East Lynne Theater Presents O. HENRY'S CHRISTMAS TALES to Help The Food Closet

As usual, the Equity professional, award-winning East Lynne Theater Company is accepting items for the Food Closet during the run of its holiday show. What is needed most are cereal, soup, bar soap, tuna, peanut butter, and dry spaghetti. For monetary donations, makes checks payable to The Community Food Closet of Cape May.

There are only five more times to see the award-winning Equity professional East Lynne Theater Company's "O. Henry's Christmas Tales," adapted and performed by Gayle Stahlhuth.

"There are just as many real Christmas stories as ever, if we would only dig 'em up," wrote O. Henry in his "Unfinished Christmas Story," published posthumously in 1919.

Stahlhuth has been "digging up" and adapting American Christmas stories for Cape May audiences since 2005, performing works by Louisa May Alcott, Zona Gale, L. Frank Baum, Mark Twain, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edward Everett Hale, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She has been praised by reviewers and audience alike for her unique tour-de-force, memorized storytelling style.

The O. Henry selections this year all take place in New York City and have to do with an exact amount of money. Della needs to buy a Christmas present for her husband in "The Gift of the Magi," and only has $1.87. A kindly old gent spends $1.30 on dinner for someone he barely knows in "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen." A millionaire offers $100 to anyone who will return his five-year-old daughter's rag doll in "Compliments of the Season." Bobby Gillian inherits $1,000 in "One Thousand Dollars," and wonders how to spend it.

Recently, Stahlhuth received praise from Terry Teachout in his review for "The Wall Street Journal" for her work as director and performer in ELTC's "Arsenic and Old Lace." Since becoming the company's artistic director in 1999, she's produced over 100 shows. In 2016, she was honored for her years of work in theater by The National Association of Professional Women (NAPW). Stahlhuth is an Active Member of the Dramatists Guild, SAG-AFTRA, and is in her 46th year as a member of Actors' Equity Association.

Final performances of "O. Henry's Christmas Tales" are on Sunday, Dec. 2, Thursday through Saturday, Dec. 6 - 8, all at 8:00 p.m. with a 2:00 p.m. matinee on Saturday, Dec. 8. The location is The First Presbyterian Church, 500 Hughes St. in Cape May, where the company is in residence. As usual with ELTC's Christmas shows, the company reduces its regular ticket price as an early holiday gift to its audience. Tickets are $28 for general admission; $20 for full-time students and military (active, retired, veteran), and as always with ELTC productions, those ages twelve and under are free when accompanied by parents or guardians.

Season tickets for 2019 are available and make a great Christmas present! Price is only $90 for four shows, if purchased by March 31, and tickets may be used in any way at any time.

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