GOREY: The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey portrays the enigmatic writer and illustrator who shunned publicity and lived his final days in solitude amidst 25,000 books and seven cats. The play marks the debut production by the Life Jacket Theatre Company, of which Russ is founding artistic director. The play opens this Saturday, April 30 at HERE Arts Center.

“I’m fascinated by people who live out their lives on the fringes, and who might be considered outcasts,” said Russ, an associate professor of communications and media management at the Gabelli School of Business. “Gorey was certainly a unique person.”

An eccentric with a taste for the macabre, Gorey authored and illustrated more than 100 works during his life, many of which were children’s stories that dealt with adult subjects, such as death, love, strangeness, and loss. He is renowned for the sinister pen-and-ink drawings that accompany his stories, and which serve in GOREY as backdrops for the stage.

The play features three actors who depict Gorey at different points during his life. One represents Gorey at the age of 25, before he published his first book. The next is 35-year-old Gorey, who has by then published several works. The final character is Gorey shortly before he died at the age of 75. The three Goreys exist simultaneously in the play, and at times speak to one another and to the audience.

“It’s a tapestry of different moments from his life,” Russ said.

Russ first encountered Gorey when he stumbled on the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, where the artist died in 2000. Not much is known about his life, which meant that Russ had to be imaginative in his portrayal. Part of the play is based on interview transcripts and Gorey’s notes and journals, and other parts are fictionalized.

“As I was diving into the archives, I realized he was very inconsistent in what he told reporters. He would change what he said from one interview to the next. Sometimes he’d admit that, and sometimes he’d be very evasive,” Russ said. “At first that was frustrating, but then I figured I’d have to embrace it. Gorey had many different personas, and we simply don’t know a lot about him.

“Some of the most extreme moments in GOREY, the ones that people think I made up, are the ones based in reality,” Russ said. “That kind of work is really exciting to me—the stuff you can’t make up.”

To Russ, Gorey was the perfect inaugural subject for Life Jacket, an innovative company that marries the academic and the theatrical. Productions are born of extensive research, interviews, and textual analysis, which then come together as a play and are brought to life on stage.

Life Jacket embodies the objectives that Russ, whose scholarly background is in communications and theater, brings to his research and teaching at the Gabelli School of Business. Many of his classes—such as his popular course, The Storytelling Project—help business students learn to communicate effectively and compellingly.

“You get hired in business if you have an interpersonal savvy—if you can frame a message effectively, spin it to make it relevant to a variety of stakeholders,” Russ said.

“There’s a craft to communications. Being successful in a business environment isn’t just about balancing budgets or understanding operations. Business happens in a person-to-person sphere. My job is to help business students excel when it comes to communicating with other human beings.”

Previews of GOREY begin at the HERE Arts Center on April 30 and May 1, and the play premieres on May 3. The show will run through May 22. Find a full schedule and more details here.

That is, unless you’re Travis Russ, PhD—in which case, these are precisely the places to learn about business and theater, respectively.

However, the students aren’t learning about business simply by reading theater. The students’ final assignment was to write an original play, which they performed April 23 at Shetler Studios.

“This was their opportunity to write their own script critically assessing what’s going on in business and how business leaders are behaving,” said Russ, who is also artistic director of Life Jacket Theatre Company.

“It’s very challenging, and if you’d asked them at the beginning of the class if they’d be willing to get on stage, most of them would’ve said absolutely not,” he said. “But it’s a great opportunity, because they are leaning into the discomfort and are really blossoming because of it.”

The show, Zero Sum Game, is a collection of short performances depicting the dark side of leadership. Scenes feature real-life interviews with vilified CEOs, personal stories of terrible leaders, and a look at poor leadership throughout the ages.

“It covers a broad range of bad leadership, from the incompetent CEO to the villainous boss to the really mean high school gym teacher,” said MBA student Nick Monteleone, FCRH ’02, who is in Russ’ class.

During the workshop phase of the semester, each student wrote more than half a dozen original scenes relating to a business experience. The pieces could be based on a personal experience or could be completely fictionalized. Then, the class voted on each student’s best piece, and the selections were gathered together to make Zero Sum Game.

Monteleone’s scene portrays his experience of being the casualty of a mass layoff at a former company. He hopes the audience will be able to empathize with the unpleasant yet ultimately edifying experience, which offers a rare glimpse into the emotional turmoil behind business practices.

Other pieces include a monologue from the perspective of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, a Dr. Seuss-inspired piece about women in the workplace, and a musical number about the underdogs.

“It was a challenging experience, especially because I wasn’t expecting such a heavy emphasis on performance,” Monteleone said. “But it forced me to really think about how to approach the material and how to mold it for an audience, as opposed to just writing it for yourself.”

The first half of the class consisted of reading plays and attending performances, which the students analyzed in terms of the underlying messages about organizational communication. The students also heard directly from playwrights who visited the class. Among them was recent Guggenheim Fellowship-winner Lucas Hnath, whose 2013 play, A Public Reading of An Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, takes a critical look at who in our society are hailed as leaders.

“The students were able to ask [Hnath] questions about why he wrote particular scenes and what message he was intending to send, and he was able to tell them about some of his own experiences in the business world. Hnath, in turn, had the opportunity to hear about what current business students were taking from his play,” Russ said.

“Theater makes interesting commentary about the business world—how effective it is, how ethical it is, whom we look to for leadership, and so on,” he continued. “These are theatrical case studies, which are more alive and much more vivid for the students than just reading case studies about a business situation.”

Photos by Kelly Milnes, GABELLI, MS ’15

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