On Thursday May 26th and Saturday June 4th  at 7 PM in Wakefield, RI, The Contemporary Theater Company will present “The Voice of Gertrude Stein,” featuring the best of local New England  talent. The program will feature a selection of art songs with text by Stein from LGBTQIA+ composers such as Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, and Felix Jarrar, as well as Rorem’s opera Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

With these performances,  co-producers Rachel Hanauer and Caroline Spaeth especially aim to provide a voice to the LGBTQIA+ arts community.  Hanauer, a professor at Providence College, hopes to bring opera to Rhode Island collegiate voice students who may not get many chances to see the vocal arts performed live. “We also  hope that this evening will provide a safe haven for LGBTQIA+ and non-binary audiences, especially as the past few years in American political life have been so fraught,” Spaeth says.

Spaeth and Hanauer will sing the roles of Jenny and Helen in Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters. Filling out the cast are  tenor Michael Gonzalez, soprano Sara DeLong, and mezzo-soprano Jade Espina. Mezzo-soprano Julie Rumbold will sing the role of Stein herself in selections from Peter Dayton’s May She | She May in the program’s first half, and will assume the role of Sylvia in Three Sisters on June 4th.

Tickets are $10 - $30 and can be purchased at  https://www.contemporarytheatercompany.com/springboard-schedule. Spaeth and Hanauer also have a ko-fi page for those who wish to make contributions to the project: https://ko-fi.com/gertrudestein