Titanic at Newtown Arts Company

Newtown Arts Company presents TITANIC, the moving musical play depicting the quintessential disaster of the 20th century, April 20 to 26 at Newtown Theatre, 120 N. State Street, Newtown, PA 18940.

As described by Peter Stone, in the early hours of April 15, 192, a total of 1,517 souls — men, women and children — lost their lives (only 711 survived). The fact that the finest, largest, strongest ship in the world — called, in fact, the “unsinkable” ship — should have been lost during its maiden voyage was unimaginable.

But the catastrophe had social ramifications that went far beyond that night’s events. For the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution early in the 19th Century, bigger, faster and stronger did not prove automatically to be better. Suddenly the very essence of “progress” had to be questioned; might the advancement of technology not always be progress?

And the accommodations of the ship, divided into 1st, 2nd and 3rd Classes, mirrored almost exactly the class structure (upper, middle and lower) of the English-speaking world. But when the wide discrepancy between the number of survivors from each of the ship’s classes was revealed—all but two of the women in 1st Class were saved while 155 women and children from 2nd and 3rd (mostly 3rd) drowned — there was a new, long-overdue scrutiny of the prevailing social system and its values.

The musical play TITANIC examines the causes, the conditions and the characters involved in this ever-fascinating drama.