![]() Over the 21 days before their rescue, those on Grace’s boat experience physical and spiritual evolution and devolution, death and survival. Under the direction of an experienced and able-bodied ship’s mate, John Hardie, three men and one woman row away frantically from the sinking ship, moving ruthlessly through the sickening, thickening soup of bodies and debris, beating back any swimmers attempting to board. But Henry can arrange a spot only for Grace, as the last of 39 escapees on Lifeboat 14, an open cutter provisioned with four oars, a tarp, and sundry limited supplies. Grace and her wealthy new husband, Henry, have been secretly married in London and are heading home to New York to meet his potentially disgruntled family. Hundreds swarm the decks in search of escape. Įvents start with a literal bang as the ocean liner Empress Alexandra, unfortunately named for the ill-fated wife of Russian Czar Nicholas, suffers a major explosion in the center of the hull. Grace’s “memory book” of the 21 days, prepared to help her defense, forms the literary premise of the book. Having come through the ordeal, just barely alive, Grace finds herself again at the mercy of tidal forces, for she is now on trial for her life for her part in a death aboard the lifeboat. However, the book actually begins at a later point and has a larger focus. Through her narrator, Grace Winter, 22 years old, 10 weeks married and six weeks widowed, we hear the story of a small boat stranded for 21 days in the North Atlantic in late summer 1914. ![]() It is these questions that writer and architect Charlotte Rogan sets out to explore in her carefully- plotted and cleverly-paced debut novel The Lifeboat. I, for one, have never forgotten the power of Oscar Schisgall’s 1,000-word parable “Take Over Bos’n,” a gem of a story I read in middle school, which tells of 10 desperate men on a 19th-century lifeboat facing their final day of drinking water.īut what drives us back to these tales of suffering and fortitude in extreme conditions, where hope is at once an indulgence and an obligation? Are we held in the grip of the ultimate question of ethics and survival, “What would you do?” Do we need continued affirmation of the universality of our basest instincts? Or are we simply unable to resist a “ripping yarn?” ![]() As far-flung as the flooded earth of Genesis, the oceanless Andes of Alive or the uniquely uncharted waters of Life of Pi, they often are steeped in loneliness and anguish, but gilded in courage and nobility. Within the canon of seafaring misfortune, lifeboat tales present an impressive subgenre of their own. Even today, our 100-year-old passion for anything connected with the sinking of HMS Titanic and the 1,500 souls who perished with her shows no sign of flagging. Terrifying yet strangely satisfying, these stories range from “Gilgamesh” to Robinson Crusoe to The Lord of the Flies. The guides throw the rope out and away from the boat: there’s no going back.Tales of shipwrecks and disasters at sea have steadily, if morbidly, fascinated people for millennia. They share secrets in the form of breath blown into a shell. Other bodies help them into the boat once they reach its end. They follow their guide across the rope, pulling themselves along. There’s a rope extending from the door to something in the distance: a lifeboat. Their new friend opens the door, revealing a room filled with light. But, they begin to trust this body, to sense that the danger does not exist there. That person has been here the whole time.Īt first, they are afraid. ![]() But, how is that possible? The door never opened. Out of the corner of their eyes, they can see movement that doesn’t fit. The sound around them transitions into noise… or is there a difference? They are layered in a way that makes them indistinguishable the longer they play out. Suddenly, the sounds of chains and creaking floorboards begin to permeate the space. At the beginning of the piece, audience members stand in a dark room and hear nothing but the breath and movement of each other. ![]()
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