(This was written on Thursday, August 30).
The word came up today, in our interview with Marty Moss-Coane. And there it was in bold, in the City Paper.
I suppose it was myopic in the extreme to think that a play about a mortician’s longing for a dead body would not be described as “necrophilia.” But the truth is I have not thought, not a once, about necrophilia when making this piece. I have done no research on “real-world” necrophiliacs, and I have nothing to say about them.
Someone called in during our radio interview today, someone who runs a crematorium, to protest that we had portrayed a mortuary technician “stereotypically” – as lonely, isolated, friendless. She said – and I agree, from our own interviews with mortuary workers – that most morticians are outgoing, warm, quick to tell a joke.
But the piece is not about morticians, either. Although many of them do speak to the dead as they work on them, I have nothing to say about “morticians” as a group with this piece. Any more than Hamlet has something to impart about the murderousness, or indecisiveness, of Danish people.
I guess we’ll see if that overheated term “necrophilia” fills the house. And with who.