In ‘Two Years,’ There’s a New Face Before the Mast : Theater: Another actor takes on the one-man show in Dana Point after the death of creator Daniel Trent.

In his classic American novel “Two Years Before the Mast,” Richard Henry Dana Jr. wrote that “A sailor’s life is, at best, but a mixture of little good with much evil and a little pleasure with much pain.” For it was harsh reality, not romanticized fiction, that Dana sought to convey in his first-hand account of how common seamen lived and died in the 1830s.

More than 1 1/2 centuries later, Dana’s story continues to be retold in the city that bears his name.

Starting Saturday, an adaptation of “Two Years Before the Mast” will be staged on the main deck of the Pilgrim, a replica of the tall ship that Dana sailed on from Boston to California.

The award-winning play, which premiered in 1981 under the auspices of the American Living History Theater, is presented by the Orange County Marine Institute.

This is the first year the show will go on without Daniel Trent, the play’s star and co-writer (with Victor Pinheiro), who died in March of AIDS, said Daniel T. Stetson, the institute’s director of maritime affairs.

Trent had performed the one-man show each summer for 12 years through 1993. His illness nearly forced the cancellation of the production last summer, but Trent found and directed his replacement, Jeffrey Paul Whitman, for an abbreviated run. Whitman will take on a five-week run this year.

“Daniel told me how much the play meant to him,” said Whitman, who had once been in an acting class Trent taught and had been recommended to him for the “Two Years” role by a mutual friend. “He directed me from a couch in his living room. I would go over to his apartment each day, and we would work for two or three hours.

“Frequently he would drop off to sleep, just because it was necessary,” Whitman recalled. Anticipating those times that Trent knew he would doze, “He told me, ‘If it happens, just repeat what you’ve done.’ ”

Whitman said he modeled his characterizations after Trent’s work, “while at the same time incorporating my own personality and my own slant on the story.”

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Stetson said the play can be appreciated by adults and children alike in the evocative outdoor setting.

“It’s very much a performance under the stars,” Stetson said. “The sails are up; the rigging is in place. You can feel the light breezes, see the moon.

“The ship is docked the whole time,” he added. “Only in your imagination does it take off.”

The demanding performance, which requires Whitman to portray seven roles, begins with Dana at age 46 recounting his experiences aboard the Pilgrim, a small but strong brig originally built for the smuggling trade.

He also portrays Dana from the ages of 19 to 21, along with the ship’s tyrannical captain and other sailors who made the perilous voyage around the tip of South America to bring cattle hides from California to New England.

Dana, who left his sheltered life at Harvard after contracting a serious case of measles, had sought to regain his health by taking a long sea voyage. But instead of sailing as a paid passenger, Dana signed on as a common seaman.

His daily journal of his 1834 voyage, which became the basis of “Two Years Before the Mast,” detailed the physical abuse and other hardships endured by sailors and described the rugged California coastline during the era of Spanish missions and ranchos.

He singled out Dana Point, then known as San Juan, as “the only romantic spot in California.” A passage in his book recounted how the sailors would pitch stiff, mite-infested cattle hides off San Juan’s steep cliffs, then watch as they “swayed and eddied about, plunging and rising in the air, like a kite when it has broken its string.”

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Whitman, a 34-year-old actor with a background in Shakespeare--he appeared in “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the Woodland Hills-based Los Angeles Shakespeare Company in 1993--said that portraying Dana and other characters in “Two Years Before the Mast” can be emotionally and physically exhausting.

“The close proximity of the audience members, the sheer volume of words and the large number of different characterizations make it the greatest challenge I’ve ever experienced on stage,” he said.

Whitman, who performs the 75-minute show without an intermission, said he hopes this re-creation of early California history will make audience members more aware “of what people went through to get us where we are today.” Or as Richard Henry Dana Jr. put it, “Some of us remember it as it was, and keep the memory green.”

* The Orange County Marine Institute’s production of Daniel Trent and Victor Pinheiro’s stage adaptation of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s novel “Two Years Before the Mast” opens Saturday aboard the Pilgrim tall ship, which is docked at the institute, 24200 Dana Point Harbor Drive. Performances at 6:30 and 8:30 p.m., Saturdays through Aug. 5. $15 and $20. Reservations are required. (714) 496-2274.