Peninsula Players Finish Reading Series with Vonnegut Adaptation

The Peninsula Players will close out their 2016 “The Play’s the Thing” winter reading series April 4 with an adaptation of three well-known comic masterpieces by the late American author Kurt Vonnegut.

Based on three short stories from his 1968 collection Welcome to the Monkey House, Who Am I This Time? (& Other Conundrums of Love) explores hilarious and charming stories of love in a small Connecticut town.

Adapted by playwright and stage director Aaron Posner, the play weaves together Long Walk to Forever, Who Am I This Time? and Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son using a single narrator who is also a character in all three stories.

Long Walk to Forever finds a young military man face-to-face with his childhood friend who is engaged to another man. He has come home with the intention of convincing her to marry him, and the audience goes along for a walk with the two as she struggles in her response.

In the same town, the story Who Am I This Time? takes place at a community theater. Peninsula Players director Greg Vinkler, who will lead the final play reading in April, starred as a “glorified extra” in the 1982 short television movie adaptation of the play starring Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon, and directed by Jonathan Demme.

“Who Am I This Time? takes place in the same small town and it centers on a community theater there called The North Crawford Mask & Wig Club,” Vinkler explained. “The community theater is doing a production of A Streetcar Named Desire and this story centers on this hardware clerk, Harry Nash, who is extremely, extremely shy and unprepossessing and really is very socially inadequate. But when he does a role in one of the community theater productions, he absolutely transforms into whatever that character is and it’s an amazing transformation and as soon as he walks off the stage, he goes back to being a very shy hardware clerk.”

A visitor to the town, Helene Shaw, is cast opposite Harry in the production and the audience is taken along on the funny twists and turns of characters falling in love on and off stage.

Finally, Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son is a tale of a writer who falls into the fame of Hollywood and must try to regain his original values, with the help of the narrator, when he falls on difficult times.

All three plays are light, optimistic and filled with love, warmth, humor and human imperfection.

“It’s about love, really, and it’s about people we all know in a small town and about community and about helping each other in a way,” Vinkler said.

Starring in Who Am I This Time? (& Other Conundrums of Love) are Harter Clingman, Amy Ensign, Ashley Lanyon, Chad Luberger, James Leaming, Mark Moede and Claire Morkin.

The reading will take place at 7pm on Monday, April 4 at Björklunden, 7590 Boynton Lane in Baileys Harbor. Admission is free.