Nick Azzaretti stands in the yard of his Newcastle home on Thursday, Oct. 10. Azzaretti is a poet, teacher, and was the director of information technology at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle from 1993 until 2019. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Whatever the role may be, Nick Azzaretti, of Newcastle, leans into the act.
Whether that’s in the myriad of characters he played on stage as an English and drama teacher at Colby College or as the director of information technology at Lincoln Academy, Azzaretti believes everything is a performance.
“It’s a lifetime of performance. It’s recognizing that life is a performance … It’s all not real or as real as we make it. It’s the meaning that we imbue things with,” he said.
Born and raised in Chicago, Ill., Azzaretti said he discovered early on he enjoyed performing in front of others. He considers his first and longest-running role to be serving mass as an altar boy from the age of 7 until he was 18.
“I realized when I started doing theater it wasn’t liturgy that was liberating for me, it was performance, the celebration,” he said. “I like to let my consciousness flow, and it’s just the way I like to think, in other words, I don’t like to think. I like to express.”
Azzaretti’s first chance to be in a production was his senior year of high school at Loyal Academy in Wilmette, Ill., where he performed in “Medea,” written by the ancient Greek playwright, Euripides. He played as an old retainer, a servant who has typically been with a family for a long time.
“So basically I played the part I am old enough to play now, but I looked convincing for a high school student,” he said, laughing.
Kindling his love for performance, Azzaretti attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., where he earned a Bachelor of Arts studying ancient Greek in 1975.
After graduating, he worked in the area at an insurance company for a summer as an adjuster who investigates and settles insurance claims.
“It broke my heart every day because it was obviously a sleazy operation that was all about denying claims as much as possible,” he said.
In 1976, Azzaretti began his work on his doctorate in dramatic history, literature, and criticism at Columbia University in New York City. While there, Azzaretti earned a Master of Philosophy and spent 15 months in Greece researching ancient Greek tragedy and modern performance.
Before writing and defending his thesis in pursuit of a doctorate, Azzaretti departed Columbia because he had become disenchanted with the academic process.
Azzaretti gave higher education another try shortly after – this time on the other side of the dais – when he taught theater and English courses at Colby College in Waterville. However, after three years he began to feel again that he didn’t want to be involved in the bureaucratic process of academia.
“I left saying I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to be on the tenure track, I don’t want to be on the conveyor belt,” he said.
Azzaretti moved to Minneapolis, Minn. briefly to act with friends before getting a job with The Theater at Monmouth in Monmouth as a cook, which he said he had no training in, other than watching his grandmother prepare meals. During the two summers he cooked for the theater company he was also on stage in its theater productions.
During that time, Azzaretti started dating the manager of the theater company, Kate Pennington. The two married in 1987 before moving to Newcastle, where Pennington started work at Lincoln Academy as an English teacher in 1988.
The same year the school also hired Azzaretti to teach Advanced Placement English and serve as the director of the school’s drama program. Azzaretti operated in those roles until 1993 when he decided to reduce he work with the school to dedicate more time to his family.
It was Howie Ryder, the headmaster at Lincoln Academy from 1994 until 2006, who inspired Azzaretti to take on fewer roles at the school. At a faculty meeting, Ryder said he spent so much time with other people’s children, he felt he wasn’t able to spend as much time with his own.
“I said (to Ryder) ‘You inspired me not so make the same mistake,’” Azzaretti said.
Pennington and Azzaretti have two children, Salvatore and Chiara.
From 1993 until 2019, Azzaretti worked at the high school as the director of information technology.
While he has no formal training with technology, Azzaretti said he started working on old computers his father-in-law gave him to fix up for Azzaretti’s students.
“I started working on networking because I wanted the kids to have tools for writing in the classroom that were not just scribble, scribble, scribble,” he said. “They could print things, learn how to format, learn how to present themselves on paper more effectively through technology, and that snowballed from there. I got more and more involved with it.”
Studying ancient Greek plays helped Azzaretti develop the basics for problem solving he applied as director of IT at Lincoln Academy. He said that texts were often incomplete or had many interpretations.
“It ends up be a constant problem solving on an intellectual level in trying to make meaning out of stuff is fragmentary and that same skill set applies to technology,” he said. “I always had to sit down and say ‘What’s happening?’”
The classically trained technologist believes that everyone is capable of anything, but “you just have to not be married to who you are,” he said.
In 2019, Azzaretti retired from Lincoln Academy.
Azzaretti’s involvement in performance in the community has taken shape in a variety of ways, such as an actor and director with River Company, a theater company in Damariscotta, since 2015.
Azzaretti was also a member of the now-defunct community choir Common Threads, directed by former longtime Great Salt Bay Community School music teacher, Anne-Marie D’Amico.
The titles of actor, director, or singer, Azzaretti often shrugs off. However, he embraces the notion of being a poet, which he said has less to do with writing, which he does, and more with creating.
Azzaretti prefers an idea his late friend and Colby College colleague, Dick Sewall, said “I’m not an actor, I’m not a director, I’m a poet.”
“The word poet in ancient Greek is from the word making, poesis,” Azzaretti said. “A poet is a maker and we make is us, sometimes we put it into words, sometimes we perform it.”
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