The Titanic’s captain went down with his big bad ship, getting a statue for his troubles, but White Star Line owner, J. Bruce Ismay, was rescued by the Carpathia in a lifeboat, famously or apocryphally turning his eyes from the sight of his doomed behemoth and its sinking object lesson in hubris. Class privilege and responsibility, near-mythic tragic imagery, and sensational reporting by the Hearst papers made Ismay an easy villain, despite his efforts to rescue survivors. But there’s more, dramatized now by playwright Luke Yankee, whose staging instructions suggest a variable number of actors on a mostly bare set, likely good for the multi-voiced echo-chamber ensemble performance of historical imagining in this always fascinating American folk-tale. UC Irvine presents Yankee’s world premiere of an enduring larger-than-death story.
Fridays-Sundays. Starts: Nov. 14. Continues through Nov. 23, 2014
