At Stray Dog Theatre, Ragtime Is Both Contemporary and Vital

George Santayana's most well-known aphorism about the lessons of history —"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"— gets a lot of play these days, but only because we as a species keep bungling into the same wars, the same brutality and the same horrible outcomes. What good is having the world at your fingertips if everything contained within it is a miserable replay of last century's atrocities, each one a new and yet recurring nightmare?…