FABLE: The play starts out with a family sitting on the deck of the Titanic. You have Richard, Victoria, and their 20yr old son Teddy, who they, especially Victoria, constantly refers to be younger than he actually is but insists him to “act his age”. The family is sitting on the deck and wants the Captain to join them. Eventually they begin to argue over who the parents of Teddy are. Victoria tells Richard that Teddy is not his son, and that she had an affair with a man on a beach and that’s his real father and that she tricked him and he really had sex with bread and she fed it to him in the morning. Richard then announces that he disowns Teddy and shall remove them from the father-son shuffleboard tournament. But then he tells Victoria that their daughter Annabella is not really her daughter and that he slept with Harriet and they bother tricked Victoria with mirrors when she “gave birth”. They continue to argue and say they want a divorce when they land and eventually storm off leaving Teddy alone on deck.
Then Lidia, the Captain’s daughter, comes in and decides she wants to sing a song and does so, and the joins Teddy at his table. They meet and she shares with him that she carries animals in her vagina and feeds them, and then she puts food under her dress. Teddy eventually accidently swallows a guppy that was floating in his glass.
Next we see the Captain and Victoria and they meet and the Captain falls for Victoria and tries to get with her. He puts on a strapped dildo on his forehead and she believes he has some sort of unicorn fetish. He asks her what she likes and she pulls out a loaf of bread from under her dress. The lights go out and you hear her say “men are such fools”.
Lidia and Teddy have gone back to her room where she suggests to him that they have sex because he should not stay a virgin, and she pulls out rope to tie him down.
Richard, out on deck, runs into a sailor, and finding that he looks familiar, and pick up line kind of way, and asks him who he is. He precedes to ask tell him about a friend of his back at his club, Dicky, and how he would dress in drag and pretend he was Queen Victoria and the other men would always play along with him. Basically, Richard tries to hit on the sailor.
Teddy and Lidia are in bed after having sex and he is all tied up. He asks why do guys have to be the ones tied up, and she tells him it is so that boys do not try anything fishy. He says that the hamsters that she carries in her vagina may have bit him and that he might be infected, and she just brushes it off as complaining. The Captain walks in on them and asked why they are behaving this way, and she replies asking why he has bread on the strap-on dildo on his forehead. Victoria and Richard run in, who eventually recognize Lidia, the Captain’s daughter, as Harriet, the woman who Richard had the affair with and real mother to Annabella. But then Victoria announces really she and Harriet are tricking Richard and that they two are together she is in love with Harriet, but also that Harriet is Victoria’s sister and so then also Teddy’s aunt. Then sailor runs in announcing there is an iceberg, but the Captain brushes it off and tells him to put the complaint in the log. They eventually hear a crash and all run around frantic, Teddy still tied up, and slowly the sailor keeps loosing his uniform, and then Teddy eveually find it and puts it on because he could no find his own clothes.
Richard sees Teddy in the uniform and mistakes him for another a sailor, and tries to hit on him and then takes him back to his room.
Victoria is trying to find Harriet and ends up find Richard and Teddy, and asks what they had been doing. Richard now finally recognizes Teddy and tells him to give him his money back, and Teddy refuses saying that he earned it. They argue, and then Lidia enters and slaps Teddy for being rude to his parents and he returns the money. The Captain comes on the load speaker and announces that the crash was just a recording that his wife played and not to worry. Lidia is upset and just wants the boat to sink.
Richard, Victoria, Teddy, and Lidia, who now has a seagull up her vagina and feathers fall from under her dress, are awaiting the Captain to join them at their table. The sailor comes in with dinner mints since the Captain is late and Lidia feeds them to her seagull. The Captain finally joins the table and announces that he wife has been found and was hanged for nautical law since she scared the people to believing they might sink. He leaves to go plan the funeral for tomorrow. Victoria says its time for Teddy to go to bed, Richard agrees and takes Teddy by the arm and the three leave together. Lidia left alone and still wanting the ship to sink tries to drill holes in the floor, and the sailor comes and stops her.
Teddy is bouncing on Richard’s lap, who pays him to sing for him. Victoria doesn’t feel well and Lidia gives her nine shots in the stomach. Lidia tells Teddy that she is really his sister Annabella and that their parents have been mistreating them for a long time. The Captain comes and Victoria now feels much better. They sit down for tea but no one gets any. They talk of his wife’s death, and the Captain proposes to Victoria. Victoria wants Harriet. Richard wants Teddy, who he has been calling Dorothy. They plan to all marry at the Captain’s wife’s funeral the next day.
The Captain marries Victoria and Harriet, and then Richard and Teddy. Then when it is time for the funeral ceremony for his wife, he takes a look and sees that it is no his wife and that she is Asian and they grabbed the wrong woman. The sailor says he will try and find the right body and they just toss this one over board.
The Captain, Victoria, and Richard go back to the room for the honeymoons, and reminisce about their first honeymoon together. Lidia and Teddy finally arrive all dressed in black for mourning, Lidia in a sexy black dress, and Teddy grown-up in black slacks. Lidia reveals to Victoria and Richard that she is not Harriet, but in fact their daughter Annabella. Victoria rips off Teddy slacks and they are back to shorts like a child. They all four get into a fight and slap each other, then make up. Lidia and Teddy sing a song together, and then Teddy pulls out a gun and shoot both Richard and Victoria. Again the ship sounds like it is sinking but then again it is just a recording.
The bodies of Victoria and Richard are propped up in chairs for their funeral. The Captain presides over the funeral. Teddy is happy they killed them, but no one else knows they did. Lidia still wants the boat to sink and shushes everyone to try and hear the iceberg hit and scrape the boat, but the Captain keeps trying to talk, and she continues to shush him and he is annoyed so had Higgins get the log to file a complaint on her. Everyone continues what they are doing in that moment, the lights black out, and the end.
PLOT SUMMARY: THE STORY: The play begins on the Titanic as Richard and Victoria Tammurai sit in the ship’s dining room and complain about not having been placed at the Captain’s table. Their son, Teddy, looks 20, but they claim he is 12, and dress him in short pants. Richard and Victoria have a terrible argument, in which Victoria reveals that Teddy is not Richard’s son. (In a mad moment, she gave in to a derelict she met on the beach once.) Richard escalates the argument by claiming their daughter Annabella was not actually born to Victoria, but was given birth to by Victoria’s sister Harriet, with whom Richard was having an affair. “You only thought you gave birth,” says Richard, “Harriet and I did it with mirrors.” Pushed by further insults, Victoria tells Richard that there is no such person as Annabella, that she and Harriet, though sisters, have been having an affair. And that Richard never even slept with Harriet, “we did it all with mirrors and slices of white bread, you made love to pieces of white bread, you stupid man.” All these revelations cause them to decide to get a divorce as soon as possible, while poor Teddy whimpers. Victoria leaves the dining room, saying with foreboding, “Somehow I wish we’d never come on the Titanic.”
From here the play, which does indeed have a plot of “numbing complexity,” gets stranger and stranger. Teddy is seduced by Lidia, the innocent yet perverse daughter of the Captain. The Captain seduces Victoria, and Richard tries to pick up a sailor on deck, who turns him down when he sees an iceberg approaching.
Strangely, the ship doesn't sink. We hear alarming sounds of a ship striking an iceberg, but that turns out to be the result of a sound effects record, played on the speaker system by the Captain's unstable wife, who is missing.
For complicated reasons, Teddy ends up wearing the Sailor’s uniform, and Richard doesn’t recognize him in these clothes, and mistakes him for a male hustler. Lidia turns out not to be the Captain’s daughter, but to be the bitter Harriet, and she resumes her affair with Victoria. At one point, Richard marries Teddy and Victoria marries Harriet, in an early version of a gay wedding, which the Captain combines with a funeral for his wife. Later Harriet turns out to be not Harriet, but the daughter Annabella, who does exist after all. And Annabella is in a rage and gets Teddy to help her plan to kill their “very bad parents.” And still the ship doesn’t sink, although everybody wants it to.http://www.christopherdurang.com/OneActsLong-titanic.htm
