Writing 33 Lost:
Fact and Fiction: Walking the Line
Writing 33 Lost:
Fact and Fiction: Walking the Line
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Fact and Fiction: Walking the Line
One of the questions I’ve wrestled with more than anything while writing 33 Lost is this:
How tightly must a playwright cling to documented history—and when is it not only acceptable, but necessary, to depart from it?
Writing historical theatre is a balancing act. On one hand, we owe respect to the real people whose lives and deaths shaped the events being dramatized. On the other, a play is not a museum exhibit. It must breathe. It must feel urgent. It must invite an audience to experience rather than observe. Historical records can provide the skeleton of the story—but theatre supplies the muscle and the beating heart.
Much of 33 Lost is grounded firmly in primary sources. Many of the characters in the play were real people—surfmen like Oscar Wicklund and Alfred Rimer, tugboat captains like Ed Parsons, and survivors like Fred Peters. Their words exist in the public record. But history rarely records fear. It rarely records guilt. It rarely records the split-second decision that might haunt someone forever.
This is where drama begins.
Pictured: Captain Johnstone Quinan, middle row, second from left
The Necessary Leap Beyond Facts
Two central figures in the play represent this blend of history and imagination.
The first is Captain Jack Quinn, the inspector from the U.S. Life-Saving Service headquarters who conducts the inquiry after the disaster. In the historical record this was Captain Johnstone Hamilton Quinan, who had commanded the US Revenue Cutters Seminole and Tahoma before becoming an inspector.
I created Quinn rather than use Quinan because the historical record on Quinan is extremely thin, providing almost no information about his personal life, relationships, or internal motivations beyond his service appointments. To give the play the dramatic arc it required—an inspector wrestling with survivor's guilt, a debt to Wicklund, and a crisis of faith in his work—I needed to invent a backstory that had no historical basis and would have been inappropriate to attribute to a real person with living descendants.
By changing the name from Quinan to Quinn, I am signaling to audiences that this character, while inspired by the historical inspector, is a dramatic creation whose personal struggles and secrets are entirely fictional. This approach allowed me complete creative freedom to craft the transformation the story needed while still honoring the fact that a real investigation took place.
The second fictional character is Alexandra Vance, a representative from Associated Oil whose husband's ship was lost at sea for unknown reason. Because of this loss, Alexandra grapples with grief and demand for accountability. Historically, it is almost certain that any corporate representative present in 1913 would not have been a woman. Miss Vance is entirely invented.
So why include her?
Vance gives voice to those who lost someone and wanted answers. She is an emotional counterweight to Quinan’s procedural objectivity. Her presence forces conflict, forces urgency, and forces the audience to feel the stakes rather than observe them.
The Truth Beneath the Facts
Plays built on history walk a tightrope. If fiction overwhelms fact, the story becomes fantasy; if fact overwhelms fiction, the stage becomes a lecture hall. Historical drama must aim for something more complex: emotional truth. If sticking strictly to provable facts means ignoring the lived experience of the people trapped in those moments—then theatrical truth demands we venture into the unknown.
So we imagine:
the conversations unrecorded,
the doubts no one admitted aloud,
the choices made in panic or hope,
the unspoken courage or the quiet guilt.
So is it ever acceptable to take liberties with history?
Yes—when it illuminates something the record cannot.
Yes—when it serves the emotional truth of the event.
Yes—when it prevents the past from becoming flat and distant.
The goal is not perfect accuracy. The goal is honesty—to honor the people involved by acknowledging their humanity, not enshrining them as static names on a page. 33 Lost is not a documentary. It is a human story inside a historical frame. My hope is that the play honors the real men who fought a losing battle with the sea—not by turning them into legends, but by letting them be fully, painfully human.
More soon as the play continues to take shape.
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