and costumes for the 1973 Broadway production of Dracula, visually referencing the 1931 movie that starred Bela Lugosi in the title role. Through his signature crosshatch drawing style Mr. Gorey created an environment that evoked the suspenseful look and feel of the black and white movie. 

In a burst of inspirational genius, Edward Gorey did not just recreate the movie sets, he filled the stage with a seemingly endless variety of bats. Virtually every architectural detail, piece of furniture and costume was decorated with a bat motif. To this end, Mr. Gorey filled sketchbooks with drawings of bats.

On June 5, 2018 several sketchbook pages with Dracula bat designs were sold at Swann.  

The artwork auctioned at Swann this week is a collage of more than half a dozen clippings of bat drawings. Some of the drawings are expressive sketches, while others are fully realized finished pieces of art. Collectively, they take the viewer on a visual journey of Edward Gorey's creative process to embellish the set for this singular production. This remarkable artwork sold for $13,750 (including buyer's premium).

Images courtesy Russell Lehrer, Swann Auction Galleries, Brady Schwind, and The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. 

Actress Valerie Mahaffey

Actress Valerie Mahaffey has died at the age of 71. Amongst her extensive acting credits on screen, television and stage was her 1979 Broadway performance as Lucy Steward in the Edward Gorey Production of Dracula opposite Raul Julia in the title role. Ms Mahaffey replaced Ann Sachs, the original Lucy.

 

(Photograph by Kenn Duncan. For more images of Mahaffey and Julia in the play, visit the New York Public Library Digital Collections https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?q=valerie+mahaffey+dracula)

An Edward Gorey Theatrical Exhibition

It matters not which coast you live on or if you reside somewhere inbetween, 2025 is the year to find rare and unusual treasures by Edward Gorey on display. The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco is presenting Backstage With Edward Gorey, A Centennial Exhibition, which runs from Saturday April 5, 2025 through August 10, 2025.

The exhibition will feature original artwork, posters, and ephemera  related to Edward Gorey's theatrical career from the personal collection of Carol Verburg. Ms. Verburg was Mr. Gorey's theatrical collaborator and friend in the 1990's and she produced many of the theatrical entertainments he created. The exhibition will include many of Ms. Verburg's personal treasures that she featured in her book The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey (published 2024 by Chronicle Books).

 For more information about the exhibit and the Cartoon Art Museum, visit, https://www.cartoonart.org/backstage-with-edward-gorey

 

 

A Gorey Inspired Puppet

My husband Bill Campbell likes to surprise me each year with an Edward Gorey inspired toy that he makes by hand. With the publication of Carol Verburg's Gorey/Theater book, Bill began working on a hand puppet based on the actors Gorey created for his Le Théâtricule stoïque puppet troupe.

Bill was working towards completing a puppet in time for our Thanksgiving anniversary, but moved things up when I was asked to participate in Carol's October 15th book launch party. With only photos of Edward Gorey's original puppets as reference, Bill sculpted a head and then sewed several practice bodies in plain cloth until he felt he had gotten the proportions correct. He then used a "Gorey appropriate" cloth and sewed the final body. The addition of a parasol made from antique lace completed the figure.

Since none of Edward Gorey's original puppet actors were available to attend the book launch, Bill's understudy puppet was displayed. After her star turn at the event, our Lady With A Lace Parasol has taken up residence in a Chinese Urn in a corner of our dining room.

Everyone knows that actors will perform at a moments notice and our Lady With A Lace Parasol is the consummate understudy, always angling for her turn in the spotlight. Here she is, performing to Absinthe Frappé by Victor Herbert. Written in 1904 for It Happened In Nordland, the tune is played on our antique 1910 Regina music box.

A Visit, A Party & A New Book

This past weekend, Bill and I had the pleasure of a visit to our home from Carol Verburg. Ms. Verburg is an author, playwright, theatrical director and producer. She was also a personal friend of Edward Gorey and produced many of his Cape Cod theatrical entertainments in the 1990's. Our visit passed much too quickly and we look forward to spending time with her again.

In addition to her previously published books on Edward Gorey's Cape Cod theatricals, Ms. Verburg has a new volume being published in October titled The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey. For more information on this upcoming book, go HERE.

Carol Verburg will be the featured guest at the upcoming Edward Gorey Summer Cocktail Soiree on Thursday July 31. She will give a brief talk at the event. This annual party is a fundraiser for The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust and will be held at the Strand Book Store in New York City. Tickets for the event are now on sale HERE. The event will once again include a silent auction.
 

Neil Gaiman

Time and again, in interviews and online posts author Neil Gaiman references Edward Gorey and the influences his work has had on his own creative endeavors. While the two men never met, Mr. Gaiman expresses a deep appreciation of Mr. Gorey and his works.

In a post on Tumblr, Neil Gaiman replied to a fan query, asking if he owned any original artwork by Edward Gorey. Mr. Gaiman not only responded in the affirmative, he provided a couple photos of some pieces in his Gorey collection.

The upper left photo shows the magnificent original artwork from Print Magazine. The other three photos show large, hand painted theatrical set pieces. Mr. Gaiman appears in a discrete selfie in upper right photo showing the pair of large set panels.

Mr. Gaiman has been interviewed for the upcoming documentary about Gorey's influences on his work by filmmaker Christopher Seufert. There are four interview clips posted on YouTube including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcJX_TTpBKU

Constructing and Painting an Edward Gorey Stage Set, Part 3 - Crosshatching Dracula

Edward Gorey's distinctive set designs for the 1973 Nantucket production of Dracula prompted an immediate discussion about transferring the show to Broadway. Whereas Edward Gorey's previous participation in set design had been in amateur and regional theater where he could be present, the construction and painting of the Broadway sets would be executed by a professional scene shop that was not under his personal day to day observation. This meant that his drawings needed to be precise and drawn to scale as the scene shop would construct the sets from the drawings and their notations.

On some of the drawings, Mr. Gorey added notes saying he did not know exactly what size something was supposed to be and hoped that would suffice. Today of course, texts and emails would be flying back and forth along with a snapshot showing the problem area(s), but this was a slower, more handmade time that relied on phone calls or sending actual artwork via couriers or through the mail.

The Nantucket Dracula sets had rooms and furnishings that were relatively life sized. For the New York stage at the Martin Beck Theater, the set would now be 30' across and 30' tall which required that the set components needed to be bigger and bolder while still taking the actors into consideration.

The sets for both productions were completely hand painted and one of the main stumbling blocks was enlarging Edward Gorey's distinctive drawing style to stage proportions while maintaining the integrity of the linework. Mr. Gorey combined three basic drawing styles for the sets to represent various materials and atmospheres - precise crosshatching, organic line work, and watercolor wash.

This bookcase set detail (Broadway production) illustrates all these techniques combined together. The "stone" column on the left is densely and precisely crosshatched, the wooden bookcase frame, section of paneling, and the books show several styles of organic line work, and the bell pull is watercolor washed so it looked like embroidered fabric. It should be noted that much of the set had a wash applied after the line work was completed to soften and tone the look of the set.

In the above photo, the top image is Edward Gorey's original artwork and the lower photo is the Broadway set with actor Raul Julia in the title role. The realized sets are masterfully painted and have the look and feel of the original artwork, but lack some of the spontaneity and density of Mr. Gorey's touch.

Producer John Wulp told Kevin McDermott (photographer, actor, producer, longtime Gotham Book Mart employee and friend of Edward Gorey) that the main stumbling block with the sets was to get the correct look for the crosshatching that Edward Gorey was famous for. After several unsuccessful attempts, a special tool was created that helped give the painted lines the correct look and feel. In the video below, my husband Bill and I have recreated the tool and filmed a short demonstration on how it would be used to paint the sets.

 

*Photographs showing Edward Gorey on the set of the original Broadway sets are by photographer Jack Mitchell. Photograph of Raul Julia on stage by Martha Swope (visit the New York Public Library Digital Collection for more photos - https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&keywords=dracula+broadway). Set detail showing bookcase from Designing and Drawing for the Theater by Lynn Pecktal. Images of artwork from the Dracula Portfolio courtesy Russell Lehrer.

Constructing and Painting a Stage Set, Part 2

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 The Blessings of Baccus.

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.

Constructing and Painting an Edward Gorey Theater Set, Part 1

 

Designing and Drawing for the Theatre by Lynn Pecktal (McGraw-Hill, 1995) is a textbook on the practical application of professional set design and construction, focusing on the New York theater scene. The book is an worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in how theatrical sets are conceived and executed. The book is also a time capsule of the time period and includes in depth interviews with several award winning stage designers.

The 1976 Broadway production of Dracula is featured with several double page spreads and additional spot illustrations showing the technical aspects involved in creating the sets for the production. Pecktal was scenery supervisor for the show. Unfortunately, Edward Gorey was not interviewed, but the photographs of the set being constructed offer a backstage view of the production. 

Viewing the information in this book got me ruminating on the process of transferring Mr. Gorey's scale drawings into functioning three dimensional theater sets. This began an informal search to collect stories from individuals who were directly involved in Gorey-designed stage productions. Forthcoming posts will explore how Edward Gorey's set designs were transferred from page to stage.

I would like to acknowledge fellow Gorey collector and enthusiast Todd Camp for bringing Designing and Drawing for the Theatre to my attention through one of his informative Instagram posts on Gorey ephemera.

 

Voyage with a Vampire

 

The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust has been working on expanding their website and a new feature introduced this past week is a Gorey blog. Entries for the blog will be written by different authors on a variety of Gorey related subjects. To kick off this exciting new feature to their website, the Trust invited me to write an entry that would be appropriate for this time of year. The resulting essay, Voyage with a Vampire can be seen here:

 https://edwardgorey.org/2021/10/20/voyage-with-a-vampire?fbclid=IwAR3tX9Vi24B75_1CkmTWLrlhD4jYhiDgKY3R6PYkQ2ro1Y54PvDq1-rs61Y

Goreyana's 13th Anniversary

 

2007/08 was a dark time for Edward Gorey collectors. The Gotham Book Mart, the mainline source not only for Gorey books, merchandise and original artwork, but also for information had closed permanently in 2007. Most book dealers would have a few Gorey items in stock, but there was no longer a centralized location for information and collectors were for the most part on their own, clinging to their 1996 copies of Goreyography by Henry Toledano and old catalogs from various book dealers and auction houses for reference. The seminal Elegant Enigmas traveling exhibition would not materialize until 2009, and the only physical location to experience the works of Edward Gorey was The Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts.

As a way to re-energize myself and reconnect with my collection, I created this Goreyana blog on October 5, 2008. My intention was to show pieces from my collection, inform interested parties about Gorey happenings, pass along many of the stories that I had gathered over the years and hopefully begin conversations with others interested in Edward Gorey and his works. Thirteen years of diligent posting have not dampened my curiosity and enthusiasm for all things Gorey and I look forward to creating upcoming posts that everyone will find informative and entertaining.

- Irwin Terry

goreyana.blogspot.com

ampootozote@aol.com

Auction News - A New Record Price

A new record price was set at auction today for a piece of original artwork by Edward Gorey at Swann Auction Galleries. Lot 160 featured a matched pair of drawings framed together that were created as part of the theatrical environment for Amphigorey, A Musicale. The drawings, drawn at a 1/2" = 1' scale were reproduced as cutout "theatrical boxes" with life sized figures and hung on either side of the stage at the Perry Street Theater. The effect when entering the theater was that there were already well heeled audience members awaiting the start of the production.

This exciting pair of drawings was given to actor/producer Kevin McDermott by Mr. Gorey when he was fundraising for the production of Off Broadway production of The Gorey Details. The drawings have been in a private collection since 1999/2000. Estimated at $4000.00 to $6000.00, the final auction sale price (including buyer's premium) was $22,500.00. The previous auction record of $18,750.00 for a work by Edward Gorey was also achieved at Swann in 2017 (see my post https://goreyana.blogspot.com/2017/03/auction-news_23.html).

Auction News

You never know where unusual Edward Gorey collectibles will turn up. The September 25 memorabilia auction at Profiles In History included items from the estate of actor Martin Landau. Mr. Landau led the 1984/85 touring production of Dracula, with set and costume designs by Edward Gorey. As a souvenir of the production, Mr. Landau had a piece of the set signed by the production's cast and crew.

Edward Gorey's sets had multitudes of bats and skulls scattered about the three interiors. For Miss Lucy's bedroom in Act 2  these skulls were used as drapery stays at the window as as part of the elaborate bed hangings. The skulls are constructed in cast fiberglass with a wooden backing. The surface has been airbrushed  for use on the set. At 7" x 8" x 5", the skull is an impressive Gorey/Dracula/Landau cross reference collectible.

Edward Gorey Inspired Theater

If you reside in St. Louie and are looking for a little mid morning diversion for your children between now and Halloween, you can visit a local library where the Storytime Theater will present A Delightfully Gorey Tale For Tots. The performances are free and will be performed at different libraries in September and October. For the locations and schedule, visit www.slpl.org/news/storytime-theater-a-delightfully-gorey-tale-for-tots

Don Giovanni Program

Did Edward Gorey ever sleep? After more than 40 years of actively searching for pieces created by Mr. Gorey it is still possible to run across an unfamiliar item with alarming frequency. This wonderful theatrical program, designed by Mr. Gorey to accompany a production of Don Giovanni in 1980 is such an item.

In 2016, Swann Auction Galleries sold a number of original set and costume designs by Edward Gorey from the production of Don Giovanni (goreyana.blogspot.com/2016/09/auction-news.html). Mounted by the Monadnock, New Hampshire Music Festival, the Mozart opera was directed by Peter Sellers. The program for the two night only production has a striking cover design by Mr. Gorey. A rose, which is opening to reveal a skull inside it, is surrounded by the title and dancing flames. Given the brevity of the performance run, these programs are understandably quite rare.