MISS CORPUS

A morbid and lugubrious tale by playwright Chapman (Rest Area, 2002).

From the first sentence (“Read, for this is my body”), it’s clear that a painfully serious narrative is going to cut slack for no one—the reader least of all. Two primary characters are involved: Will Colby and Phil Winters, both recently bereaved. Will is a merchant marine who has been married half a year to his childhood sweetheart Shelly. Off at sea for long stretches of time, he’s just returned from his latest cruise (aboard the SS Farewell), eager to be reunited with his wife—but instead he finds her dead body in the kitchen when he lets himself in. Not one to be easily put off, Will packs Shelly into the trunk and decides to go ahead with their postponed honeymoon to Florida. By an odd coincidence, Phil Winters has a very similar idea at nearly that exact moment: He’s just set off for a road trip with the corpse of his son Kevin, who drove a van full of teenagers into a swamp some months back. Phil’s estranged wife Margaret doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the idea of one last trip with her son, and the parents of the other kids killed in Kevin’s van (they’ve formed a grief therapy group called Mourning Glory) are content with funerals and floral bouquets for their deceased. When Will and Phil meet up on their respective pilgrimages, they are both on I-95—one of them going south, the other north. You get the idea. But before their big bang-up, we get to meet a motel manager who collects roadkill, a pregnant toll-collector who gives birth in her booth, and a one-armed boy to whom Will gives a piece of his wife (nicely wrapped up in a cooler).

Too pompous to be disgusting, this remains just a bore.