A Poet of Darkness and Light
The Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet online writing program will host “Dear Yusef,” a virtual event in honor of poet Yusef Komunyakaa, from 6 to 7:30 p.m on Thursday, March 20. The program, which also celebrates the publication of Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), will feature readings by poets Major Jackson, Jennifer Jean, John Murillo, and Nicole Sealey.
The book “affirms Komunyakaa’s transformative influence, showcasing how his mentoring has ignited creativity, nurtured passion, and fostered a sense of belonging among countless individuals” and expresses “the transformative power of poetry and the enduring legacy of a true literary icon,” writes Murillo, who co-edited the collection with Sealey.
Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, La. in 1941 and was a FAWC fellow in 1980-81. His tightly knit poems conjure youth, family, listening to jazz, and his “phantasmagoric” experience standing before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., as expressed in the poem “Facing It”: “My black face fades,/ hiding inside the black granite,/ I said I wouldn’t./ dammit: No tears/ I’m stone. I’m flesh.” (Komunyakaa served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.)
Komunyakaa’s work is also included in Angels of Ascent, an anthology of African American poetry, and online at poets.org, a project of the Academy of American Poets. His numerous awards and honors include the William Faulkner Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Arts Council. He was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.
The program is free, but registration is required. See fawc.org for more information. —Susan Rand Brown
Fiorella Brings Her Experience to the Stage
Playwright Linda Fiorella returns to the Truro Public Library (7 Standish Way) for a reading of her latest play, Just Like All the Rest, on Saturday, March 15.
Raised in Albany, N.Y., Fiorella first visited the Outer Cape in the 1970s and began writing plays when she moved here in 2017. She is a founding member of the Truro Playwright Collective, a group of seven Outer Cape writers who present full-length staged readings at the library once a month during the off-season, and has also participated in the annual 24-Hour Plays festival at the Provincetown Theater. Her last staged reading at the library was in 2023; this is her first autobiographical piece. “As nervous as I was, I am proud of myself for doing it and maintaining my composure,” she says.
The play covers events from an almost 20-year period in Fiorella’s life and was inspired by a woman with whom she had a long-term tumultuous relationship when she was in her 20s. “It’s been cathartic in some ways,” says Fiorella. “As I’ve looked at the past in different ways and uncovered new or forgotten nuances, experiences look different far enough on the other side. The hardest part was picking which stories to use.”
Admission to the reading is free. For more information, see trurolibrary.org and truroplaywrightcollective.org. —Hazel Everett
Beethoven’s Operatic Tale of Heroism
Ludwig van Beethoven is best known for his orchestral and chamber music works, including his nine symphonies, his many sonatas and concertos, and his 16 string quartets. But unlike Handel, Mozart, Puccini, and Verdi, Beethoven wrote only one opera, which he began in 1804: Fidelio, a dramatic tale of heroism.
This season’s Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD series continues with a simulcast of Fidelio at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (2357 Rt. 6) on Saturday, March 15 at 1 p.m. Soprano Lise Davidson stars as the heroine Leonore, who — in disguise as “Fidelio” — attempts to save her true love, Florestan, played by tenor David Butt Philip, from the clutches of tyranny. Susanna Mälkki will conduct the Met’s production.
While Beethoven set the opera in Seville during the tumultuous time following the French Revolution, the Met’s version “places the action in an unspecified contemporary setting,” according to the production notes.
Composing Fidelio proved a trial for Beethoven, who was known for his bad temper, and the opera underwent multiple revisions. In a letter to Georg Friedrich Treitschke, who worked on the libretto, Beethoven wrote, “I assure you, dear Treitschke, that this opera will win me a martyr’s crown. You have by your co-operation saved what is best from the shipwreck.”
Despite his frustration with the work, the premiere of the final revised version in 1814 in Vienna was a great success. Beethoven, who was by that time severely deaf, conducted. And — spoiler alert! — the opera, with its undertones of personal anguish, political strife, and violent uprising, has a happy ending.
Tickets for the simulcast are $18.75 to 30.75, including fees. See what.org for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Spring Workshops at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Starting this week, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum will offer a range of classes and workshops for visual artists, from printmaking and photography to mindfulness techniques and picture framing. The sessions, which will continue through the spring, will be offered both in person and online. All workshops are limited to 12 participants.
For three consecutive Thursdays beginning March 13, Siân Robertson will teach “Creating a Daily Art Practice.” Robertson works primarily with vintage maps and atlases, which she uses to make works including collages on paper and sculptures encased in plastic. “Participants will consider their own goals, perhaps to try something new, or deepen an existing skill,” according to Robertson’s course description.
Stephen Wells, an artist who operates Pilgrim Framing in Provincetown, will teach “Mat Cutting and Framing,” a single-session workshop, on Thursday, April 10. Participants will explore picture framing, mat cutting, and mounting techniques.
Multimedia artist Bernd Haussmann will teach “Be You, Be Your Art,” an online class spanning six consecutive Wednesdays beginning April 16. According to the course description, class members will engage in experimental creative exercises, mindfulness techniques, independent projects, interactive dialogs, and group critiques. Artists of all genres, media, and levels of experience are invited to participate.
Other classes include an introduction to cyanotype photography taught by Tonya Lemos, an introductory oil painting class taught by Antonia DaSilva, and a monotype workshop taught by Megan Hinton.
Costs for each class range from $150 to $360 with discounts for PAAM members. Scholarships are also available. See paam.org for a complete schedule and more information. —Susan Rand Brown
Zane Pergram’s Musical Connections
Zane Pergram calls himself a “mockingbird.” Several artists influence his music, including Irish musician Hozier with his full-throated voice, Sam Cooke with his soulful sound, and “cowboy tunes” by artists like Marty Robbins.
When Pergram makes music, “it’s just me and my guitar,” he says. “I try to mimic those artists, but what ends up happening is something a little different.” His own sound is best described as Americana, a label that “grabs the aspects of folk that I play and the aspects of blues and soul that I’m close to and wraps it up in a little package,” he says.
Pergram will perform at Wellfleet Public Library (55 West Main St.) on Saturday, March 15 from 3 to 4 p.m. The concert will feature a mix of covers and original compositions.
Pergram grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio and majored in vocal performance at Bowling Green State University, later receiving an M.F.A. in vocal performance and pedagogy at the University of Colorado Boulder. He arrived in Wellfleet last fall with his partner, who works for the National Seashore. They live in a converted cargo trailer near Wellfleet’s White Cedar Swamp.
When not creating music, Pergram works as an environmental technician for Wilkinson Ecological Design. He says his interest in ecological work factors into his music making: when he was younger, he wrote love songs, but now he writes about “his relationship to the world as a laborer” as well as climate change.
For his upcoming concert, Pergram has chosen songs that he says have “an earnestness and a grounded-ness to them, songs with a presence in the moment.” One of them is “Poems, Prayers and Promises” by John Denver. He once played it at an open mic in Wellfleet, he says, and “something about it spoke to some of the people there.”
Also on his program are two songs by American singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne: “Burn” and “Lesson Learned,” both of which convey emotions like jealousy and embarrassment. Other selections include “Babe I Know” by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, which Pergram says is about “accepting the gritty reality of life,” and Marty Robbins’s “The Red Hills of Utah,” which he calls “a beautiful vignette of missing the American West.” It’s a song that he especially connects with having grown up in the Midwest and spent years in Colorado. “I sometimes feel like a cowboy in the wrong kind of sand,” he says.
The concert is free. See wellfleetlibrary.org for more information. —Eve Samaha
