Global

For our GREEP Zoom #143 at Green Power & Wellness, RACHEL COYLE explains how Ohio is trying to gut the referendum process while facing statewide votes to protect a woman’s right to choose both abortion and marijuana.

WENDI LEDERMAN adds in the bad news from Florida, where she is being physically harassed in the course of gathering signatures for a referendum there whose rules have already been rigged.

VINNIE DESTEFANO gives us the latest reporting on the murderous case of Julian Assange in contrast to the hand-wringing over Evan Gershkavitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter being held in Russia for reasons barely parallel to whatever Assange has done.

MIKE HERSH informs us about a critical petition now circulating from Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan to finally slash some of the excess money being wasted on the military budget.  

DAVID SALTMAN explores the dirty realities of cluster munitions, land mines and depleted uranium in Ukraine.

MYLA RESON ends our first  hour with the lethal realities of the aerosolization of depleted uranium, leaving a death toll of cancer in its wake.

IN OUR SECOND HOUR...

That splendid arcadian Shakespearean reliquary, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, is
presenting four of the Bard’s dramas – Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Henry VI plus Richard III –
compressed, compiled and edited into a single two-act play, Queen Margaret’s Version of
Shakespeare’s War of the Roses, directed by Ellen Geer. A Shakespearean scholar and
playwright, Ms. Geer also stitched together this quartet of history plays by the “Prince of
Poets” for WGTB, which the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust awarded a commemorative
plaque with wood from Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon Garden in 2014.
Ms. Geer, who is also WGTB’s Producing Artistic Director, has given the Richard III
and the Henry VI works a decidedly feminist twist, as the tale is told from the women’s
point of view, just as composer André Previn and playwright Tom Stoppard respun
Homer’s Odyssey, by retelling that epic from the point of view of Ulysses’ wife, the
titular Penelope (see: https://hollywoodprogressive.com/music/evening-with-renee-

In March, the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) denounced what it described as the ‘imperialist bias' of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

If you are a fan of plays featuring and exploring bravura acting, Hollywood history, LGBTQIA issues, creative stagecraft, feminism, anti-Semitism, one-person shows, illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and more, strap on those running shoes and dash, do not walk, to experience Garden of Alla: The Alla Nazimova Story, which is currently having a limited engagement at Theatre West. Romy Nordlinger depicts the eponymous legendary stage and screen thespian Alla Nazimova in this one-woman piece de resistance which the New York actress also wrote. In doing so, a theater and movie myth (and nymph) lives again in an 80-or-so minute show that imaginatively uses rear screen projections to tell the tale of Alla and her legendary mansion  precariously perched in Tinseltown, once upon a time.

Desecrating, then burning the Holy Quran in Sweden has, once again, raised a political storm of condemnation, but also of justification, if not outright approval.   

 Such acts are protected by law, top Swedish and EU officials have declared.  

 But why are the rights of those who oppose western agendas, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and military interventions not equally protected by law? 

 The Palestine boycott movement, BDS, for example, is constantly fighting in western societies and institutions for the right to use certain language or merely challenge, though non-violently, Israeli occupation and apartheid.