Backstage with Edward Gorey: A Centennial Exhibition

The Cartoon Art Museum is proud to present Backstage with Edward Gorey: A Centennial Exhibition, a selection of original drawings and ephemera created by this extraordinary artist-author who was also a playwright, stage designer, and director. The works on display are drawn from the collection of Gorey’s longtime friend and collaborator Carol Verburg, author of the lavish new art biography The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts and Stories (Chronicle Books, 2024).

Backstage with Edward Gorey opens with an eventful soiree on Saturday April 5, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, part of the Cartoon Art Museum's yearlong celebration of Gorey’s remarkable career between his birth in 1925 and death in 2000.

This exhibition features a number of original works that have never been shown before, but are known only to collectors or those lucky enough to have seen Gorey’s under-the-radar “entertainments” on Cape Cod. Highlights include the stage set and poster he designed for Verburg’s production of Hamlet–which inspired his puppet pastiche Omlet–and his poster for Verburg’s play The Whistling Pig, named for a tea-shop in Gorey’s Epistolary Play. Also on view are photographs, lithographs, calligraphic promotional materials, and four of the hand-sewn, rice-stuffed animals that Gorey crafted for friends and well-wishers, including his signature “Figbash” creature.

About The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey

The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey (Chronicle Books, 2024) unveils a previously hidden side of a brilliant, inventive, and influential artist. During the last dozen-plus years of his life, Edward Gorey left Manhattan for Cape Cod and plunged wholeheartedly into his lifelong love affair with the performing arts. This lavish stage biography by Gorey’s friend and comrade-in-arts Carol Verburg combines front-line reporting with newly released drawings, sketches, notes-to-self, and other visual treasures from the Gorey Archive. For the first time,  Gorey’s fans, collectors, fellow thespians, and anyone who loves the theater can discover the extraordinary range and creativity of his theatrical artwork — colorful sets and costumes for The Mikado, giant hand-painted urns, intricate lithographs, storyboard sketches — along with a sampler of scripts ranging from a pastiche of Nancy Drew in limericks to an opera libretto for hand puppets to a Christmas homage to Agatha Christie.

For anyone who’s ever been curious about the brilliant, eccentric creator of such classics as The Gashlycrumb Tinies (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears”), Dracula on Broadway, and the animation that opens PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery, this revelatory book is a treasure trove. For art lovers, it’s a spectacular 250-page exhibition of elaborate black-and-white drawings and full-color paintings. For actors and directors, it’s a revelatory look at a unique genius’s never-before-published texts for the stage. For collectors and fans, it’s the definitive survey of Gorey’s joyful experiments with 3-D real-time multimedia, conveniently packaged in a deluxe hardcover volume bound in red velvet.

About Edward Gorey

Renowned for his miniature story books and alphabets pairing sparse, oblique texts with lavishly detailed black-and-white drawings (The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest, The Curious Sofa, and many more), Edward Gorey was first and last a dramatist. His approach to the theater was shaped by his “everyone does everything” experience as a founding member of the legendary Poets’ Theatre at Harvard University after World War II. He was often asked to design posters for local companies during his family summers on Cape Cod, and when the Nantucket Stage Company begged him to design the sets and costumes for their new Dracula, he couldn’t say no. Transplanted to Broadway in 1977, Dracula won him a Tony Award which enabled him to leave Manhattan permanently for the Cape. There he spent his last thirteen years devising and staging "entertainments"-diverse collections of sketches and scenes, plus a few enigmatic plays-for local actors and hand-made puppets. The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey is a 250-page sampler of his never-before-published drawings and scripts.

About Carol Verburg

Writer, director, and theater administrator Carol (CJ) Verburg spent the 1990s collaborating with her Yarmouth Port neighbor Edward Gorey on theater projects, and collecting scripts in London to direct on Cape Cod. Their close personal and creative friendship inspired her new art biography The Theatrical Adventures ofEdward Gorey (Chronicle Books, 2024), following her multimedia monograph Edward Gorey On Stage and her award-winning play Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians. Verburg’s Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod mystery novels, starting with Croaked, began as one of her and Gorey’s “idées du jour” over lunch. A longtime editor and freelance writer for publishers on both coasts, she now lives in San Francisco, where she attended an early Edwardian Ball and staged a 75th-birthday tribute to Gorey at the Cartoon Art Museum. She continues to publish crime fiction and is working on a historical mystery about New Englanders who emigrated to California after the Gold Rush.