When choosing between recording fact or legend, the saying goes, what usually endures is the legend—in this case, the real-life morality fable of the sumptuous trans-Atlantic cruise ship that crashed into an iceberg in 1912, killing most (but not all) of the personnel aboard. Owen McCafferty's documentation of the inquest into responsibility for the disaster is lifted verbatim from legal testimony, but no writer re-opens a century-old Cold Case without an agenda—and therein lies the factor differentiating this online production by Chicago's Court Theater from other dramatic diagnoses thereof.
Two factors, actually: First, however sectarian our own society, American audiences aren't as invested in their legacy of class distinctions as those in the United Kingdom—so while McCafferty's text offers ample opportunity for bashing the Bigwigs and pitying the Proles, director Vanessa Stallings minimizes the temptation to assign shopworn labels rooted in popular prejudice. Second, video presentation's absence of choreography, scenery and costumes—spectacle replaced by characters wearing modern garments and scene changes featuring stage crew wiping off microphones, actors masking or unmasking and the stage manager calling instructions—prevents our luxuriating in materialistic fancy.
The Tony award-winning Court Theater has hired a cast of A-list actors equipped with virtuoso vocal delivery (as well as Eva Brenemen's "dialect design" and Mikhail Fiksel's sound track of ghostly maritime ambience) to ensure the narrative never grows tedious during the nearly two hours of verbal scrutiny necessary to solve the mystery—not of WHOdunit, but WHYdiddit happen? [Hint: The discovery lies in the witness statement of Arctic explorer/Ice whisperer Ernest Shackelton—listen up, lest you miss it.]
