“That boy came from nowhere and went everywhere,” is a quote from the documentary “Jimmie & Stevie Ray Vaughan: Brothers in Blues,” which tells how Stevie Ray Vaughan became one of the most influential artists of all time.

Writer/director Kirby Warnock strikes a nostalgic chord, blending music, memory, and raw emotion into a bittersweet symphony. It harks back to a time when music served not just as a backdrop but as the cornerstone of coming together and connecting with others.

The film hilariously begins by suggesting that attending a Beatles concert was the secret ticket to meeting girls considering they transformed the world. It signaled a cultural shift, turning the “cool kid” blueprint on its head––you no longer needed to be the handsome football player to win a girl’s heart; all you needed was a guitar and a dream.

Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum goes Bollywood, with Terrence McNally’s India-set A Perfect Ganesh, which opens with a barefoot Apsara (Shivani Thakkar) or celestial nymph in Hindu mythology, traditionally dancing onstage in age-old Indian radiant raiment. The dancer is followed by Ganesha (Mueen Jahan), the narrator wearing an elephant mask, denoting the Hindu god Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, bearer of good luck and patron of arts.      

Enter two Connecticut friends, Katharine Brynne (Ellen Geer, WGTB’s Producing Artistic Director) and Margaret Civil (Melora Marshall), who are flying to the subcontinent. In doing so, the New Englanders are walking in the footsteps of characters in a well-trod genre of Westerners leaving their more “advanced,” materialistic societies to live in “exotic” cultures which are closer to nature and often endowed with a heightened spirituality. As is the case with both Katharine and Margaret, they carry pain and are on quests for a healing they yearn to find in these faraway lands. Katharine’s favorite expression, which she repeats throughout the paly, is taken from “Shakespeare’s Henry V: “O for a muse of fire.”

With the film Oppenheimer opening in theatres on Friday and being widely heralded by media, and this past Sunday the 78th anniversary noted of the first explosion of a nuclear device, and, so importantly, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons becoming international law, the time for putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle has arrived with great timeliness and strength. 

Can it be done? Can nuclear weapons be abolished? 

Yes.

Consider what the world did in the wake of World War I when the terrible impacts of poison gas had been tragically demonstrated. Mustard gas, chlorine gas, phosphene gas killed thousands on both sides of the conflict. Thereafter, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1933 outlawed chemical warfare, and to a large degree the prohibition has held.

Wednesday, July 19, 2023, 7:00 PM
In its starred review of War Made Invisible, Kirkus Reviews called the book “a powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy” and “an incisive and provocative overview of the consequences of the media’s appalling failures in making important truths known.”

The review summarized War Made Invisible this way: “With formidable clarity, Solomon, the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of War Made Easy, documents how the so-called war on terror has spawned an endless and secretive program of foreign interventions. The author is particularly eloquent in explaining how the media’s exclusive focus on past and potential ‘American suffering’ in framing such activities has meant that ‘there [isn’t] much room to see or care about the suffering of others, even if—or especially if—it was caused by the United States.’

This is the perfect opportunity for Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to exit the stage. But he will not. 

Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on July 12 demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader. 

As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in what was promoted as a ‘solidarity’ visit to the camp.