Advanced BioFuels USA

by Frances Stead Sellers (The Washington Post)   … But that’s former Reagan DOJ official Bruce Fein high on a promontory pulling a white cowl up over his head. And there’s conservative commentator Richard Viguerie opposite, clad from head to toe in cardinal red. They’re arguing — and, oh dear, so high up! — while way below, in black and gold, British writer Andrew Cockburn watches in concern.
They’re acting, of course — and not the prescribed roles they play in Washington’s public life. No, this band of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals are Rappahanock friends, with a bond rooted in regular Sunday morning meetings on a local country store’s porch. Now they are combining forces to stage local author James Reston Jr.’s new play, “Galileo’s Torch.”
Strange and wonderful things can happen, you begin to understand, when you take Washingtonians out of Washington.
Reston’s work replays the 17th-century trial of Galileo Galilei — a compelling tale of what happened when the astronomer-mathematician violated Catholic dogma by asserting that the Earth orbits the sun. Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition, put on trial and threatened with torture in a clash of science and religion that still resonates today.
Who could resist being part of the first public performance in this vast outdoor theater, excavated out of a granite hillside by a genial and eccentric businessman named John B. Henry, who’s famous for high-voltage Halloween spectacles?
“This is a very unusual group of people who would never come together in Washington,” explains David Tatel, a judge on the prestigious federal appeals court in D.C. “We are all so different, from such different groups. And Washington is a pretty segregated place.”
This Saturday, Tatel, a Clinton appointee, will make his theatrical debut alongside Bush 41’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray (playing Pope Urban VIII). But the play’s most striking partnership — or juxtaposition — is of modern conservatism’s “funding father,” Viguerie, in the role of Cardinal Bellarmine, and the man playing his adviser, Bob Kozak, who’s bent on making biofuels from bits of carrot and who ran for Congress in Maryland as the Green party candidate.
…
“The word ‘unique’ is overused,” says Rick Davis, executive director of the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas who agreed (for “a little professional courtesy”) to direct the play. But he has never worked with a troupe like this. He’s making actors out of public speakers, blending the inexperienced with the one true pro, Colin Davies, who plays Galileo and boasts “a very loud voice.”
“It’s such an amazing spectrum of folks,” the director says. He’s not talking about the color spectrum: The actors’ range from too-many-hours-in-the-office pale to a man-of-means tan. Nor the gender spectrum: The only woman with an acting role is Edie Tatel, the judge’s wife, who plays the Grand Inquisitor’s scribe.

 
Editor’s note:  Some photos of the event featuring Bob Kozak, co-founder, treasurer and writer for Advanced Biofuels USA and president of Atlantic Biomass Conversions, Inc. 

Quarry stage and audience for Galileo’s Torch.

Stage and audience at the start of Galileo’s Torch.

From the far right promontory playwright James Reston, Jr., plays himself as the author of the play.

Galileo’s youth in Venice:
From left, Galileo (Colin Davies), Monk (Bill Nitze, Chairman of the Climate Institute, the Galapagos Conservancy, and Oceana Energy Company), May Miculis, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (C. Boyden Gray before he becomes Pope Urban VIII),and Giovanni Francesco Sagredo, with whom Galileo caroused (Andrew Cockburn, Washington Editor of Harper’s Magazine, prolific writer and movie producer).

Bob Kozak as advisor to Cardinal Bellarmine played by Richard Viguerie (“modern conservatism’s “funding father”).

Former US Ambassador to the EU, White House Counsel to President George HW Bush, and current promoter of the benefits of ethanol in transportation fuel, C. Boyden Gra is Pope Urban VIII.

Bruce Fein, former presidential adviser, Church Committee staffer and defender of Constitutional individual liberties, portrays the ghost of martyred scientist, Giordano Bruno

Bob Kozak reads the prohibition against Galileo teaching or supporting in any way the Copernican view of the sun as the center of the solar system with Earth moving around it. From the left Kozak, Edie Tatel (scribe), US Federal Appeals Court Judge David Tatel (The Grand Inquisitor), Colin Davies (Galileo), John Jackquemin (Facilitator of the Inquisition) and C. Boyden Gray (Pope Urban VIII).