By night, Liberatore is a server at Bresca, while Brent tends bar at 51 Wharf Street, occasionally hopping on the mic to freestyle. By day, they are artists who use theatre, hip-hop and spoken word to give youths and disadvantaged populations a creative outlet and a voice.
True, Brent’s freestyling — a highlight for many of 51 Wharf’s patrons on Friday and Saturday nights — isn’t exactly mild-mannered, and he, unlike Clark Kent or Peter Parker, does tend to stand out in a crowd. But still, there’s something about the couple’s daytime-nighttime duality that evokes the superhero analogy. One moment, Liberatore could be reciting the night’s specials, and the next, creating a theatre program for women in Maine’s correctional facilities.
Liberatore is, in fact, working with two other women on that initiative at present and recently secured funding for the new non-profit, Inside Out (www.maineinsideout.com), through the Maine Community Foundation. But that’s not all the dynamic couple is up to in their daytime lives.
Previously, they have worked with girls through “Say It Loud,” a local program using hip hop and spoken word poetry to help young women find and express their voices, and now they’re working with a male population — students from Lincoln Middle and Portland High, along with a few from a separate workshop they co-facilitated at Casco Bay High School — to create a keynote performance for the Boys to Men Conference on May 13 (www.boysconference.org). The performance will include original pieces the boys have written and practiced with guidance from Liberatore, 32, and Brent, also 32, who are both accomplished performers and writers themselves.
In addition to being heard on the mic at 51 Wharf, Brent is a regular at the Big Easy’s Hip Hop Open Mic Night, and Liberatore, who co-directed “Hear Our Stories, Know Our Names,” a drama about homelessness and poverty, has also co-written many original scripts, including “When Turtles Make Love: Real Talk Between Parents and Teens,” which she co-wrote with Cathy Plourde. Plourde is the founder of Add Verb Productions (www.addverbproductions.com), one of the organizations through which Liberatore and Brent have found many of their projects, but their activism didn’t begin in Maine.
When they lived in Chicago, Brent did some work with Public Allies as a housing advocate for people who were already homeless or at risk of becoming so, and Liberatore was involved with the Prison Creative Arts Program, which was where she first discovered the concept of “using art as a social change agent.” Liberatore now sits on PCAP’s National Board, and it was through that organization that Liberatore and Brent found some of their connections here in Portland.
“At our last meeting, when I told Michael (Keck, fellow PCAP board member) we were coming to Portland, he said there were two people I needed to get in touch with: Cathy Plourde and Layne Gregory,” Liberatore says (Gregory is the founder of Boys to Men), and those two connections have proven fruitful for the couple.
Brent has worked with the Boys to Men program RSVP (Reducing Sexism and Violence) in implementing a program at Sacopee Valley High School which trained 24 students last year. Boys to Men hopes to continue the program this year and expand it to more schools in southern Maine.
With full-time jobs occupying most of their nights and various projects filling in their days, Liberatore and Brent are kept busy, but both of them seem to be perpetually upbeat and smiling. So where do they find the time and energy for it all?
“One of the reasons we left Chicago was because we were doing too much,” Brent says with a chuckle. When asked if they’re at risk for the same problem here, Liberatore laughs. “We’re always at risk for that, I guess,” she says, “but Portland is good for us that way. We’re much more relaxed here than we were in Chicago.”
And certainly, Liberatore and Brent are good for Portland, too. A city can never have too many superheroes.
— Belinda Ray