‘Galileo’s Torch’ lights up Saturday
Rock lover John Henry of Stone Hill Farm in Flint Hill has finished enough of his hand-built, all-rock Stone Hill Amphitheater to offer an inaugural production amid the giant and carefully fitted stones this weekend: “Galileo’s Torch,” a historical one-act play written by James Reston Jr., starts at 7 p.m. this Saturday (June 7) and benefits the Rappahannock Association for the Arts and the Community (RAAC) theatre in Little Washington.
The play, focused on the age-old conflict between science and religion, is an outgrowth of Reston’s 1994 biography, “Galileo: A Life,” a book heralded by The Washington Post as “brilliant” and “masterful.” Directed by Rick Davis, executive director of George Mason University’s Hylton Performing Arts Center, the play’s cast is composed of such Washington, D.C.-area celebrities as the Hon. David S. Tatel (U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court) and Ambassador C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel under President George H. W. Bush and ambassador to the European Union.
The grass opens at 5:30 p.m. — the hosts ask that you arrive no later than 6:30 p.m. — for picnickers, who are urged to bring food, beverages, chairs and/or blankets, as very few seats will be available to the public. A $20 donation is suggested. The address is 40 Springwish Lane, off Route 647 (Crest Hill Road) about 1.5 rolling, curving miles east of U.S. 522. For more information (or if it looks like rain Saturday), visit galileostorch.org.