The Titanic Plays

Written in the year following the sinking of the Titanic, Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill’s enigmatic first plays address one of history’s greatest calamities from the perspectives of its few survivors, floating helplessly in the vast and unforgiving waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Stripped of basic human needs, torn away from civilization and its notions of race, privilege, decency, and justice, O’Neill’s earliest characters struggle to reconcile their disastrous circumstances with their sense of individual identity and social responsibility. ‘The Titanic Plays’ is an original production combining O’Neill’s one-acts “Thirst” and “Fog” with transcriptions of the senate inquiries immediately following the disaster and the verbatim radio transmissions of the Titanic in its final hours.