The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes: "The Last Days of Dogtown," serves as a eulogy for a town and its people but also for a way of life. Set in the early 1800s, the book is loosely based on a true story of a hardscrabble community just getting by on a particularly rocky patch of land on Cape Ann, Mass. The book is haunting, partly because of Diamant's lyrical language and partly because of the townspeople that she creates. Here are widows (some thought to be witches), orphans, spinsters, drunks, hussies and free people of color. Every last one is a disenfranchised soul with a troubled - or troublesome - past.

Late last year, Rolling Stone asked Bruce Springsteen about his inspiration. Springsteen said: “Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ had an enormous impact on me. It made me feel that I was a player in this moment in history, as we all are, and that this moment in history was mine, somehow, to do with whatever I could.� It’s exactly what Zinn - Boston University Professor Emeritus, Marxist, activist, historian and playwright – has tried to instill in his students, readers and fans since the 1960s. And over the past few decades he’s attracted liberal musicians – like Springsteen, Billy Bragg and Eddie Vedder - and actors to his work.

What World Music/CRASHarts does is this: “We create a common meeting ground for communities. And it’s a place for people who are adventurous in life and in their artistic taste.�

An American Repertory Theater play can scramble your senses. It can move you to tears, startle you, overwhelm you with sound and delight you with its staging. The plays chosen tend not to be the most easily digestible or linear. Often, they question moral assumptions about the world we live in.