“Unsinkable”
The RMS Titanic may have gone down on the morning of April 15, 1912, but, like one of its famous passengers, Margaret “Molly” Brown, stories about its brief existence have proved to be unsinkable.  |
| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
The latest vessel sailing into the waters of the fabled liner’s lore is Jimmy Titanic, a one-person play by Irish playwright Bernard McMullan, starring Irish actor Colin Hamell, and directed by Carmen O’Reilly. The play, which has toured Ireland and North America, is now being presented, in conjunction with the 10th Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival, in the tiny W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre located deep in the bowels of Off-Broadway’s Irish Repertory Theatre.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Jimmy Titanic is the nickname of our narrator, Dubliner Jimmy Boylan, who had worked as a riveter on the building of the ship; he also became a member, with his friend, Tommy Mackey, from outside Belfast, of the Guarantee Group, men hired by Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff to accompany the ship as troubleshooters on its maiden voyage.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Jimmy’s in heaven, where he’s pals with the archangel Gabriel, who, at the start, is teaching Jimmy how to fly. Gabriel, an overtly fey, practical joker, has the job of welcoming JDs (“just dead”) to heaven. Jimmy soon notes that there really are no wings here. In fact, things, more or less, are just as they are on earth, “just longer like.”
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Jimmy, who died at 25 and has been here for 100 years (the play is set in 2012) spends the play’s 75 uninterrupted minutes recounting his experiences, often with a comically sardonic edge, on the night the Titanic went down. Time jumps around nonlinearly and sometimes confusingly, with scenes both in heaven and on earth.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Enacting over 20 characters, with multiple accents, mostly Irish, Hamell’s Jimmy eulogizes the men who built and operated the ship, especially those stoking its boilers; tells of his and Tommy’s efforts to save a coal-shoveling fellow worker, whose physical toil is closely described; provides scads of information about the nature, scope, and aftereffects of the disaster; and reconstructs the panic of befuddled passengers, especially when they’re being herded into the too few lifeboats.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
We also meet onboard celebrities, like millionaire John Jacob Astor and writer Jacques Futrelle, who had just parted forever from their wives; learn about the building of the ship; feel Jimmy’s concern over the blow the catastrophe will have on Belfast’s shipbuilding industry; observe the journalistic responses to the sinking, and so on; we even view the eventual U.S. Senate investigation. Some of this is informative, some of it satiric, some of it touching, especially a well-acted scene where a father tries to save his child from the rising waters in his cabin.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
But the specifics of what happened on that night to remember are too often mingled with snarky diversions, especially the extraneously jokey stuff about Jimmy’s fun life after death, when, known as Jimmy Titanic, he revels in the aura of having been a Titanic victim. He even searches for love at discos—cue the dance sequences—among women who died as long ago as 700 years. Mention the name Titanic, he avers, and girls all over heaven swoon. You just don’t want to meet someone who died of the plague.
The small McLucas stage has been dressed by Michael Gottlieb with a notably effective arrangement of walls that look, even from a few feet away, like authentic, ever-so-slightly rusting slabs of rivet-lined steel.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Illuminated by Gottlieb’s dynamic lighting, Hamell’s performance is consistently energetic and charismatic. He doesn’t nail all the accents, though, especially the Americans, and it’s occasionally difficult to separate one character from another. That, of course, is the price one pays when portraying so many roles in rapid, back-and-forth discourse with no physical alterations or props.
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| Colin Hamell. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Regardless of the holes in Jimmy Titanic’s script and performance, it’s an unsinkable tale that scratches a few icebergs but still manages to stay afloat.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Irish Repertory Theatre/W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 W. 22nd St., NYC
Through February 18