The Unsinkable

The Unsinkable is a new play with both comic and dramatic sides, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, with Aya Ogawa as director. It is a world premiere, presented by the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in Lower Manhattan, and it is scheduled for 2027.

The subject is the Titanic, seen from an angle that many retellings skip. Six Chinese seamen survived the sinking, yet they were left out of the usual account of the ship's survivors. The play is inspired by those six men, and it follows one young man, Little Fong, through his night in the water and the places his memory carries him.

Reports connect the production with one of the six in particular: Wing Sun Fong, who boarded as Fang Lang. A sailor and later a waiter, he settled in Chicago, where he died in 1986. His family is reported to be helping with the production. His rescue is also said to have inspired a scene that was cut from James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic.

Little Fong is 17 when the Titanic goes down and he is thrown into the freezing Atlantic. From that moment the play turns inward: staying alive becomes a struggle inside his own mind, and his memories take over the stage.

Those memories cover a lot of ground. The places named for the play are Liverpool and Chinatown, Cuban sugarcane fields and a nursing home in Chicago in 1986. Because the story is told through memory, it moves between these settings the way a person's thoughts do, not in a straight line from one port to the next.

The real history gives the play its backdrop. Wing Sun Fong was born in 1894 in a village in Taishan, Guangdong, and he survived the sinking by holding on to a piece of floating wood until a lifeboat picked him up. The Chinese survivors later sailed to Cuba.

Cowhig is the playwright, and the script mixes humor with serious subject matter, which is why it is listed as both a comedy and a drama.

The structure is built on memory: his recollections and wishes lead the audience from one place and period to the next. This is a play, not a musical.

The staging draws on three traditions at once: puppetry, dance traditions from both sides of the Atlantic, and elements of Chinese opera. These are the tools that carry his inner life onto the stage, whether the scene is a Liverpool street, a Chinatown block or a Cuban field.

PAC NYC presents the production as part of its 2026-2027 season, which also includes dance, music and opera.