Safe Is Not A Shot

Philadelphia, 1962. Richard Norris Williams II, tennis champion, Olympic gold medalist, Titanic survivor, and war hero, sits in his study across from Walter Lord, the author of A Night to Remember. Lord has come to interview Williams about the Titanic disaster for a new project. Between them sits a plain silver tray on a small table. Lord has done his research. He knows the facts of April 15, 1912, the iceberg, the sinking, the lifeboats, the thousands who died. He knows that Williams’s father, Charles, was lost when the forward funnel fell. He knows that Williams himself spent hours in freezing water, that doctors aboard the rescue ship Carpathia wanted to amputate his nearly frozen legs, and that Williams refused, then went on to win two U.S. National Championships, a Wimbledon doubles title, Davis Cup glory, and an Olympic gold medal. What Lord does not know, what no one outside this room knows, is the story of the silver tray. It was made from 162 trophies that Williams had melted down. His widow would later say: you’d never even know he played tennis if you talked to him. As the interview unfolds across a single day, the past rises through the present. We move between 1962 and 1912, the ship, the ocean, the Carpathia, and a tennis court in Boston twelve weeks after the sinking, where Williams faced another Titanic survivor across a net and played the most important match of his life without either man mentioning the disaster once. Safe Is Not A Shot is a play about fathers and sons, about survival and its cost, and about why a man who never once played safe on a tennis court chose, in the end, to erase the record of his own greatness.