TALKING WITH . . . Talking With . . . reinforces that belief. I don’t know how the playwright, Jane Martin, created these 11 monologues. I don’t even know if “Jane Martin” exists. According to theater lore, the manuscript for Talking With . . . simply appeared on the doorstep of the Actors Theater of Louisville one morning in 1982. Despite the play’s success, the author has never been identified....
GEMINI In other words, back then Gay liberation was warm and fuzzy. You could snuggle up to it. It was cute. And it was really simple. In Innaurato’s time-trapped script, the agonized hero doesn’t have to grapple with anything other than his own sexual discovery. And that revelation comes with some humor, brings some surprising support (even if he doesn’t acknowledge it), and occasions virtually no rejection. Gemini is a sweet coming-of-age story–except that the hero’s queer....
GRACES Eventually it became clear to everyone but my friend that he would never get around to writing the play, and that even if he did, he’d have to be the next O’Neill or Ibsen to create a play that meant all that he wanted it to mean. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought about my friend the other night after seeing Jeff Helgeson’s play Graces and speaking with Helgeson after the show....
Gravel Lake is about 130 miles from Chicago, and driving there east on I-94 should take between two and three hours, depending on the weather, traffic, highway construction, and so on. Going at night is usually dramatic–with the fireballs bursting over the steelworks in Gary and the blinding lights of 18-wheel semis in your rearview mirror–and it’s quicker than during the day. About halfway through Indiana the speed limit jumps to 65, and that limit is in effect most of the rest of the way....
A fascinating postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 7Os that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense–one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war–but the various personalities involved–including Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himself–keep this compulsively watchable....
The seventh- and eighth-graders at DeWitt Clinton Elementary School on the northwest side are a lively bunch, gregarious and gawky, as are most early teens on the threshold of that social and academic mine field otherwise known as high school; but like prisoners in the dock, they stiffened and eyed me cautiously as I entered the school gymnasium, knowing that I was one of the guests invited to judge the seventh- and eighth-grade history fair....
I THINK IT’S GONNA WORK OUT FINE In I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones are the angels of Ike and Tina Turner–who, though they’re not dead, travel in such different circles from the rest of us that they might as well be. Of course, because Ike and Tina are still very much alive, Ed Bulfins’s play (written with the help of Ackamoor, Jones, and director Brian Freeman) deals instead with a fictional R & B couple, Prince and Rita, whose life story sounds remarkably like the Turners’....
Patience is not one of those Gilbert and Sullivan hits that travel particularly well across the Atlantic. After all, an aesthetic movement is hardly as universally identifiable a topic for lampoon as, say, foreign potentates or the nouveau riche. One probably has to be a die-hard Victorian scholar to appreciate jabs at such Pre-Raphaelite pretensions as Greek dancing and lilies worn on the lapel. But director Philip A. Kraus, who’s been responsible for most of Light Opera Works’ G&S revivals, claims to see modern parallels in this tale of two poets vying for the love of a milkmaid....
LOOK BACK IN ANGER The plot is simple. Jimmy Porter, a young lower-class intellectual, doesn’t manage to suffer his indignation silently. His relentless ranting annoys his friend Cliff, and the abuse and sarcasm Jimmy dumps on his middle-class wife, Alison, eventually gets under her skin. Alison, who has concealed her pregnancy from Jimmy, goes home to Mummy and Daddy and miscarries. Meanwhile, Jimmy plays house with Alison’s friend, Helena, but then that falls apart too....
Halfway through his show at the Riviera, Billy Bragg, as is his wont, digressed into a short monologue before his new song “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” This song is the standout track on Bragg’s new record, Workers Playtime; it’s a luminous, transcontinental fantasy that begins in Cuba, rockets out to a nuclear test station in Russia, and ricochets back to Bragg himself, closing down another show and being quizzed by a fanzine writer about “mixing pop and politics....
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA In anointing Barenboim the CSO’s next leader, the Orchestral Association has settled for a safe bet: a versatile but wimpy version of Solti. (The other finalist was reportedly Claudio Abbado; I would have voted for Michael Tilson Thomas, the brightest American-born conductor since Leonard Bernstein.) Barenboim comes with impeccable credentials. He is, like Solti, an accomplished pianist, a sought-after chamber player, and a renowned conductor of both orchestra and opera....
If the recession were to cancel all downtown construction tomorrow, we’d still be way ahead in terms of our skyline. Never mind the serious economic ramifications; a glorious Chicago skyscape glowing like white-hot shattered glass can make us all feel exalted, even if we are on the el and some character next to us is splashing puke on the floor. This is art. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An interesting cluster of buildings huddles at the northwest corner of Grant Park: the bevel-topped Associates Center, at Randolph and Michigan; the Two Prudential Plaza Building, a new annex to the old insurance stalwart, at Lake and Beaubien; and the enduring Amoco Building, at 200 E....
Richard Linklater’s delightfully different and immensely enjoyable first feature takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture of Austin, Texas; it doesn’t have a continuous plot, but it’s brimming with weird characters and wonderful talk (all of it scripted by Linklater, though it often seems improvised). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation on The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime. “Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,” remarks Linklater himself to a poker faced cabdriver in the first (and in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts (around 90 in all)....
= recommended The festival’s opening night film is Lina Wertmuller’s adaptation of an Eduardo De Filippo play from the 50s, starring Filippo’s son Luca as a jealous husband suffering something of a mid-life crisis and Sophia Loren as his wife, who expresses herself mainly through her cooking. The setting is Naples in the 30s; with Luciano De Crescenzo, Alessandra Mussolini, and Pepella Maggi. (Fine Arts, 7:00 and 9:30) A Paucity of Flying Dreams...
Most fish records are eaten, notes the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wisconsin (Box 33, 54843), sadly. “Hardly a week passes that a frantic phone call from someplace in the U.S. or Canada from an angler reveals that he just ate a record fish.” The hall offers free rules, guidelines, and application forms to those fisherpersons who would rather be immortal than well fed. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I’M FROM HOLLYWOOD In a way, Kaufman called into question the very idea of having “fans”; his object, it sometimes seemed, was to alienate people–an object that could be deemed successful considering the unprecedented Saturday Night Live viewers poll taken in late 1982. The vote was called to decide whether Kaufman would ever appear on the program again, and he was handily banished. It was getting so he wasn’t much fun to watch....
THE MONSTER SHOW Seeing The Monster Show is a bit like watching artists in rehearsal, working through a series of raw, unedited impulses. This gives the evening a certain volatile, unpredictable quality. It also makes certain sections quite dull. None of the pieces seemed complete or thorough, but certain moments had at least the potential for excitement. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Levonne McAlister performed an inaccessible work full of personal anecdotes about growing up in New Orleans with his grandmother who used to “scare the shit out of him....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “Palestinians” are the indigenous population of the Land of Israel. Archaeology testifies that the Jews preceded them by many centuries. When the Romans conquered the country and renamed it “Palestine” they found only Jews. The first Arabs, who originated in Saudi Arabia, didn’t arrive until the great Muslim conquests of the seventh century. Indeed, the bulk of those who today call themselves “Palestinians” are descended from people who migrated to the country after 1840....
In the waning moments of the first half of the first playoff game between the Bulls and the Philadelphia 76ers last Saturday, Charles Barkley went to the far end of the court and sat down. Michael Jordan was shooting free throws, and Barkley went to the other end, grabbed a towel from a ball boy, mopped his face, and sat down on the base of the Sixers’ basket. It was the sort of thing someone might do during a break in a Saturday-morning game between friends: lounge at the far end, then, after the final free throw, step inbounds, call for the ball, take the long pass, and lay in an easy one....
There’s something oddly appealing about these Bears of the 90s. Like George Bush, they want to be described as kinder and gentler–more street smart and savvy–but what they really are is more neurotic and fallible. Even so, that only makes them more recognizably human. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So, like the stock dive, fears about the economy, and dread of the impending holiday season, the Bears intruded on Thanksgiving this year....
