Dead Letter Writer

Edward Gorey hates Halloween. Which is not as strange as it sounds. For Gorey, master of often whimsical yet very particular horror, Halloween is pretty much amateur night.

“People are always asking me to do something for Halloween,” Gorey says, “and I don’t know, I just usually go to a movie so I don’t have to answer the door. Fortunately,” he adds, “there are no children in my neighborhood.”

He adds this, and it is clear that Gorey likes children. Which is a little stranger than it sounds. He has, after all, with cheerful grisliness, knocked off more kids than anyone this side of the Brothers Grimm. His perhaps best-known work, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” is an alphabet of infanticide (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears”). Body count: 26. And it doesn’t stop there. In much of the writer-artist’s virtually unquantifiable and certainly unqualifiable oeuvre, children meet untimely ends. “Oh well, children are the easiest targets,” he has inevitably responded to any stray probing of his subject matter.

On the other hand, Gorey at least affords youngsters their dignity. They follow their destiny deadpan, in suitable high collars and hats, no tears or pleadings or regret, just a quick shove by fate and, as their creator would say: “Well, there you are.”

So there are a lot of undercurrents tugging at the West Coast debut of Gorey’s theatrical “entertainment” “English Soup.” It marks Halloween (performances run today through Saturday) and will be held in Storyopolis, a children’s bookstore and gallery. A lovely airy space on trendy Robertson Boulevard, Storyopolis is so large a psycho-geographic leap from Gorey’s black and white, cross-hatched Edwardian literary milieu that it seems absurd.

Which makes it completely appropriate.

Through the end of November, Gorey also has an accompanying exhibition titled “Dramatis Artifacti,” the span of which establishes him as something approaching a Gothic Renaissance man. In the half-century of his career, Gorey certainly has not been idle. His own books--with their signature men in fur coats and handlebar mustaches, round-faced beady-eyed children and severe women in buns, all stoically contemplating something quite dreadful, and often dead, in rooms with busy wallpaper--give new meaning to the term “body of work.”

There are tales written under anagrammatical pseudonyms--Awdrey-Gore, Ogdred Weary--some commercially published, others by his own Fantod Press. Alphabets are a recurring theme, including one devoted to the Figbash, his own mythical, slightly ominous creature. A list of available works from Gotham Book Mart in New York, Gorey’s unofficial archivists, runs four crowded pages with offerings such as “The Utter Zoo,” “The Fraught Settee,” “The Just Dessert.” (Just for the record, a first edition of an early work, such as “The Unstrung Harp” or “The Fatal Lozenge,” goes for almost $400.)

But there are more bodies in this library: Gorey has illustrated works for authors as disparate as Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. He has done posters for the New York Opera and the New York Ballet; his New York Ballet shopping bag was the hot carryall for several years. He designed the Tony-winning costumes for the 1977 Broadway hit “Dracula” as well as the enduring opening sequence for PBS’ “Mystery!” More recently, he adorned the cover of the New York Review of Books for its 35th anniversary.

Much of this, as well as a homemade beanbag Figbash or two, is included in the exhibition. The folks at Storyopolis had fantasized for years about a Goreyfest, and finally put it together with the help of Carol Verberg, who has produced many of Gorey’s live “entertainments.”

Regrettably, nothing could lure the 73-year-old famously reclusive author and director from East Coast to West.

“Oh, I never go anywhere,” he says, and he doesn’t. Since moving from New York to Cape Cod--”10 years, was it 10 years ago? Oh well, something like that”--he hasn’t ventured very far, just to local eateries and theaters. “I might miss something on the tube,” he offers as one explanation. “Who would take care of the cats?” is another.

So visiting L.A. was out. “Oh who knows?” he says. “I might love it, and then where would I be?”

But he’s sending his troupe, a group of Cape Cod actors, many of whom have worked with Gorey on his “entertainments” and plays staged at various Cape Cod venues for the last 10 years.

“They’re very excited,” he says. “They think they’re going to be discovered or something. And who knows? Maybe they will.”

Like much of Gorey’s work, “English Soup” seems to defy description. “Bits and pieces,” he says. “Things that I’ve written, oh dear, some music, some puppets.”

A cast of seven will perform a dozen or so skits, a few of them interpretations of previously published books, including the popular “The Doubtful Guest” and “The Epileptic Bicycle.” In some of the mini-plays, the actors will employ the puppets of Gorey’s Le Theatricule Stoique--hand puppets, with round heads of clay or plaster and little or no expression, made by Gorey himself, who also directed the performance.

“I don’t really direct,” he says. “I just let it happen. It’s not really theater. [The actors] are not professional people, everybody has day jobs, you know, and families, so it’s hard to get everyone together to rehearsal. Everyone always seems to have these excuses. I find it vaguely miraculous that it comes together at all.”

Joe Richards is one actor who has been with Gorey since his first “entertainment,” “Lost Shoelaces,” which was performed at the Woods Hole Theatre.

“Edward has his own take on things,” Richards says, snorting a bit at the obvious. “I think he places things in Edwardian society because that’s far enough away for people to see the humor.”

Absurdity also helps; in one skit, Richards acted out the tale of a much-pampered baby who is, in the end, eaten by dogs. “If a woman had played it, it would have been too close to home. But I’m an overweight bearded male, so you can see it as a parody.”

Gorey, he says, “gets you to laugh at something you probably shouldn’t and then realize you are laughing. It’s the distance of melodrama.”

Melodrama, with or without a twist of macabre, seems to be a personality trait. Before he left New York, Gorey was known to prowl the streets in a full-length fur coat (he has since given up fur) and high-top tennis shoes.

Now, although by no means a hermit--”when the people show up at my door, and they invariably do, I’m always sweetly charming. ‘Yes, yes, now would you please go away’ “--his life is notably circumscribed, the center point being his Cape Cod home. Depending on the observer, this singular domicile, aproned by a village green, is either picturesque or eerie, stocked with an assortment of collections--books, tapes, finials, toys--worthy of any notable Dickensian character.

Gorey is a bit Dickensian himself; first there’s his name, and then there’s his speech.

“Oh well,” he says with a sigh when asked what he’s up to of late, “you know, I’m just living here in an ever-increasing pile of debris. Oh, you know, I’m working on things, there’s always something, but nothing I care to explain. If I can’t explain what I have done,” he breaks off into a rather congested laugh, “I certainly can’t explain what I haven’t. No, I’m just sitting here, coughing. . . .”

He moves from one topic to the next in a sort of verbal swoon, reminiscent of a really good one-man show--not surprising since his career has taken a bit of a theatrical turn in the last decade.

“I would hardly call it my career,” he says. “It’s where I’m going now. I wish I had done it sooner--I did a little when I was at Harvard--and then not again for what? 45 years. I never seem to do anything, it just sort of happens.”

What just sort of happens in life is the primary theme of Gorey’s work. The most active character in any Gorey tale is fate, the invisible power that commands the boulder to tumble, the uninvited to arrive, the raven to hover. His style has been called Surreal or Dada-esque,with Eastern influences. As in life, much happens in the pauses, much happens off stage.

Which may explain why Gorey’s work has not made what would seem a natural leap to the big screen, especially in these days of frenzied animation.

“Oh dear,” Gorey says with a laugh. “Well, yes, people are always saying, ‘Let’s do this’ and ‘Let’s do that,’ and blah, blah, blah, blah, and then nothing ever happens. I don’t care. Life is too short to spend it trying to figure out deals. I suppose if someone calls me up and says here’s a vast amount of money, I might say OK. Or I might not, depending on my mood.”

“People can’t figure out what to do with Edward,” Verberg says. “He doesn’t push. He just sits back and watches all the strange things people do. He’s a genius in the best sense of the word, he has a completely open mind.”

He is, however, singularly unimpressed by the recent adventures into animation. “I won’t see ‘Antz’ because I don’t do Woody Allen, and it looks perfectly hideous. I have just gotten through ‘Toy Story’--hated it, the way it looked and moved, everything. Detested ‘The Lion King’ and the rest of Disney, well. . . .”

What he does like, he says, is a Saturday morning offering called “Ned’s Newt.” “I noticed a little blurb on it in TV Guide which I read cover to cover. It came on at 8 a.m. Well, I taped it, of course, and it’s marvelous. Just what a very small child would like--the writing is for people with razor-sharp minds who can take in a lot of information in a split-second.”

By and large, he prefers television to most things, although he is five weeks into a news boycott. “It was just before the president was going to make his little speech. What finally drove me crazy was the NBC cable station with pointless people talking endlessly. I just thought, ‘I will never, never watch the news again,’ and I haven’t. Or read the newspapers. The world could have to come to an end, though of course it hasn’t. All I can say is thank God, ‘Buffy [the Vampire Slayer]’s back.”

Besides his West Coast debut, Gorey is also sending off “The Haunted Tea-Cozy,” his first commercial book in 10 years. “It’s coming out at Christmas and of course Harcourt Brace is trying to pretend that it’s my first book in 25 years, which makes all my friends just laugh. I mean, I’ve self-published [through Fantod Press] all sorts of things since then.”

After that, who knows? “I have a book I’ve been working on for 10 years, maybe I’ll finish that,” Gorey says. “I didn’t do a Christmas play last year, I got too tired. I’ll probably do one this year. I was doing a tidy up and I discovered fragments of 25 plays I wanted to write. So they need to get done. Well,” he adds in an uncharacteristic nod to reality, “maybe one or two.”

BE THERE

Edward Gorey’s “English Soup,” Storyopolis, 116 N. Robertson Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Preview tonight at 7:30 (sold out); Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets $15, sold in advance only. (310) 358-2500.

The exhibition “Edward Gorey: Dramatis Artifacti” opens today. Mondays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Closes Nov. 30. (800) 95TALES.