This book explores the role of musicians in the call for peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As Russia’s unprecedented invasion of Ukraine progresses, musicians there, and around the world, join talents in concerts to voice their protest and show solidarity against the universally condemned conflict. They play and sing for peace, calling for solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Performing artists have been at the forefront of a global response to express outrage against the Russian invasion. Benefit concerts seek to raise funds to be directed toward the humanitarian crisis that has affected the daily lives of innocent people, including hundreds of thousands of orphaned and wounded children. Artists-activists come together to praise Ukrainians’ struggle for self-determination, democracy, and freedom with music performances and engage in opportunities to use their platform to assist those affected by the conflict, calling for an immediate end to the war.

Nancy Rhodes wrote the powerful foreword of this important and intense book. Click the button below and scroll to page 13 to read it!

This collection includes 34 one acts and monologues by notable American women playwrights. 67201 by Adele Edling Shank: Love and fantasy in the afternoon. THE BEST OF STRANGERS by Lee Hunkins: Two women sharing a hospital room cope with breast cancer, husbands, and racial barriers. BOARDERS by Constance Congdon: Three short plays about apartment dwellers, with an epilogue by their landlady. BREAKFAST SERIAL by Megan Terry: A child abuser meets his match. BRUSSELS SPROUTS by Janet Neipris: Former lovers meet under very different circumstances the second time around. THE CORD AND THE TRACK by Helen Duberstein: Two older men discuss younger women. CURTAIN CALL by Roma Greth: An actress balances on an emotional tightrope strung between approaching retirement and a fading career. THE DEATH OF HUEY NEWTON by Lynda Sturner: A couple reflect on the twists and turns their lives have taken since their 1960s glory days. DRY SMOKE by Adele Edling Shank: The story behind a fatal fire. FOOD by Neena Beber: Two women are starving for something, anything, that might provide fulfillment… OCEAN DREAM by Nancy Rhodes: A young woman recovers her childhood during an afternoon on the beach.

The Theory of Everything, a new full-length opera exploring science, spirituality and indigenous cosmology. The opera traces the journey of a Brazilian quantum physicist who is studying fundamental connections between science and the ancient wisdom of the Q'ero Tribe in Peru. Alternating between North and South America, scenes take place inside a planetarium and at the university of Sao Paulo in Brazil, where Tomás Cabral teaches physics. His wife, Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, is exploring near-death experiences, and their daughter Cassy is a precocious 8-year-old student of astronomy. Dramatic events involving the family catapult a metaphysical and scientific search into other dimensions and alternate universes.

The music embraces the diversity of its settings: 21st century classical techniques, Brazilian samba, indigenous Q’ero chants, contemporary melodic lyricism, propulsive rhythms, soaring vocalism, a harmonic language rooted in both tonal and atonal sources, and colorful orchestration.

To learn more about The Theory of Everything and to hear excerpts from this groundbreaking new opera, click the button below!