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Thomas Andrews designed the RMS Titanic to be unsinkable, but the ship struck an iceberg and sank shortly past 2 a.m. on the morning of April 15, 1912 -- just once, of course. Patrick Kelly, technical director and set designer for Diamond Head Theatre's production of the Peter Stone/Maury Yeston musical version of the tale, wants to make sure his ship can sink several times, on cue. Stage action revolves
around tilting deck
Where: Diamond Head Theatre 'TITANIC'
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays through June 9
Tickets: $10 to $40
Call: 733-0277By John Berger
jberger@starbulletin.com"The action of the play requires that the decks that the people are standing on when the ship goes down take a sudden tilt and they all sort of fall forward. That's the actual visual representation of the ship sinking," Kelly said during a recent rehearsal as director/choreographer Jennifer Waldman and the cast were polishing the climactic conclusion of Act I.
Kelly's secret? Three $49 hydraulic jacks from Sears.
"I was looking at using double-action hydraulic cylinders, which would have been maybe a $2,000 expenditure, and by using the actors' weight in our favor we were able to cut that down to $150 (for three jacks). Plus, if something goes wrong, we can run down to Sears."
Space considerations ruled out cloning the Broadway set, so Kelly redesigned the ship to fit the DHT stage. Kelly's Titanic consists of three modules, two deck sections and a multi-level center section, that can be rotated to reveal the ship's interior.
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"This is probably the 10th version of the design that I did just working with space considerations and budgets and everything," he said. "The whole show is based around the tipping mechanism (and) how you tip the set will dictate everything else. What we've done is use gravity in our favor."Each of these three decks has a pivot point in the center and is balanced. The actors provide the counter-balance on it so that when they are standing up there (at the rails) the decks want to tilt (forward), and it's just a matter of controlling the fall. To restore it (after the show) all the actors have to do is help us out by stepping back."
The challenge for Kelly and his tech crew is making sure that all three sections of the set tilt at precisely the same rate of speed in simulating the ship's sinking.
"What we're doing is letting the pressure out of the cylinders. You can make it tip very quickly or very gradually. Each cylinder basically has its own person on it and they learn the weight difference (between the sections). The center deck is the trickiest one because it has twice as much weight on it."
Kelly said a day was spent in working on the timing of the cylinder operators and the placement of people.
"Jen (Waldman) is very helpful with the blocking in terms of making sure that we kept the right number of people in the down stage areas (while the ship is sinking) so that it won't go back the other way," he said.
DHT artistic director John Rampage notes that Kelly and Waldman brought their own ideas to the challenge of bringing "Titanic" to the local stage.
"It's not even trying to take the Broadway set and cut it down," Rampage said. "It's a whole entirely different concept of the set that still has to do all of the things that the script dictates. All of that is in here, but it's a much more conceptual idea of it.
"What I think is interesting is that although Patrick has created an entirely different design of the show, even on Broadway it has always been a simplistic approach to the idea of the Titanic. You never saw the whole ship or the hugeness of it. I think in concept we're following the same idea that simple and strong is more important than trying to rebuild the Titanic."
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