HANK
I’ve been a Mortimer. In Arsenic and Old Lace, the romantic lead is a Mortimer. Cary Grant played him in the film version. It’s about these two little old ladies that are poisoning homeless guys and stuffing their bodies temporarily in their
window seat. Mortimer, their nephew, is horrified to discover this. So we are rehearsing this play and these two old babes just aren’t into it. So I thought if we added some realistic details it might help. The props guy was an undertaker see, so I arranged for a different fresh body to be inserted each performance. It made the world of difference! Problem was one of the old babes went into shock onstage. She transformed from “ditzy” to “psychotic” before our very eyes. But know what? That plays. The other one seemed to get overly fond of the corpse. I guess she thought the stiffness was in her honor. So she tried to drag him out of the window seat the better to have her way with him! And she tried that every performance even though it was a different guy each time! Yeah. A serial necrophiliac! The show was supposed to run two weeks, but The Department of Health closed it down after we left a stiff in there during a couple of off-days.
