Cast and Crew
Carl Martin/Doremus Jessup
CARL MARTIN’s favorite roles include Kissinger in NIXON’s NIXON (Manbites Dog Theater), Jacob/Roy in Mike Wiley’s LEAVING EDEN (RhinoLeap Productions in Asheboro), Tiny Duffy in ALL THE KING’S MEN (Burning Coal Theater in Raleigh), and Duke Vincentio in MEASURE FOR MEASURE (Shenandoah Shakespeare, national tour). Carl’s day job is in contact-tracing.
Cynthia de Miranda/Lorinda Pike
Cynthia de Miranda originated the role of Lorinda Pike in Leslie Frost’s adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here in 2016. She has performed in and written for productions in the Triangle since 2001. Cynthia is also an architectural historian and a fan of the architecture of the New Deal period.
April Mae Davis/Mary Greenhill
April Mae was last seen as Cinna/Titinius in PlayMakers Repertory's production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Her previous work includes; Fay in the rolling world premiere of Jump at Playmakers Repertory Company.
REGIONAL: Everybody, Native Son,Sense and Sensibility, Tartuffe, Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood (Playmakers), In the Red and Brown Water (National Black Theatre Festival), The Right Reverend Dupree in Exile, and Black Nativity (NC Black Repertory Company), Crowns the Musical, and The Art of Murder (The Barn Dinner Theater) FILM: Monsters (Rev Films) EDUCATION: 3rd year MFA candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, BFA from NC A&T State University, British American Drama Academy's Midsummer in Oxford.
Brandon Haynes/Fowler Greenhill
Born and raised in Atlanta, Brandon St. Clair has been submerging himself in theatre since graduating from a performing arts high school and pursuing his BFA at Valdosta State University. While studying theatre in undergrad, he took an interest and begin to explore African American Studies and discovered he could add more dimension to characters he was being asked to portray with historical accuracy. He is a recent graduate of the UNC-PATP MFA Program and uses his knowledge and physicality to \tell his story.
Thaddaeus Edwards/Frank Tasbrough/Pastor Paul Peter Prang
Thaddaeus Edwards credits include: Audio/Digital: Declaration of Love Project, Master Builder Audio Drama (Artist Soapbox); The Jade City Pharoah (WUNC/State of Things). Stage: In a Word, Curve of Departure (Bulldog Ensemble Theater); To Buy the Sun: The Challenge of Pauli Murray (Hidden Voices/Pauli Murray Center); Life Sucks, The Best of Enemies, Spirits to Enforce, The Homosexuals, The Brothers Size, Middletown, The Overwhelming, The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen, Sonnets for an Old Century (Manbites Dog); The Parchman Hour (Cape Fear Regional Theater).
Sofia Ventimiglia/David Greenhill
Sofia Ventimiglia is an 8th grader from Durham, NC. She has been acting for eight years with Durham Regional Theatre. She enjoys reading, roller skating and watching anime.
Caitlyn Wells/Shad Ladue
Caitlin Wells was raised in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She's worked in recent years with artists such as T. Ryder Smith, Christopher McElroen, and Chris Stamey; performed at Yale and The New Ohio in Manhattan; and taught acting across mainland China. She has been awarded creative residencies with Drop Forge & Tool (Hudson, NY), Turkeyland Cove Foundation (Martha's Vineyard, MA), and The Tank (NYC), as well as a Manbites Dog Theater Fund grant (Durham, NC). She is currently studying with Austin Pendleton & Lisa Pelikan at HB Studio and interning with The Wooster Group, and just filmed her first commercial, directed by Dash Barber. www.caitlinjwells.com
Jackson Seymore/Julian Falk
Jackson Seymore is a recent UNC alumnus at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi where he is working on a master’s thesis in chemistry. His work involves monitoring air quality in the Coast Bend and identifying biomass burning aerosol markers in São Paulo rainwater. You may have seen Jackson in other productions around Chapel Hill such as LAB! Theatre’s A Bright New Boise, The Pillowman, or Constellations, or even Kenan Theater Company’s Hedda Gabbler or Company Carolina’s A View from the Bridge. Before the pandemic, Jackson was selected by the Campus Movie Festival to appear at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival for his role in the short film The Stars. His invitation has been extended for 2021.
Mark Filiaci/Berzilius “Buzz” Windrip
Actor, Director, Producer, Golfer, VOTER!
Daniel Toot/Effingham Swan
Dan Toot is a former company member at PlayMakers Repertory Company: Julius Caesar, Everybody, Dairyland, Ken Ludwig’s: Sherwood!, How I Learned to Drive, She Loves Me, Bewilderness, Sense and Sensibility, Leaving Eden. Regional: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Notre Dame Shakespeare, The House Theatre of Chicago, Oak Park Festival Theatre, First Folio Theatre, Raven Theatre, the side project, Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, Monomoy Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals. MFA in Acting from UNC Chapel Hill, BFA Acting from The Hartt School, Graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, and is represented by Talent One.
Lucia Foster/Narrator
Lucia Foster has been involved with theater as a performer, director and educator for most of her life. Favorite professional roles include being adjunct drama faculty at Washington College and Artistic Director of The Garfield Center for the Arts (Chestertown, Maryland.). In the regional theater realm, favorite acting roles include playing Emma Goldman in Ragtime (Justice Theatre Project-2016) and Inez McCormack in Seven (Sotto Voce Theatre-2017;) favorite regional directing gigs: The Woodstock Tontine (Women’s Theatre Festival 2017,) KiDSWrite (Burning Coal Theatre Co. – 2018) and multiple youth productions with ARCliTe (2017-2019.) An ardent believer in the potential of performance to engage communities, promote understanding and prompt action towards social change, Lucia is grateful to Leslie for involving her in a project that tickles all of these possibilities.
Joseph Megel, Director
Joseph Megel (Director) is Artist in Residence and Teaching Professor in Performance Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has run the Process Series: New Works in Development for 13 years. He is Artistic Director of StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance. His focus is on new performance as a vehicle for social justice.
Recent credits include: Orange Light by Howard L. Craft at BullDog Theater, Durham (the dramatized story of the chicken plant fire in Hamlet, NC); Temples of Lung and Air written and performed by Kane Smego at PlayMakers Repertory Company, The Talk written and performed by Sonny Kelly at Bulldog Theater Ensemble in Durham and at Historic Playmakers in Chapel Hill.
Additional recent credits include Dean Gray’s The Pattern at Pendarvis for New Dog Theatre Company|StreetSigns at HERE Arts Center in NYC, Mike Wiley’s adaptation of Tim Tyson’s book Blood Done Sign My Name at Raleigh Little Theatre, Christine Evans’s Closer Than They Appear for StreetSigns, Howard Craft’s The Miraculous and The Mundane for Manbites Dog Theater. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway credits include: Craft’s Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green for the New Federal Theater at The Castillo Theatre (Off-Broadway) and also for StreetSigns, ( NY Times Critics Pick).
At UNC, Megel serves as the Chair on the Provost’s Committee for LGBTQ life, is an artistic associate for Teatro Latina/o Series. He is a member of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society, a national theatrical labor union.
Daniel Wallace/intro
Daniel Wallace is author of six novels, including Big Fish (1998), Ray in Reverse (2000), The Watermelon King (2003), Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007), The Kings and Queens of Roam (2013), and most recently Extraordinary Adventures (May 2017). His children’s book, published in 2014, and for which he did both the words and the pictures, is called The Cat’s Pajamas, and it is adorable. In 2003 Big Fish was adapted and released as a movie and then in 2013 the book and the movie were mish-mashed together and became a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three-dozen languages.
His essays and interviews have been published in The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in over fifty magazines and periodicals, including Tin House, One Story, Glimmer Train, and The Georgia Review. His stories have been recognized in Best American Short Stories, Best Stories from the South, and read by Levar Burton on his podcast, Levar Burton Reads.
He lives in Chapel Hill with his lovely, charming and brilliant wife, Laura.
Leslie Frost/producer
In 2016, Leslie Frost adapted Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 script and produced an 80th anniversary staged reading of the Federal Theatre Project’s It Can’t Happen Here at Historic Playmakers Theatre at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is currently working on a project centered on New Deal U.S. Post Office murals. In her book Dreaming America (2013) Leslie Frost traces how the tumultuous politics of the late 1930s shaped the stories and stagings of Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939) children’s plays that participated in Popular Front culture.
Tim Tyson/historian
Timothy B. Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His 2017 New York Times bestseller, The Blood of Emmett Till, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Southern Book Award and the Grawemeyer Award from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Hollywood screenwriter Jeb Stuart directed a 2010 feature film based on Blood. His Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best book in United States history and the James Rawley Award for best book on race from the Organization of American Historians and became the basis for a 2006 PBS documentary, “Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power.”
Tyson teaches African American and Southern history, culture, and politics to students at Duke, UNC, Durham Technical and Community College, and the public. He works with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and serves on the executive boards of the N.C. NAACP, the UNC Center for Civil Rights, and Repairers of the Breach. He lives in Durham.
Will Cotter/tech director
Will is a producer and digital media artist from Chicago, Illinois. He previously served the artistic departments at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, American Theatre Company, and Portland Center Stage, where he produced the JAW New Works Festival from 2017 through 2019. Will has designed projections for theater and dance projects including world premieres of PJ Paparelli's The Project(s) and Adam Szymkowicz's Kodachrome. Will is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where he spent two years devising adapted theater works for actor James Franco. Will hopes you vote and also hopes you help your friends vote too.
Daniel Chavis/musician
Daniel Chavis hails from Raleigh and is the Lyricist, vocalist for the N.C band The Veldt for over 30 years.
He's toured with every possible indie band in the Psych/Shoegaze circles and in 2018 he started The North Carolina Festival of Psychedelia whilst starting his own indie design and illustration companies 5BC and Butterfly Soup.
Daniel along with The Veldt continue to perform and release music and will be back on the road once this country climbs out of the depths of hell.
Rachel M. Anderson/Stage Manager
Rachel is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Asheville's drama department. Although she started as a performer she has found that her true passion lies in Stage Management. She has managed shows like And Then There Were None, Metamorphoses and Rain Like Tears, to name a few. She loves theatre almost as much as she loves dogs and hopes one day to figure out how to combine the two and achieve ultimate happiness.
Martha Hoelzer/website designer/ consultant
Martha is a jack of many trades including photographer, entrepreneur, website designer and manager, social media guru, former IT helpdesk team lead and fundraiser. She created, designed and manages the websites for What Lies Beneath, a site dedicated towards helping others understand the impacts of brain injury on the visual system, her photography site - www.marthahoelzer.com, Olympian Margaret Hoelzer, PilgrimQuests, and more. As an award winning photographer, her portfolio includes clients such as Delta Airlines, Fleet Feet Sports, Balanced Movement Studios, EmbodiYoga, and others. When she’s not helping others, she can be found out on the trails joyfully running or practicing yoga.