Guy Mendilow Ensemble
feat. MA Poet Laureate Regie Gibson

About

Different Ships, Same Boat is an interactive, multidisciplinary performance combining powerful spoken word, music and song to explore the multifaceted ways Americans risk, live, love and laugh. Unfolding through a series of chapters — each curating real world stories — literary performer Regie Gibson (inaugural poet laureate of the Commonwealth of MA) and composer/storycatcher Guy Mendilow guide audiences with podcast-like narration, at turns humorous, poignant or poetic, over an evocative musical score. With stories from small towns, cities and ports of entry, along with music spanning lyrical American Blues and songs from older homes from which today’s Americans came (e.g. Ottoman Jews from present-day Greece and Hungary), Different Ships, Same Boat offers a stirring exploration of the joys, tensions and complexities of who we are and who we wish to be.

As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Different Ships, Same Boat invites audiences to celebrate not only America but Americans. This is for those craving a powerful artistic performance of captivating music and stories — a moving, finely-crafted, anthology that connects audiences to American histories, perspectives, and experiences both familiar and different from their own.