Local Poet to Workshop Play at New Port Richey Public Library

Bob Zappacosta and Jack Buchanan share a passion for poetry.

Zappacosta is a Holiday resident. Buchanan is a fictional character Zappacosta wants to bring to the stage.

Both will be at the Saturday afternoon.

On April 30, the last day of National Poetry Month, Zappacosta and co-writer MaryFrances Locarni are performing a free staged reading of their play “Jack Buchanan, a rough cut, a work in progress”. The two hope to get feedback from the audience finish shaping the piece.

“I’m a perfectionist,” Zappacosta said. “ When people see it, I want them to understand it’s a work in progress.”

Buchanan, the main character of the one-act play, is a poet from Boston who lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast. He has a shrine to Charles Bukowski, works as a short-order cook and lives in a house he inherited from a dead friend. The night he’s scheduled to give a big poetry reading at a university, he’s visited by the spirit of poet and writer Sylvia Plath. She’s visited him before, but on this night, she’s costumed like a dime-store fairy. And she helps him deal with his troubled past and current reckless behaviors.  

The play, Zappzacosta's first, is mostly finished, but Zappacosta and Locarni say they will probably make revisions.

Zappacosta wants audiences to engage with poetry. He doesn't just recite it. He performs it, working from memory.

He started the Jacaranda Poetry Festival, held for the fifth time April 16, at the Pasco Arts Council in Holiday, where Zappacosta is the resident poet.  The Council hosted his Art of Poetry exhibition, in which his poems are paired up with pieces of art, most of which were created for the exhibit, in honor of National Poetry Month. The exhibit ended today, April 29.  

The play, which Zappacosta has worked on for more than three years, started as a vehicle for Zappacosta’s poetry. Then, it started to develop a story, and the poetry worked itself into recitations by Buchanan and character dialogue.

The play is mostly finished, but Zappacosta is still refining who Jack Buchanan is. Most recently, Buchanan just got bounced from the Bukowski Tavern in Cambridge, Massachusetts. See it at Zappacosta’s YouTube account here.

Locarni, a Safety Harbor resident, met Zappacosta at a Barnes & Noble, and she’s worked on the play with him over the years. She’s an unpublished novelist, and she sits on the board of Showcase Arts Foundation, based in Clearwater. She says she’s talked to the Foundation about bringing the play to the stage, and it has expressed an interest in hosting the play. Locarni says she’s pleased at the way the play is coming to life after she has worked on it for so long with Zappacosta.

“I think we approach things differently because he’s a poet and I’m a writer,” she said “But I think this is beneficial.” 

And who is Bob Zappacosta? He doesn’t like to say much about his personal life.

He’s from just north of Boston, “in a city of red brick factories and caged elevators.”

He won First Place in the Tampa Bay Poetry Foundation’s 1998 Oral Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared by the Aurorean poetry journal, Boston Literary Magazine, Bowersock Gallery of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Pasco Arts Council, St. Petersburg Times, Tampa Tribune and Verdad.

One of his poems is called “My First Café Grand Poem,” and he can recite it from memory. It appears in the play. So do others.

He likes Sylvia Plath, but "you can't stay there" in the darkness with her too long. He also likes Bukowski’s poetry.

"He doesn't offer a lot, but he shows survival,"  he said. 

Ultimately, the play is about poetry. Not Zappacosta, he said. He doesn’t want people to see his face behind the work.

 “Jack Buchanan, a rough cut, a work in progress” will be read Saturday at 3 p.m at the New Port Richey Public Library, 5939 Main St, New Port Richey, FL 34652. It will be free to the public.