Jimmy Titanic: An Imaginative Homage To The Unsinkable Titanic

Jimmy Titanic

Written by Bernard McMullen, Directed by Carmel O’Reilly; Lighting,
Tyler Lambert-Perkins
Produced by Tir Na Theatre; Presented by The New Rep Theatre
Arsenal Center for The Arts Black Box Theatre, Watertown, MA
Through June 30, 2013

The story of the sinking of the RMV Titanic has been told in film and TV scores of times. The first film about the disaster was produced 29 days after the disaster and starred one of the survivors. Twenty other films, including the one you probably saw, James Cameron’s Titanic, followed.

I don’t know a single one of them that’s been told as a one-man show by an angel in heaven. In the first scene, Jimmy Boylan (Colin Hamell), who recently passes through the pearly gates after perishing when the Titanic sinks on April 15, 1912, is getting a lesson on how to fly like a proper angel from Archangel Gabriel. When Boylan’s efforts to fly remind us of a drunken duck and Gabriel is seen to be a first class twit, we get the idea that whatever we’re about to witness is an imaginative approach to recounting history.

In the next ninety minutes, Jimmy, a born story teller – are there any Irishmen who are not born storytellers? - plays two dozen roles in what can best be described as a kaleidoscopic historic narrative with an Irish brogue.What propels this glorious retelling is the backstories that weave imagination and fact together in a tightly woven quilt of vignettes told by points of view from every quarter on the compass.

We get the mayor of Belfast worrying that the Titanic’s sinking could damage Belfast’s reputation as a ship building capital and employer of thousands of Irishmen. We get the editor of the New York Times desperately attempting to get the facts straight before trying to scoop the competition (sound familiar?). And of course we get Jimmy’s story, that of a twenty something country lad from outside Belfast, who, with his pal Tommy Mackay, helped build the ship and sign on to shovel coal into the ship’s hungry boilers on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

Mind you, this is all from one man with an immense presence on an unadorned rectangular stage. In a matter of seconds, Boylan’s playing John Jacob Astor, a desperate Italian immigrant shot because he wouldn’t stop trying to have his wife and children seated in a life boat, a coal-shoveling seaman, an entitled British gentleman, a girl in a bar somewhere in heaven, or a stevedore loading lifeboats with women and children.

The real focal point of the show remains the RMV Titanic and Jimmy doesn’t let us forget it. Alternating between stories such as the 700 immigrants in steerage who had to share two bathtubs, Jimmy mimes the way millions of rivets were cast from molten steel and banged into place by Irish laborers. He reels off facts and figures telling the Titanic’s length, width and tonnage, interspersing them with atmosphere of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and the herculean efforts of the 176 men who had to shovel six tons of coal a day into the ship’s furnaces in four hour shifts day and night. On her maiden voyage, she carried 2,224 passengers and crew. 1,502 perished.

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912

Then there’s Boylan’s fabulous caricature of God as a cigar chomping boss not above a bit of larceny as he shakes down Gabriel, the bully at the pearly gates, who’s been shaking down the newcomers he calls the JD (the “Just Dead”) the way they might have been shaken down when they managed to land in the new country. Both of them get a kick out of shaking down the rich and famous for sport. These fanciful caricatures, as only an Irishman like playwright McMullen could conceive, keep the play afloat.

No props. Light fades and music plays to show change of scene, mood, or character. Jimmy dressed in white collarless shirt, gray vest, light gray pants, black shoes has gained notoriety after letting it slip that he went down with the Titanic. Now known as Jimmy Titanic, he’s become quite the ladies man, who find him by using a pokey online dating service (hello, Match.com) “It’s got much better after a JD named Steve Jobs got up here,” Jimmy confides in us.

Forget your ideas of heaven being an egalitarian society.  A privileged British passenger demands that Jimmy deliver his luggage. On the other hand, there are charming scenes of John Jacob Astor, 47, one of the richest men in the world, and his pal author Jacques Futrelle, calmly smoking cigarettes and asking Jimmy and Tommy if they’d like a drink. Astor has already put his 19 year-old pregnant wife aboard a life boat.

Tommy, after years of being on the lowest social tier, thinks they want him to serve them. “No, they want us to sit down and have a drink WITH them!” says Jimmy.

“Tell us about the ship,” they ask. Tommy (says Jimmy), “can tell a story including every detail known to man,” reels off facts and figures we havent yet heard by the bushel.

 “There we were,” Jimmy says, “four men who have nothing in common minutes away from having everything in common.”

Here we have an actor with a gift of gab to weave the story together with the jolt of a Hollywood action movie in a theater space the size of one of the staterooms on the Titanic. Playwright Bernard McMullen and director Carmel O’Reilly set the course for Colin Hamell’s Jimmy Boylan and Hamell goes full steam ahead for ninety minutes.

Photo courtesy New Rep Theatre

Comments

[Susan Sullivan]

I know Colin. He managed a crew that did carpentry on my house...his real job. He knows Christian McNeill and many of the local musicians. We chatted for quite awhile. Good man. I would have tried to go to the play.Keep me posted if you see him in another one.