Herman Melville at the MAC

Sailing Towards My Father
Herman Melville performed by Stephen Collins

Friday, January 24 at 6:30pm

MAC Members: $15, Nonmembers: $18, Students 18 and under: $10 

in the MAC’s Anne Braitmayer Webb Theater
Doors open at 6:00pm

Sailing Towards My Father, written and directed by Carl A. Rossi, is a one-man play about Herman Melville (1819-1891), the American author best known for his whaling epic Moby-Dick. The play chronicles Melville’s life from youth to old age, concentrating on his evolution as a writer and his complex relations with God, his parents and siblings, his wife and children, and Nathanial Hawthorne.

Stephen Collins first joined the MAC Stage as Walt Whitman, battling Emily Dickinson (Annemarie Fredericks) in the Poetry Knockout! during ArtWeek 2019 at the MAC. Collins grew up in Cambridge and received a BA in Literature from UMass Boston. After twenty plus years in a sales career, he is back doing what he truly loves – performing and teaching. Recently he has been teaching seminars on Whitman, Hardy, Shakespeare, Frost, and Contemporary Poetry at various locations. Stephen first performed Sailing Towards my Father at Arrowhead, Pittsfield MA, where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick. Prior to Melville performance, Stephen performed as James McNeil Whistler in another play by Carl A. Rossi entitled Butterfly. He also works as a professionally licensed tour guide doing narrated historical tours of Boston. His Whitman performances have taken him all over the country. He now has eight one-man shows and seven courses where his teaching style has been described as a hybrid between lecture and performance. Learn more about Stephen here.