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'Titanic' production opens Thursday
The multitudinous human aspects of one of the worst maritime tragedies in history, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, will be portrayed in the Nevada High School Drama Department's production of "Titanic: Tragedy and Trial" at 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Tickets, $6 for adults and $3 for students, are available in the school office at 800 W. Hickory St., Nevada.
Starting well before rehearsals began Sept. 20, the project has demanded a big commitment from the 45 cast members, said NHS Drama Director Angie Bin.
"They studied the biographies of their characters and developed character displays," Bin said. "By playing real people whose stories could be researched, the students gained a much deeper understanding of the characters they play on stage and the feelings those passengers must have had aboard the ship.
"They visited the RMS (for Royal Mail Ship) Titanic Museum in Branson and participated in a workshop with Robert Foulk, director of performance studies at Avila University in Kansas City. It's so much different than performing a regular play."
Sophomore Christian Renz plays Thomas Andrews Jr., the Irish architect who designed the ship and went down with it; freshman Nathan Hines is First Officer William Murdoch; sophomore Tanisha Lukenbill is the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown; and sophomore Aubrey Smith and freshman Leslie Dunaway are Isidor and Ida Straus, who died together when Mrs. Straus refused her husband's plea to board a lifeboat, saying, "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go!"
Leslie said after dress rehearsal Friday afternoon in the NHS auditorium that she found Ida Straus' strength of character compelling. "I liked the fact that she refused to leave her husband," Leslie said.
"She thought that if he died, there was no point in living after that."
The progression Capt. Edward John Smith went through before going down with his ship prompted senior Cody Jordan to seek that role. "I love doing it because he was a leader," Cody said.
"Over the course of the play, he slowly loses the confidence of a captain."
Senior Scott Hampton portrays Sen. William Alden Smith, R-Mich., who held hearings to investigate the disaster, while freshman Luke Christensen is White Star Line Chairman J. Bruce Ismay, whose company owned the ship and who was widely vilified for escaping in a lifeboat.
Bin said the two-act play, running two hours with an intermission, "doesn't have a lot of stand-out roles, but it does involve a lot of monologues that were hard to memorize."
Exhibits by seventh grade students who have studied the Titanic will be on display at the school. Bobbie Lou Barber is the assistant director.
The Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean some 400 miles south of Newfoundland, according to references. Of the 2,223 passengers and crew members, 1,517 died.
Written by Pat Cook of Houston, the play ends with a series of characters coming onstage, telling about themselves and saying, "I died that night."
They are followed by characters who introduce themselves, intone with equal gravity, "I survived," and sit at the feet of those who didn't.