THE STORY: Amid a tangle of changing identities—and sometimes sexes—the action of the play centers on an American family, the Tammurais, who are traveling aboard the Titanic. Comprised of father, mother, brother and sister (or is she actually the Captain’s daughter?) the Tammurais undergo a series of sexual permutations as they reveal all manner of shocking secrets and bizarre fetishes while awaiting the iceberg which, somehow, the ship seems unable to find. The mother tells the father that their son is not really his; the father confesses to the mother that their daughter is not really hers; the daughter mysteriously becomes an aunt who is having an affair with her sister (when she isn’t seducing her nephew); while the father and son compete vigorously for the affections of a handsome young sailor, who is hard put to choose between them. Eventually the ship does go down, taking its odd assemblage of passengers with it, but leaving behind a remarkable array of original thoughts on the nature of the modern American family and the undeniably disturbed society which nurtures it.
A wildly funny and outrageously irreverent spoof by one of our theater’s most spirited and original writers, which finds high comedy in the zany doings of an unlikely group of passengers aboard the doomed Titanic.
“This is a wild drawing-room farce that happens to take place at sea. The humor is untamed, a nonstop flow of outrageous jokes, puns and burlesque byplays.” —The New York Times.
“…A merry and (innocently) obscene farce.” —The New Yorker.
