Please Note: Individual tickets to the Staged Reading are sold out, but limited Dinner/Reading tickets remain.
The Sag Harbor Partnership and Steinbeck House Local Advisory Committee will celebrate the launching of Steinbeck House on Saturday September 9, 2023 with an evening entitled THE FALL OF OUR CONTENTMENT, a star-studded, newly penned staged reading of the classic Steinbeck novel The Winter of Our Discontent.
Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning writer, John Steinbeck’s last novel, and the only one to take place on the East Coast, was written in his beloved cottage and is about the residents of a town much like Sag Harbor where the action takes place. Writer, director, and producer Marc Abraham has written this adaptation of the novel that is being primed for a theatrical run. The director, actor, and playwright, Tim Blake Nelson, will direct the reading that will feature local artists including James Badge Dale in the pivotal role of Ethan Hawley. A former member of the village’s aristocracy, Ethan’s father lost their fortune and Ethan is now a clerk in the grocery store his family once owned. A novel that grapples with morality, justice and power and was justly reviewed as marking the return to the mood and concerns with which Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent reverberates with what the author saw to be the moral disintegration of American society in the latter part of the 20th century.
A reception will take place at 6:00 p.m., followed by the reading of the play at 7:00 p.m. on the ground level of The Church, 48 Madison Street.
For those interested, a private dinner with members of the acting company will follow the reading at one of Sag Harbor’s oldest and most charming private homes. The dinner will feature food by Sybille van Kempen of Loaves and Fishes and wines by Wölffer including Roman Roth’s The Grapes of Roth.
One of the Partnership’s latest and proudest accomplishment is the purchase of Steinbeck House. Proceeds from this event will directly benefit both the Sag Harbor Partnership and the Steinbeck House Local Advisory Committee.