WHO AM I THIS TIME?
(& OTHER CONUNDRUMS OF LOVE)
By Aaron Posner
Adapted from Stories by Kurt Vonnegut
Directed by Gayle Stahlhuth
The cast: Nathan Garcia, Veronique Hurley, Mat Labotka,
Mark Edward Lang, Andrew Lofredo, Liz Mattera,
Alison J. Murphy, and Gayle Stahlhuth
July 27 – September 3
Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM
Location: Cape May Presbyterian Church, 500 Hughes Street, Cape May, NJ
Tickets: $35; $30 senior; $20 student and military; (active/retired/veteran); ages 12 and under free
Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM
Location: Cape May Presbyterian Church, 500 Hughes Street, Cape May, NJ
Tickets: $35; $30 senior; $20 student and military; (active/retired/veteran); ages 12 and under free
KURT VONNEGUT WOULD HAVE BEEN 100 THIS YEAR!
And we're celebrating the occasion by offering three of his stories about love!
The location is North Crawford, Connecticut and the year is 1962.
These stories are filled with hope, delivered with humor and heart.
“Long Walk to Forever” - A soldier goes AWOL to try to convince his childhood sweetheart that she’s marrying the wrong man.
“Who Am I This Time?” - A new woman in town falls in love with a terribly shy man when she performs opposite him
in the community theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” - A writer realizes that his marriage to a film star can be difficult.
BIOGRAPHIES
Nathan Garcia, a New York City native, is a student at Anne Arundel Community College with an interest in Film and Theater, and appeared in their 2022 production of Clue as Mr. Boddy and The Police Chief. His earliest performances were at Wildwood Catholic High School's productions of Godspell, as Rooster in Annie, and Tulsa in Gypsy. He co-produced Louis Mascolo's Dying Like Ignacio off Broadway, and recently was an on-air broadcaster for local FM radio stations 98.7 and 106.3. Nathan retired from the New York City Police Department as a Detective in 2017 and from the US Navy Reserves as a Chief Petty Officer in 2019. A former Sergeant in the US Marine Corps, he now makes his home in Annapolis, Maryland. He is a graduate of the International Culinary Center which was located in New York City.
Veronique Hurley (She/Her) Is grateful to be performing at ELTC again. She co-hosts a comedy podcast called Grumble Goat. @grumblegoatpodcast. Last seen in ELTC’s The Rainmaker, Sherlock Holmes Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Silent Sky and
Biography. Off Broadway Theatre Credits include: The Tempest, As You Like it, Twelfth Night, Hunting and Gathering (The Glass Eye), and Women are crazy because men are Assholes (Cherry Lane Theatre); Regional Credits Include: Noises Off, To Kill A Mockingbird, Christmas Carol, (The Hartford Stage Company) The Straight Marriage Plays, Moon Over Buffalo (Cape May Stage), Around the World in 80 Days (won best ensemble, Broadwayworld.com). Member Actors' Equity Association.
Biography. Off Broadway Theatre Credits include: The Tempest, As You Like it, Twelfth Night, Hunting and Gathering (The Glass Eye), and Women are crazy because men are Assholes (Cherry Lane Theatre); Regional Credits Include: Noises Off, To Kill A Mockingbird, Christmas Carol, (The Hartford Stage Company) The Straight Marriage Plays, Moon Over Buffalo (Cape May Stage), Around the World in 80 Days (won best ensemble, Broadwayworld.com). Member Actors' Equity Association.
Mat Labotka recently played File in ELTC's The Rainmaker. An alum of Chicago’s Second City Conservatory and Marquette University, Mat is both classically trained and freshly comedic. New York credits include Henry in The King’s Face, Albert in Relativity of Love (Break A Leg), Victor in The Star and The Fire (90 Square Arts). Chicago credits include Metropolis Theatre, Circle Theatre, Second City, iO Chicago, Underground Lounge. Mat also performs in commercials, improv and stand-up comedy. Member Actors' Equity Association. matlabotka.com
Mark Edward Lang Theater and corporate training events have taken him to 35 U.S. states and around the world; including trips to Malaysia, Tanzania, Copenhagen and Istanbul. Favorite roles include Alfred Lunt in the biographical drama Lunt and Fontanne: The Celestials of Broadway (FringeNYC and Classic Theatre of San Antonio; also playwright), Captain Robert Scott in Terra Nova and Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest (Hilton Head Playhouse), The Actor in ELTC’s The Guardsman (with wife Alison J. Murphy), seven roles in the Irish comedy Stones in his Pockets (Open Stage of Harrisburg), Kosti in Welcome Home Marian Anderson (Off-Broadway and tour); and ELTC’s The Rainmaker, Ah, Wilderness!, Biography, Zorro!, Christopher Bean, The Poe Mysteries, Dulcy, Butter and Egg Man, Why Marry?, The New York Idea, Voice of the City, The Dictator (2001), Four by Four and You and I (Best Actor Jacoby Award, 2007). He’s performed Shakespeare, Molière and new works in NYC and on tour; as well as theater workshops and directing, including ELTC’s Anna Christie. Graduate of Vassar College. Member AEA, SAG-AFTRA.
Liz Mattera is a New York based actress who is thrilled to be performing with East Lynne Theatre Company for the first time! Most recently seen in Overtones (Maggie), some of her past resume highlights include Hamlet (Player Queen), Shivaree (Laura) and directing/producing/writing/performing in Daughters Rising with Daughters of Troy. Proud graduate of Marymount Manhattan College with a BFA in Musical Theatre. For more info, visit lizmattera.com. IG: liz.mattera
Alison J. Murphy has appeared in New York productions of Lunt and Fontanne: The Celestials of Broadway (with her husband Mark Edward Lang), Aurora Leigh, The Wound of Love, and ELTC’s Why Marry? at the historic Players Club. Past ELTC productions in Cape May include The Late Christopher Bean, The Dictator, The New York Idea, Voice of the City, Four by Four, Why Marry?, You and I, Dulcy, and The Guardsman. For Access to Art in Cape May, she portrayed Rosalind in As You Like It and Margaret Roper More in Bound by Truth, by Sheila Rinear. She has also worked with American Stage Company and Shakespeare in the Garden, in productions of Cloud Nine, Elephant Man, Extremities, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Film: The Love of My Life (Frank Faralli, director). She also teaches acting workshops. Member AEA.
Andrew Lofredo is an Orlando-based performer, writer, and stage manager. In the past, he’s worked as a production assistant for East Lynne’s summer 2019 and 2020 seasons and is thrilled to be returning on stage. Favorite past credits include the Waiter in First Date at Theatre UCF and Hugo in Tuck Everlasting at the Southeastern Summer Theater Institute. He recently graduated from the University of Central Florida with a BFA in Musical Theater.
Gayle Stahlhuth has performed off-Broadway (Manhattan Theatre Club, etc.), in national tours (Cabaret, Fiddler, etc.), regional theater (Gateway Playhouse in Long Island, etc.), television, and radio. Other work involves directing cabaret shows in NYC, starting a dinner theater in Billings, MT, and creating a Medieval Festival at The Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. A Year in the Trenches (2017), marked her 100th production for ELTC since becoming the company’s artistic director in 1999. She’s been awarded commissions from The National Portrait Gallery, the Missouri and Illinois Humanities Councils, and grants from the NJ Humanities Council, the NYS Council on the Arts, and the Mid-Atlantic Foundation for the Arts. For several years, she was a judge for the Emmy Awards in the field of broadcast news. In 2016, she was honored for her work in theater by The National Association of Professional Women (NAPW). Member: AEA, SAG-AFTRA, and Dramatists Guild.
Amanda Brinlee (Stage Manager) is a recent graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University, a small business owner, stage manager, and performer. Since receiving her Bachelors of Arts in Acting in 2020, she performed in ELTC’s virtual reading of Something to Vote For; worked backstage and onstage in Vaudeville Variety, Tales in the Backyard and Poe by Candlelight; assistant stage managed Dorothy Parker: A Certain Woman, and assistant directed The Summer Student Workshop’s The Reluctant Dragon. When she is not working in theater, she is running her small business, Amanda Brinlee Designs on Etsy, and raising her daughter. Amanda would like to thank ELTC and Gayle for this continued opportunity, as well as her husband and the rest of her family for their love and support.
Gail Kennedy (Costume Designer), comes to Who Am I This Time? via a circuitous route—from Allegheny College where she supervised the costume shop and designed many Playshop productions, Hecuba to Uncommon Women; to New York City dressing Broadway shows, Wicked, Jersey Boys, Hairspray; designing costumes for an off-off Broadway production of The Duchess, aka Wallace Simpson; to Manhattan College designing Company and Little Shop of Horrors. Most recently backstage at the Met and now happy to be designing at Cape May! Appreciating the wonderful serendipity of her creative paths; sweetest memories to Rue who truly instilled the lifelong lesson “thank you for being a friend.”
Aaron Posner (playwright) grew up in Eugene, Oregon, went to Northwestern University, and has spent most of his life working in professional regional theater. He was the Artistic Director of two LORT theater, and is currently an Associate Professor at American University. He's directed more than 150 productions at major regional theaters across the country including The Arden Theatre, Arena Stage, California Shakespeare Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Folger Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Seattle Repertory Theatre, South Coast Rep, and Two River Theater in NJ.
Posner has written about 20 plays, all (but one) of which are adaptations of short stories, novels, novellas, or plays. His work has received over 400 productions including Off-Broadway (My Name is Asher Lev and Life Sucks). Other plays include Stupid, F*****G Bird (a new look at The Seagull, JQA, The Heal, No Sisters, District Merchants, The Chosen, Sometimes A Great Notion, Cyrano (with Michael Hollinger), A Murder, A Mystery & A Marriage (with composer James Sugg), The Gift of Nothing (with composer Andy Mitton), ME…JANE: The Dreams & Adventures of Young Jane Goodall (also with composer Andy Mitton.) He's received six Helen Hayes Awards, two Barrymore Awards, The Outer Circle Critics Award, a Joseph Jefferson Award, an Elliott Norton Award, The Bay Area Theatre Critics Award, The John Gassner Prize, and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award.
Posner has written about 20 plays, all (but one) of which are adaptations of short stories, novels, novellas, or plays. His work has received over 400 productions including Off-Broadway (My Name is Asher Lev and Life Sucks). Other plays include Stupid, F*****G Bird (a new look at The Seagull, JQA, The Heal, No Sisters, District Merchants, The Chosen, Sometimes A Great Notion, Cyrano (with Michael Hollinger), A Murder, A Mystery & A Marriage (with composer James Sugg), The Gift of Nothing (with composer Andy Mitton), ME…JANE: The Dreams & Adventures of Young Jane Goodall (also with composer Andy Mitton.) He's received six Helen Hayes Awards, two Barrymore Awards, The Outer Circle Critics Award, a Joseph Jefferson Award, an Elliott Norton Award, The Bay Area Theatre Critics Award, The John Gassner Prize, and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was born into a wealthy Indianapolis family, the youngest of three children. His father and grandfather were eminent architects and his mother’s family ran a successful brewery. The financial security the family enjoyed began to vanish when the brewery closed in 1921 due to Prohibition, followed by the Great Depression, during which no one could afford to hire architects. His father withdrew from public life, and his mother became bitter as she tried to hold on to the status the family once enjoyed.
Vonnegut began to write while attending Shortridge High School, where he was the co-editor of the weekly school newspaper, “The Shortridge Echo.” After graduating in 1940, he attended Cornell University where he wanted to study humanities, but on the advice of his father and brother, majored in biochemistry. Here, he also worked for the school paper, first as a staff writer and then as the editor of “The Cornell Daily Sun.” Due to poor grades, he was placed on academic probation, and dropped out of Cornell in May 1942. Although a pacifist, he joined the army instead of waiting to be drafted. In March 1943, he reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He went home to see his mother on Mother’s Day on May 14, 1944, only to discover that she had committed suicide the night before with an overdose of sleeping pills. Three months later, he was in Europe with the 106th Infantry Division.
During the final German offensive of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, over 500 men in his division were killed, and over 6,000 captured, including Vonnegut. As a prisoner, he ended up living in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, working in a factory. In February 1945, when allied troupes fiercely began bombing this historic city, destroying the center of town and killing around 25,000 civilians, he hid in a meat locker. Vonnegut and other POWs were put to work excavating bodies from the rubble, an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life.
After the war, he married his grade-school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, and moved to Chicago where, using the G.I. Bill, he became an anthropology student at the University of Chicago. At night, he worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. After college, the family moved to Schenectady, NY where Vonnegut was a technical writer, and then publicist for General Electric. His first story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was published in the February 11, 1950 issue of “Collier’s,” for which he received $750. More stories with greater fees followed, and in 1951, Vonnegut moved his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he planned to write full time.
In 1952, his first novel, Player Piano, was published. Granville Hicks, critic for “The New York Times,” compared it favorably to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. While he continued to write short stories that were getting published in magazines, he worked on his novels. By 1954, the Vonneguts had three children. In 1958, his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in the three youngest of their children. Novels began to be published: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). By 1965, however, he was on the verge of quitting his writing career, when he was offered the job of teaching writing at the University of Iowa.
In March, 1967, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany, which brought him back to Dresden. For years, he’d been trying to write about his wartime experience, and now he could. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, published in 1969 during the Vietnam War, quickly rose to the top of the “New York Time’s” Best Seller List. Finally, he had the fame and financial security he’d been seeking, and became a voice for the anti-war movement, speaking at rallies. He taught for a while at Harvard and City College of New York, and was elected vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1972, the film version of Slaughterhouse Five was released.
Meanwhile, his disintegrating marriage led to divorce in 1971, although the two remained friends until Jane’s death in 1986. Battling depression, he continued to write. In 1979, he married photographer Jill Krementz.
In all, Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, with further collections published after his death. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 2015, and an asteroid was named in his honor, as well as a crater on Mercury. In 2021, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association.
Here is a selection from his final and very successful book, A Man Without a Country, published in 2005.
Requiem
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
That we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Vonnegut began to write while attending Shortridge High School, where he was the co-editor of the weekly school newspaper, “The Shortridge Echo.” After graduating in 1940, he attended Cornell University where he wanted to study humanities, but on the advice of his father and brother, majored in biochemistry. Here, he also worked for the school paper, first as a staff writer and then as the editor of “The Cornell Daily Sun.” Due to poor grades, he was placed on academic probation, and dropped out of Cornell in May 1942. Although a pacifist, he joined the army instead of waiting to be drafted. In March 1943, he reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He went home to see his mother on Mother’s Day on May 14, 1944, only to discover that she had committed suicide the night before with an overdose of sleeping pills. Three months later, he was in Europe with the 106th Infantry Division.
During the final German offensive of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, over 500 men in his division were killed, and over 6,000 captured, including Vonnegut. As a prisoner, he ended up living in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, working in a factory. In February 1945, when allied troupes fiercely began bombing this historic city, destroying the center of town and killing around 25,000 civilians, he hid in a meat locker. Vonnegut and other POWs were put to work excavating bodies from the rubble, an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life.
After the war, he married his grade-school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, and moved to Chicago where, using the G.I. Bill, he became an anthropology student at the University of Chicago. At night, he worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. After college, the family moved to Schenectady, NY where Vonnegut was a technical writer, and then publicist for General Electric. His first story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was published in the February 11, 1950 issue of “Collier’s,” for which he received $750. More stories with greater fees followed, and in 1951, Vonnegut moved his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he planned to write full time.
In 1952, his first novel, Player Piano, was published. Granville Hicks, critic for “The New York Times,” compared it favorably to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. While he continued to write short stories that were getting published in magazines, he worked on his novels. By 1954, the Vonneguts had three children. In 1958, his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in the three youngest of their children. Novels began to be published: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). By 1965, however, he was on the verge of quitting his writing career, when he was offered the job of teaching writing at the University of Iowa.
In March, 1967, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany, which brought him back to Dresden. For years, he’d been trying to write about his wartime experience, and now he could. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, published in 1969 during the Vietnam War, quickly rose to the top of the “New York Time’s” Best Seller List. Finally, he had the fame and financial security he’d been seeking, and became a voice for the anti-war movement, speaking at rallies. He taught for a while at Harvard and City College of New York, and was elected vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1972, the film version of Slaughterhouse Five was released.
Meanwhile, his disintegrating marriage led to divorce in 1971, although the two remained friends until Jane’s death in 1986. Battling depression, he continued to write. In 1979, he married photographer Jill Krementz.
In all, Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works, with further collections published after his death. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 2015, and an asteroid was named in his honor, as well as a crater on Mercury. In 2021, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association.
Here is a selection from his final and very successful book, A Man Without a Country, published in 2005.
Requiem
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
That we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
