Newburyport’s bright lights in the arts have come together very quickly – in less than a week – to pull together “An Evening of Theater and Poetry to Benefit Ukraine” on Sunday evening, March 27 at 7 p.m. Held at the Firehouse Center for the Arts, which has generously donated the space, the event will raise money for the Ukrainian charitable organization Razom for Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid where it is needed most.
The evening will include a staged reading of Take the Rubbish Out Sasha, written by Ukraine’s most acclaimed playwright-director, Natal’ya Vorozhbit. The play, directed by Bonniejean Wilbur and featuring Paul Wann, Mara Flynn, Molly Flynn, and Edward Speck, offers insight into everyday life in the early years of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and highlights the experiences of women in war time.
The event will also feature readings from award-winning Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s book Deaf Republic, which opens in a time of political unrest in an occupied territory. Though the setting is uncertain, we recognize ourselves—our time and our country—in these harrowing events.
Kaminsky was born in Odessa when the Ukrainian city was still a part of the Soviet Union, and is now an American citizen. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Award finalist
Newburyport’s event, hosted jointly by the Firehouse Centre for the Arts, Theater in the Open, and Newburyport Arts Collective, is a part of the “Worldwide Readings Project,” a global initiative joining nearly 150 theater companies around the world to stage readings of Ukrainian texts to raise money for the military, humanitarian aid, and relief efforts.
Tickets are $25 and available online.