Posts

THE MISANTHROPE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I doubt that Wilbur would approve of Michael Barto’s staging of The Misanthrope. Presented as part of Bailiwick Repertory’s gay- and lesbian-oriented Pride Performance Series, Barto’s Misanthrope maintains, sort of, the original setting of Moliere’s play (17th-century France). But it places the story of a moralistic man’s love for an unfaithful woman in an all-male homosexual context, in which not only Acaste and Clitandre but just about everyone else is more than “flouncingly epicene”–they’re flaming queens....

Just a few years ago, Illinois looked like barren territory to the national leaders of the women’s movement. In 1989 Molly Yard, then the president of the National Organization for Women, talked to a group of supporters about NOW’s deployment of resources for the upcoming elections. Yard said, “We have to pick states where we can have victories and not spread ourselves too thin. I’m not sure about Illinois; I’m not sure it’s one where we’ll decide to spend our wherewithal....

It’s ironic that the Halsted Theatre Centre chose monologuist Quentin Crisp to perform during Gay and Lesbian Pride Week. That event celebrates group solidarity; Crisp is the quintessential loner. His autobiography The Naked Civil Servant elevated him to cult status with its account of his decision to live openly as a homosexual in England between the 1920s and the 1960s. (“Perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre would be kind enough to say that I exercised the last vestiges of my free will by swimming with the tide–but faster....

This question has perplexed me since the ninth grade. You’re in a room with only two doors. One door leads to death, the other to life. Each door has a guard. One guard always lies, the other always tells the truth. You don’t know which door is which, and you don’t know which guard is which. How do you get out by asking one guard just one question? Is it possible?...

Why is north up? Did the early explorers, mapmakers, astronomers, and the like get together and vote, or did it just sort of happen? Does everyone on earth think of north as up, or could a Northern Hemispherian like myself travel south of the equator and buy a globe with Antarctica on top? –David Johnson, W. Arlington Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By cracky, David, I think you’re on to something here....

Miriam Gutierrez, a bubbly, brown-haired 15-year-old, has been taking classes at the Marwen Foundation–an art-education program for inner-city kids–since last summer. On this particular day in March, she and the rest of the advanced classical drawing class are sitting around a table, wearing–for the purpose of today’s exercise–a collection of eccentric hats. Their assignment: draw the person across from you using the hand you don’t normally draw with. The result is an arresting display of talent that, along with some of the class’s other black-and-white work, makes up “Classical Drawing: Shades of Black and White,” currently on exhibit at the Junior Museum of the Art Institute....

RED TANGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even when CAE’s productions are less than successful–their completely out-of-control version of Dario Fo’s Archangels Don’t Play Pinball and their ponderous and confounding production of Heiner Muller’s Volokolamsk Highway–they are never artistic failures. There is always something–some image, some scene–that remains embedded in the brain long after the play ends. For example, the moment in Volokolamsk Highway in which a party bureaucrat goes raving mad as she circles a committee table while shouting increasingly incoherent orders....

Down by the River: Can Art Dealers Survive the Recession? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though there will certainly be plenty of survivors, the realists know that the art market isn’t what it was even a couple of years ago. “Sales are down,” says gallery owner Ricky Renier, “but you have to keep believing in what you do.” Renier is confident that there’s still a large pool of collectors who will continue to buy art....

The Italian ensemble I Virtuosi di Roma’s long tradition of performing classics of the Italian Baroque pioneered in many ways the contemporary revival of early music. When its founder, Renato Fazzano, passed away the group disbanded, but a regrouping of sorts took place in the early 80s with eight members of the original group. The new ensemble, which calls itself I Solisti Italiani, has continued the Fazzano legacy, emphasizing line and grace in presenting particularly the works of Vivaldi....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was one year old I was diagnosed with asthma and hay fever. From that moment until I was in my early 20s I was continually using strong prescription drugs. As a teenager I began to realize that the drugs were causing problems, and on slowly reducing my use (against the advice of the legion of doctors) I found the drugs were causing my mood swings, spaciness, fatigue, anxiety attacks, insomnia, and migraine headaches....

IN PERPETUITY THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE It’s hard to imagine a tame production of this play. But that’s exactly what Element Theatre Company have given it–they’ve sucked out its lifeblood as surely as Miss Petersen, the vampire, has sucked the blood of her victims. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe is a tale of philosophical intrigue. It revolves around Christine Penderecki and her Chinese lover, Dennis Wu, both ghostwriters for a strange, secretive company that sees its lunatic story-telling clients as suckers....

INTIMACIES Kearns clearly intends to show only the AIDS victims who inhabit society’s underbelly. More than five years ago, he set aside all his other projects in order to devote himself to the AIDS crisis. An outspoken activist whose work is widely known on the west coast, Kearns began to wonder about the people he wasn’t representing, whose voices were never heard–those who were politically incorrect or insufficiently noble or just plain nasty....

Knocks on Wood There’s the right bad news and the wrong bad news, and Yvonne Delk has a firm opinion about which is which. Pick up “20 Years Later . . . A CITY STILL DIVIDED,” the 20th-anniversary issue of the Chicago Reporter, published by the Community Renewal Society, whose executive director is Delk. The right bad news, laid out in the article “Troubled Agency Faces Long, Hot Summer,” is that the budget of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations was cut this year by 22 percent, the chairman works part-time, and the commission is dispirited and ineffective....

He was the terror of northern Mexico, a revolutionary par excellence, the man who led the last foreign incursion onto U.S. soil. And now Pancho Villa is being honored with that unique American tribute–a look-alike contest. It’s to take place in a Pilsen restaurant. Contest organizer Jose Gonzalez is ready to greet people as they enter. Gonzalez, a short, stocky man with a wrinkled face and salt-and-pepper mustache, is clad in jeans, a poncho, and a ranchero hat similar to the one Cortez has on....

Someone once said of Orson Welles that, yes, he was self-indulgent–“but what indulgence, and what a self!” The same applies to Mandy Patinkin, the Chicago-bred singer-actor famed for his appearances on Broadway (Evita, Sunday in the Park With George) and in films (Yentl, The Princess Bride). Returning with the same show that he performed at the Goodman Studio Theatre two years ago, Patinkin transforms the showtune concert into a virtuosic and often tremendously moving act of dramatic self-exploration....

MISS JULIE Geniuses are rarely pleasant people in the ordinary social sense, but August Strindberg continues to hold the prize for the one with whom you would least want to share an office. Although recognized as Sweden’s most prominent playwright (in most theater history texts, Sweden’s only playwright) and certainly one of the first to break with the 19th-century melodrama forms in favor of a drama based on realism and the recent discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Strindberg bordered on psychotic, which made for distortions in the “reality” he purported to depict (in contrast with the rationalism of his contemporaries Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw)....

PAUL ROBESON–AMERICAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unprofessional theater is an offense in any case; but when the subject is someone like Robeson, the offense is particularly intolerable. A performing artist of international stature, an accomplished intellectual and superstar athlete, Paul Robeson embodied a rare combination of passion and principle. The son of a slave minister, he promoted the unique values of African American heritage while also advocating a pan-cultural humanist sensibility; his concerts (at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere), for instance, drew their repertoire from African, Jewish, Celtic, black American, and Slavic folk and religious music at a time when such broad-mindedness would have been suspect in a white performer, let alone a black one....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am in agreement with Mr. Phil Albee [Letters, September 15] concerning the President Bill strip. It is not a good addition, and even a suspicious one. Presumably political, it conveys what little message it has by the simplistic substitution of stereotyped left/progressive content into the form of the unfortunately all-too-real practices of the far-right wing....

In Henry County, Kentucky, where the foothills of Appalachia slope to the plains of the midwest, on a small farm of fields and woods, Wendell Berry is quietly fomenting revolution. One of his tools is a plow, which he pulls behind a team of draft horses much as his father and grandfather did, measuring against the lay of the land which plots to cultivate and which to leave wild, husbanding the precious topsoil....

BRIEF LIVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » England’s misfortunes were the making of John Aubrey. For if England had been less interesting he might never have bothered to write his quirky, gossip-filled collection of biographical sketches, collected and published as Brief Lives some 201 years after his death in 1697. That would have been a loss, because Aubrey’s sketches are much more like a Restoration equivalent of News of the Weird than, say, Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, packed as they are with odd, scandalous, and bizarre facts....