The Playwrights’ Theatre of East Hampton will return to LTV Studios with a staged reading of “The Old Marlin and the Sea,” a play by John McCaffrey that will premiere in Wainscott on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
The play is less about the marlin than about William Farnum, the man who caught it off Catalina Island in California and eventually hung it in the boathouse of his estate on Actors Colony Road on North Haven.
While Farnum (1876-1953) isn’t exactly a household name, he was an actor who made his stage debut with Edwin Booth at the age of 14 in a production of “Julius Caesar” in Richmond, Va., and went on to a career in silent pictures and talkies so prolific that it earned him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
After more than 20 years onstage, Farnum debuted in movies in 1914 and became one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, earning $10,000 per week. He was seriously injured on a set in 1924, however, after which he took smaller stage roles before 1929, when he reportedly lost $2 million in the stock market crash, according to American National Biography.
He returned to the screen in 1930 and appeared in dozens of films as a character actor, most often in westerns, though he was featured in Cecil B. DeMille’s “Cleopatra” (1934) and “The Crusades” (1935). DeMille was one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
The play follows Farnum’s career through the heights of fame and fortune, his downfall, and his reinvention in talkies, according to LTV. It draws upon literary themes that helped earn Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” its enduring status.
“William Farnum’s life mirrored this line from ‘The Old Man and the Sea’: ‘Man can be destroyed but not defeated,’ “ McCaffrey said. “The similarities continue in the men as well. Hemingway and Farnum were both avid adventurers and outdoorsmen, and each experienced in their lives public triumph and tragedy.”
Josh Gladstone, LTV’s executive and creative director, called “The Old Marlin and the Sea” “the type of production that Mitzi and Perry Pazer had envisioned when they founded the Playwrights’ Theatre of East Hampton some 30 years ago.”
“An accomplished writer and active, longtime member of our arts community, John is inspired by the characters and locations that make up the uniquely interesting fabric and history of the East End,” Gladstone said. “William Farnum, Actors Colony Road, the scandals of another age, and a really big fish that’s been hanging around our neighborhood for over a hundred years — what compelling threads to weave!”
The production has original music by Marshall Coid, performed by Coid and Elizabeth Rodgers, a pianist. It also features visual projections, including images dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A Wainscott resident, McCaffrey is a novelist, playwright, and columnist with a novel and three short-story collections to his credit. He teaches creative writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The cast includes Mark Singer as Farnum, Gianna Volpe as the narrator, Gladstone as Hemingway, Kate Mueth as Olive, Farnum’s second wife, and Steven Lance.
Tickets in advance are $30, or $65 for table seating with bar and bottle service, with a two-person minimum. The prices rise the day of the show.
