Composer and National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini returned to MASS MoCA with a work-in-progress preview of her opera The Old Man and the Sea, created with Royce Vavrek and Karmina Šilec and produced by Beth Morrison Projects, that interweaves Hemingway’s classic fable with original portraits of quotidian life to create a look at aging, legacy, and our relationship to oceans. The evening included an excerpt of the new work, followed by a conversation on stage with the principal creative team.

Helga Davis, a longtime collaborator and muse of Prestini — and another returning MASS MoCA artist — sang as the narrator with Jeffrey Zeigler performing as the featured cellist. The cast included a choir and brought to life Hemingway’s seminal characters Santiago, Manolin, and the wife, recast here as the Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in Santería, the Afro-Caribbean faith, who was found floating on a wooden board off the coast of eastern Cuba in 1628. Themes of baseball, ecology, religion, and economy helped paint a conflict between progress and tradition, granting a contemporary perspective to a timeless tale.