Epic Theatre Company has announced “a series of programs designed to respond to the country’s political climate,” beginning on Sunday, January 22, with a one-off performance of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? by Eric Russell Bentley, a 1972 play that uses the the real words of questions and answers in testimony before […]
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of the most well-known and recognizable plays of the past century. The film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives was the third highest grossing release of 1958, and the vision of Taylor, widely acknowledged as one of the classic feminine beauties of the era, […]
Anyone who has lost a child or a sibling to premature death finds the experience inexplicable and unique, and even parents who lose the same child together will cope differently from each other, sometimes driving a wedge of mutual incomprehension between them. No one can truly understand the grief of another person, no matter how […]
Life expectancy is a measurement that summarizes almost everything about quality of life in a society, and therefore even tiny increases or decreases are indications of profound changes with deep consequences. In a somewhat shocking discovery, life expectancy declined overall in the United States by 0.1 year from 2014 to 2015, according to the Centers […]
Zika virus infection poses a significant risk in pregnancy as it “is a cause of microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an agency of the federal government responsible for monitoring and assessing threats to public health. “Microcephaly is a medical condition in which the […]
Taking Charge: Collected Stories on Aging Boldly by Herb Weiss, available in paperback and for Amazon Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692688706/ After 36 years in journalism Herb Weiss, known for his regular newspaper columns in The Pawtucket Times and The Woonsocket Call, has collected in book form what he regards as some of his best work. An eclectic […]
I never expected to live in a fascist state. I’m old enough to have grown up in the United States acquainted with people who escaped real fascists. One of my elementary school teachers in her late teens and early 20s fought with the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany during the war. I knew people who survived […]
The word “appropriate” can be pronounced (according to the American Heritage dictionary) either as an adjective “(ə-prō′prē-ĭt)” meaning “suitable for a particular person, condition, occasion, or place; fitting” or as a verb “(ə-prō′prē-āt′)” meaning “to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission.” The ambiguity is deliberate in the title […]
Poet Emily Dickinson, who was more than a little odd herself, noted that madness is what society ascribes to those who do not conform: “Assent, and you are sane ;/Demur, — you’re straightway dangerous,/And handled with a chain.” There are, I would argue, three great novels that better than any others captured this theme for […]
In Wilbury’s “Fascist Mash-Up” of three plays – although really two plays and an epilogue – director Josh Short deserves praise for conceiving a radical experiment well carried out. Interweaving scenes from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht and from Party Time by Harold Pinter, the result is surprisingly more palatable than […]