The Last Cigarette

April 14 and 15, 1912. The RMS Titanic has struck an iceberg and is sinking. On the First Class Promenade Deck, three men who have chosen, for different reasons, not to fight for the lifeboats spend the ship’s final hours in conversation. Jacques Futrelle, America’s most celebrated mystery writer, has just forced his wife, May, into a lifeboat against her will. John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest man on the ship, has been turned away from his pregnant wife’s boat by an officer who told him his name made no difference to the policy. Thomas Mullin, a civil engineer from Philadelphia, was below decks helping a confused elderly passenger and returned to find his boat gone. Attended intermittently by Henry Etches, a first class steward maintaining his professional composure even as the world dissolves beneath him, the four men argue, confess, and come to terms, each in his own way, with the locked room they find themselves in. At the center of the play is a paradox. Futrelle built his career on the absolute supremacy of reason. His detective, Professor Augustus Van Dusen, “The Thinking Machine,” insists that anything can be solved if you think hard enough. Yet in the final hours of his life, Futrelle makes the most irrational choice imaginable, he stays. Not from confusion, not from cowardice, but from love. The man who championed reason chooses, with full knowledge and full feeling, to remain in the only room that ever mattered. The Thinking Machine would have found a way out. That is the difference between a great detective and a man who loves someone. One of them is free.