Freedom Seder 2025: Different Ships, Same Boat

Join the NCMA for our fifth annual Freedom Seder featuring Different Ships, Same Boat, an interactive, multidisciplinary performance combining powerful spoken word, music, and song to explore the multifaceted ways Americans risk, live, love, and laugh. Literary performer Regie Gibson and composer/story catcher Guy Mendilow guide audiences with podcast-like narration through a series of chapters that relate real-world stories.

The dialogue, over an evocative musical score, is at turns humorous, poignant, and poetic. With stories from small towns, cities, and ports of entry; music such as lyrical American blues; and songs from Americans’ ancestors (for example, 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.

A Q&A takes place after the performance.

Written and directed by Guy Mendilow and Regie Gibson
Script by Regie Gibson, Guy Mendilow, and Alison James
Music composed and arranged by Guy Mendilow and Chris Baum
Performed by Regie Gibson (host/narrator), Guy Mendilow (host/narrator, piano, voice, guitar), Chris Baum (violin), Courtney Swain (voice, keyboard, bass)

This event is co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Raleigh and Jewish for Good.

Photo: Elizabeth Friar Photography