My overall impression
RICHARD ADAMS, The World Socialist Website
T.S. Cook’s The Annual Meeting of the American Society of Lone Fishermen Who Have Found Dead Bodies, a one-man show performed alternatively by Cook and his co-director Paul Messinger, has a certain laconic charm spiced with set-piece jokes, aphoristic wisdom, and private confession.
While it held my attention and occasionally gripped me – especially when The Angler reveals that he’s driven his fishing skiff to a spot somewhere off Catalina Island, just remote enough to see nothing but sea, the very spot where his father’s ashes are buried – the play never quite overcomes the hurdle that bedevils so many one-character plays (and this is a play, not a show): why exactly is this man, who insists that he comes out here to be alone and free from the conversational noise of others, talking to us? Why now? Why does he need to confide in or entertain us with his stories? And while it’s perfectly credible that The Angler was once a “Hollywood writer” (and still may be), that LA-specific footnote of character ultimately mars what strives to be the play’s more universal reach. His uncritical internalization of bourgeois aspirations and male competition measured by material acquisition offends to the extent that the character insists that this is a universal principle not merely an indication of his limited political consciousness.
