Two Weeks In Falmouth

My Favorite Year meets On Golden Pond.
To revive his waning career, legendary Hollywood film star Robert Morgan begrudgingly agrees to a two-week run of summer stock at the Falmouth Playhouse on scenic Cape Cod. As an incentive, his agent allows him to select the play. Robert chooses the obscure “Desire in the Boudoir,” which we later come to find is his one attempt to make peace with the play he had completely botched as a young actor, and which led to the closing of the show after only one disastrous performance.

When the aging actor discovers that his leading lady will be played by his ex-wife Lilly LaRue, all hell breaks loose with an expert exchange of insults and comic repartee. The play opens and Robert’s flippant attitude and inability to remember his lines make Lilly’s blood boil, but Eleanor Adams, resident seamstress and head of wardrobe, has no patience for their antics. She dispenses truth with calm and quiet authority, which further enrages Lilly, yet attracts Robert who finds her demeanor quite refreshing. As their friendship grows, Robert seeks to release Eleanor from her melancholy brought on by her husband’s death in WWII, which he also finds prevalent in her beautiful but moody paintings of Cape Cod landscapes.

Robert realizes his celebrity has always been a cover for his mediocre acting. He strives to improve with Eleanor’s coaching, but time is running out when he finds himself coughing up blood, a sign that his disease, which he had been hiding from the public, is progressing, and that his moment of truth must come soon. At the next performance, Lilly is outraged when a replacement for Robert joins her on stage to the crowd’s audible disappointment, but is practically apoplectic when Robert later makes his entrance as the Butler to the roaring cheers of the audience! It was this role, not the lead, that he had performed so long ago, and to which he can now return some honor, as he effortlessly delivers his few lines, thus restoring his own peace, and Eleanor’s as well. With enormous gratitude and love, he rushes offstage to kiss Eleanor, and tells her he will not return to California, but live out the rest of his days in Falmouth.