Jilli, did you know these intriguing facts about Edward Gorey?
In later years, he lived year-round in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, where he wrote and directed numerous evening-length entertainments, often featuring his own papier-mâché puppets, in an ensemble known as La Theatricule Stoique. His major theatrical work was the libretto for an "Opera Seria for Handpuppets", The White Canoe, to a score by the composer Daniel James Wolf. Based on the Lady of the Lake legend, the opera premiered posthumously. On August 13, 1987, his play "Lost Shoelaces" premiered in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In the early 1970s, Gorey wrote an unproduced screenplay for a silent film, The Black Doll.
The Black Doll! Papier-mâché puppets! La Theatricule Stoique!
Also...
Gorey was noted for his fondness for ballet (for many years, he religiously attended all performances of the New York City Ballet) and cats, of which he had many. Both figure prominently in his work. His knowledge of literature and films was unusually extensive, and in his interviews, he named as some of his favorite artists Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Francis Bacon, George Balanchine, Balthus, Louis Feuillade, Ronald Firbank, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, Robert Musil, Yasujiro Ozu, Anthony Trollope, and Johannes Vermeer. Gorey was also an unashamed pop culture junkie, avidly following soap operas and TV comedies like Petticoat Junction and Cheers, and he had particular affection for dark genre series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman: The Animated Series, and The X-Files; he once told an interviewer that he so enjoyed the Batman series that it was influencing the visual style of one of his upcoming books. Gorey treated TV commercials as an artform in themselves, even taping his favorites for later study. But Gorey was especially fond of movies, and for a time he did regular and very waspish reviews for the Soho Weekly under the pseudonym Wardore Edgy.
There's a Gorey documentary almost done.
“The first things I wrote seriously, for some unknown reason, were plays. I think I may have copies of them...and I hope no one else has copies of them! But I wrote those when I was in the army and WWII and I don’t know why I decided to write. I suppose it must have been some strong, dramatic urge at the time but I never tried to get them put on, or anything. They were all very exotic and filled with...they were pretentious in a way and in another way, I don’t think they were as pretentious as they might have been, let’s put it that way. I didn’t go in for endless, dopey poetic monologues for people. They moved right along. They were rather bizarre, I think, rather overwritten in a way. I don’t even remember what they were about, if anything.” -- Edward Gorey on his theatrical beginnings
Wouldn't you want to read those plays now?
Gorey was a founding member of the Poets' Theatre, along with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, V. R. Lang, Alison Lurie, William Matchett, Thornton Wilder and William Carlos Williams. He designed sets for the first play the group presented - O'Hara's one-man show "Try, Try" in 1951.
The 1952 production? THE SINISTER TEDDY BEAR, A SINISTER PLAY
I kid you not.