Mr. Earbrass Comes to Fringe Fest

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Photo by Mark Larson

Jesse March as Mr. Earbrass in 'The Unstrung Harp'

Jesse March as Mr. Earbrass in 'The Unstrung Harp'

This has been the summer of writer-illustrator Edward Gorey. In June, Present Music gave the world premiere of Carla Kihlstedt’s song cycle “26 Little Deaths,” inspired by Gorey’s mordantly satirical “Gashlycrumb Tinies.” This Saturday at Milwaukee Fringe Festival, Kathryn Cesarz and Jesse March will present the Midwest premiere of Cesarz’s “The Unstrung Harp,” based on another set of Gorey’s captioned pen-and-ink drawings.

“I have enjoyed Gorey’s work for a long time; I’m a fan of the creepy, dryly humorous style with which he illustrates and writes,” Cesarz says. “The stories also have this sort of ambiguous horror that I find captivating and poetic.”

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Photo by Mark Larson

Kathryn Cesarz and Jesse March in 'The Unstrung Harp'

Kathryn Cesarz and Jesse March in 'The Unstrung Harp'

Cesarz is familiar to Milwaukee audiences from her roles with Quasimondo Physical Theatre and Boozy Bard. Her play Emily was included in the first Milwaukee Fringe Fest (2016). “When I want to California, I was lucky to maintain lots of important friendships over the distance and was able to return to do work in my hometown (this upcoming show included!),” she says. Her most recent Milwaukee performance was in Theatre Gigante’s The Beggar’s Opera in 2019.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Gorey produced a series of picture storybooks. Or, to put it more clearly, his pictures and captions suggest narratives rather than tell stories, leaving much to the realm of the reader’s imagination. His drawings are entirely unique, depicting a vaguely Edwardian era where men went about in high collars and ankle-reaching fur coats and women in floor-length skirts and big hats. Specters haunt the sketchy pen and ink shadows. Children are forever vulnerable to the cruelty of adults.

The public first learned of Gorey through “The Unstrung Harp,” published in 1953. Subtitled “Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel,” it follows a novelist (A Moral Dustbin was his bestseller) as he pads about in his country home near the towns of Collapsed Pudding and Nether Millstone in the English county of Mortshire. He is at loose ends, having the greatest difficulty sewing together his stubbornly unruly plot threads. Mr. Earbrass’ writing desk is half buried beneath scribbled pages of crossed-out lines, “a prolonged and powerfully purple blizzard.” A minor character named Glassglue disconcertingly materializes at the head of the stairs ...

The story of an author wandering alone in his house “felt relevant after the past couple of years with the pandemic keeping us locked up at home,” Cesarz explains. “There are these great images in the story of the author, Mr. Earbrass, in these melodramatic poses—so I imagined my performing partner Jesse who is long, lanky and an archetypal Commedia Dell’Arte lover (over-the-top, balletic) putting a fun and funny spin on the character. I took that and rolled with it.” That the story centers around a single character is important in today’s world of thinly funded performing arts. “It makes it easier to have less actors when producing new theater on a micro-budget,” she adds.

“The staging is physical theatre, but of a storybook. Jesse as Earbrass will not speak throughout the entire play—the audience will instead hear voiceover narration throughout the piece to move the story along,” Cesarz continues. “There is a lot of physical staging and storytelling, which for people who have never seen physical theater they can expect it to be a little like dance, and others have said our work is kind of like watching an old cartoon. There’s also a fun use of objects where I puppet them and they come alive—some lovely effects I’m really proud of.”

“The Unstrung Harp” will be performed 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 27 in the Marcus Performing Arts Center’s Vogel Hall as part of Milwaukee Fringe Festival. For more information, visit mkefringe.com.