As family lore has it, my grandmother Margaret couldn’t get on the boat fast enough to make the journey from Ireland to the United States. Though she boarded a ship with a better fate than that of the Titanic, I can hear her excitement and her hopes echoed in many of the aspirations expressed by the third-class passengers on the our ship of dreams.
The Irish Immigrant has become a cliché in New England, and we laugh and joke about our ancestry because we know that for the most part, the Irish have thrived in America. Because of this triumph it’s easy to forget that many of the waves of immigrants who swamped the shores of the East Coast in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries were fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of social mobility. Such conditions in their countries of origin left them vulnerable and without resources. They were often powerless when they got to America, and had to be industrious and lucky to build lives for themselves.
Not long ago at all a boat filled with similar strivers from another part of the world capsized off the coast of Libya, and hundreds perished, some locked in the hold by those whom they had paid to transport them to a better life in Europe. Hearing that awful news it was hard not to think of those third-class passengers on the Titanic who were similarly trapped as the ship went down.
It’s heartbreaking to recognize that such stories of desperation and danger are timeless and still with us today. Will we ever live in a world that doesn’t include such tragedies? And for those of us who are among the more privileged classes (a status that is made very clear onstage in Titanic), what does it mean to not have the same struggles and peril that some endure?
All of us are on a journey, some more fraught than others. We flee the things that haunt us and we dream of brighter futures. Come journey and dream with us when Titanic opens on May 8.
Margaret Felice is a singer, religion teacher, choral conductor, and blogger who lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Her music and writing are found at http://www.margaretfelice.com her website, or you can catch her on http://www.facebook.com/MargaretAFelice Facebook or http://www.twitter.com/margaretfelice Twitter. She plays Alice Beane in Titanic and won’t tell anyone whether she survives until they see the show.
Woodland Theatre Company 