My overall impression
The show hints at a comedy, but with few intentional comic moments it is a lonely nautical voyage indeed.
When our fisherman convincingly lands a plastic fish only to be met with guffaws this caused the vessel to lose power and started listing badly, buffeted by waves of old bar room jokes, to long winded stories about characters we neither care about or believe in. Once the writers’s clumsy pandering to a local industry audience swamped the deck I was praying for pirates.
The bold moniker of “The Annual Meeting of the American Society of Lone Fishermen Who Have Found Dead Bodies.” must have forewarned theater goers as to the long-winded monologue to come, which was sparsely attended.
Fortunately, the skilled lead actor ( un named) powered through the kelpy text like a 200hp evinrude outboard motor, only with more poise and good humor. But without a decent rudder or discernable heading this craft drifted on a Sargasso Sea of lost narratives, inexorably ending up wrecked in a non-sequitur reef-like plot twist, involving the titular dead body.
Although solidly directed with style and panache, Mr Cook’s rudderless script never gets the craft under way, and provides neither an educating nor entertaining voyage.
