Celebrating Community Theatre with Edward Gorey

The writer, illustrator, designer, publisher and playmaker remembered by one of his most dedicated on-stage collaborators

The cover of The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey, lovingly written by Carol Verburg is beautifully embossed with a velvet stage curtain, though the petit theatricals within were rarely performed in proscenium for large audience. The plays of artist, writer and cat lover Edward Gorey were largely experienced in barns turned into theatres and retail spaces repurposed by dedicated theatre artists into black box venues with fifty seats or fewer.

The Theatrical Adventures isn't just a celebration of overlooked Gorey works. It's a love letter to the idea of community theatre, a collection of some 6,000 non-profit producers of plays and, as Gorey called his works "entertainments" put on by (often) skilled amateurs for the love of the art, rather than money. Success in this endeavor means raising enough money from one show to put on the next and though many involved have professional ambitions, not all do and for the hopefuls, this is usually a step along the way, perhaps towards studying in college, or building a resume to take to commercial auditions, with a headshot stapled to the back of the page. Nobody, comic film aside, is actually Waiting for Guffman, though the artists do dream big.

Community theatres hold a special place in Middlebrow culture. Some are wild and experimental. Others focus on old chestnuts of 20th century theatre, or on Shakespeare and other classics. Some put on amateur productions of big Broadway shows. Strategies abound — one theatre might specialize in big cast extravaganzas, hoping that each actor will bring a dozen folks to buy tickets. Others specialize in small cast sizes and abstract sets, hoping to take big artistic risks while keeping costs down. All depend on the passion of people with day jobs and other responsibilities to make their own art and this type of art is one of the few that doesn’t scale and is truly hyperlocal. That can mean a lot of things, from providing towns and cities with homegrown productions of shows people would otherwise have to travel to see, to creating completely new stage works.

In Cape Cod, Massachusetts during the 1990s, Gorey created more than a dozen works for community theatres in both winter and summer months, catering to townies and vacationers. Verburg served as assisted director for most of these productions and facilitated the few she didn’t. Gorey had a following as an author and illustrator and as a theatrical designer. His illustrated books, each a work of art, trafficked in dark verse, wordplay, weird children, macabre scenarios and cats, which were his beloved pets. Indeed, he made his first fortune by designing the set and look of Broadway’s Dracula in the 1980s, creating a live entertainment that evoked earlier century film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. He made his second fortune designing and illustrating a best-selling book of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was not affiliated with the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that had just moved to Broadway from London’s West End, but that definitely benefitted from it.

So Gorey is most known for his drawings and books and also known for his theatrical designs, but when he took his two fortunes to Cape Cod and began working with Verburg, he became one of so many community theatre artists — a person who made his money in one profession but expended considerable passions on the floorboards of black box theatres built into the husks of shuttered convenience stores.

Verburg shares a telling anecdote about another Cape Cod writer that sets a familiar scene for any community theatre artist working today. While working with a theatre in need of funding (as they all are) she saw a framed letter from Kurt Vonnegut in the office. The letter promised that the theatre could stage any of his works at any time, without paying royalties or even letting him know, if it would help their cause. The text doesn’t say, but I wonder if this is the Orleans theatre where Vonnegut premiered his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June in 1971. When Verburg saw the letter and considered the theatre’s plight, she decided to mount a stage adaptation of Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, which would have been an ambitious project even in the best funded Broadway theatre. To enhance the experience and chances of success, she wanted Vonnegut, who had lived on Cape Cod for many years but decamped for New York City, to play an on stage role. So, she reached out.

Vonnegut did not respond well. He had sold the rights to everything he had written, he said. His publisher, not him, would have to authorize a production of Cat’s Cradle. When Verburg cited the framed letter he scoffed that it was a love letter and that no love letter should ever be entirely believed.

Enter Gorey, stage left.

Gorey owned most, if not all, of his published work and was willing and able to create on demand. His books were short and filled with lyrics and illustrations. They were graphic novels, of a sort. He didn’t have ambitions to write Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or even Dracula. He approached theatre more as a sketch writer and absurdist, wanting to create cabaret evenings of sketches and song, in the manner of early David Ives or even the David Mamet of Goldberg Street. He wanted to collaborate with actors, directors and designers, bringing pages to rehearsals that were fodder for improvisation an instant revision. In short, he and Verburg put the community in community theatre.

Now, a brief soliloquy about community theatre and what it means: We Americans professionalize everything. I remember noting, on my first international experience which was a long visit to Ireland after college, that when people asked “What do you do?” they did not mean “for a living.” They were more interested in hearing that you are a writer than that you work in a book shop for money. In the U.S., “for a living” is the unstated but implied part of the question, “what do you do?” So, community theatre can get a bad rap because it’s a hobby, not a job. It is plagued by the implicit assumption that its artists are not good enough to pay their bills that way. It carries the stink of “second rate.” Plenty of non-professional theatres (by which I mean, money losing as opposed to non-profits) reject the “community theatre” label because of this.

It’s hogwash, of course. Some community theatre sucks. But so did the very professional, high budget, Broadway adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. So did the second Ant-Man movie, where they tried to make Kang a thing. So did the three Star Wars sequels and the first two of the prequels, which had combined budgets that could repel Vladimir Putin from Ukraine.

The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey tells us about a special time for community theatre in Cape Cod during the 1990s. You had Gorey at the height of his creative powers, you had an intellectual and creative Cape Cod social scene to support theatrical experimentation, especially with a name attached, and you had media from regional papers and alt weeklies to The Boston Globe and The New York Times who would review these shows as serious art. That’s crucial.

During this period, Gorey created sketch reviews that he called entertainments, holiday shows and high teas attached to book signings and performance art. When he felt more like a designer than a writer, he staged productions like Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which touches my heart as I once played a Roman guard in a community theatre production of that show, directed by my friend Jeanette Isaacson, who had previously directed Pablo Picasso’s elusive play Desire Caught by the Tail, which was a Gorey selection.

Were Gorey’s productions hits? Yeah, kind of. Sometimes. But what mattered, and what matters in community theatre, is that they were part of a conversation. Reviewers compared Gorey to Samuel Beckett and while reading the script excerpts presented in this luscious book, I also see hints of Eugene Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello, Max Frisch and the weirder works of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.

Very few writers achieve playwriting prominence from community theatre work (trust me, friends). In the 90s, the media environment was more supportive because we had local publications and, crucially, alt-weeklies, but it didn’t seem easy at the time. Gorey had Cape Cod’s natural cultural exchange with New York and Manhattan, but Verburg describes that even he was chagrined that his plays did not move from their enclave to wider or commercial production. Theatre’s a tough business because, for most of us who love it and love doing it, it isn’t a business at all.

This bring us back to my diversion about the professionalism of everything in the U.S. and how we don’t value hobbies and passion projects but do value “pay the bills” work. Verburg wrote a love letter to her friend and artistic collaborator, who dies 24 years ago in Hyannis. These close friendships and collaborations are the essence of community theatre. It’s very personal. It’s so personal that I naively believe that the casts of movies and TV shows I watch are all tightly connected off set and why I am always surprised to find out that, I don’t know, the cast and crew of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are not all super-close and hanging out every weekend and at holidays. While I of course understand that these are professionals doing jobs and that they leave their co-workers at the end of the day just like I leave mine, my subconscious can’t escape the feelings of closeness that develop when artists work together, often with commercial ambitions, but without commercial rewards or expectations.

This isn’t just a book about Gorey (though it’s a great untold tale) and it isn’t just a book about theatre (but if you’ve done it, you’ll feel it in the pages). It’s a book about skilled people making good art for its own sake and, more importantly, loving each other along the way.