END OF THE NIGHT Matt Borczon’s Wild Dogs details the final conversations between two dissimilar individuals: Trevor King, whose wife has just thrown him out of the house for terminal wimpiness, and his unlikely buddy Rex, whose own wife left him years ago. King had been hiding his harmless but repulsive uncle in the attic, and when the hapless relation died there, he postponed giving his wife the news until the decomposing corpse forced him to do so....
HELLCAB DOES CHRISTMAS Famous Door Theatre Company at Jane Addams Center Hull House Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Will Kern’s Hellcab Does Christmas was made for cynics like me. Set on Christmas Eve, this truly funny black comedy describes with unblinking honesty an evening in the life of a poor, beleaguered cabdriver. In a series of blackouts we meet an evening shift’s worth of crazies, assholes, and other annoying, potentially dangerous passengers....
IMPROPRIETIES During rehearsals for the concert “Improprieties” at the Dance Center of Columbia College, one of the dancers stood onstage while the lights were being adjusted. Bored, he started to strike dramatic Martha Graham-style poses. The other dancers teased him, shouting “Angst. Give us some Graham angst.” The dancer, the youngest member of the company, didn’t know what “angst” meant. The other dancers teased more, saying: “You call yourself a modern dancer, and you don’t know what angst is?...
Cathy and Steve (not their real names) dream the same dreams other young couples do. They talk about marrying someday, having a home, and raising a family. “Right, Steve?” she bellows. Again Cathy stands straight, pulls her sweater back down over her stomach, and echoes his question. “Yeah. Why us?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A number of leading medical magazines, including Science News, have reported over the past few years that the syndrome, which has no cure, is believed to be caused by an abnormality in chromosome 15....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Children are not allowed to vote, drive, or consent to sexual activity because their capacities for judgment are not fully formed, and they wouldn’t understand the full impact of their actions. Because they are particularly vulnerable, they need special protections. The girl in the Robert Mapplethorpe picture did not have the capacity to consent to that picture; it is therefore at least an invasion of her privacy for Mapplethorpe to have taken and the Reader to have printed that picture....
Journalistic Unfairness Cut from Hess. And now that his back is turned, so to speak, Poinsett immediately belittles Hess’s testimony as “outsider analysis of inner-city dynamics.” We’re told that “some” black leaders dismiss Hess as “at best, a dilettante in African American ethnography,” and that “others” dismiss Hess’s “new leaders” as “inadvertent pawns” of Chicago Panel, of a “self-serving business community,” and of Designs for Change, which Poinsett introduces as “a prominent downtown educational research group that loudly espouses concern for the education of black children....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fred Camper certainly covered many historical and aesthetic issues raised by the show “‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-garde in Nazi Germany” [August 9]. And though he made it clear that he thought that many of the works displayed were excellent examples of the modern idiom (and far superior to the styles preferred by those wretched Nazis), he never addressed the original concept of the exhibition: “Degeneracy” in the Arts....
Cynthia Rich’s 1955 story is a creepy little tale of the Landis family: elder sister Olive, chafing under her widowed father’s quasiincestuous domination, finally escapes by eloping with the humblest of suitors; younger sister Sarah Ann, passionately jealous of her father’s unequally meted affections, vows to care faithfully for that parent in precisely the manner that he cared for his children; and the ultimately pitiful Dr. Landis learns too late that as he sows, so will he reap....
NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA Alice–choreographed by Glen Tetley to David Del Tredici’s Pulitzer Prize-winning score, Child Alice Part I: In Memory of a Summer Day–was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But Tetley’s Alice goes far beyond reintroducing the audience to the fantastic, whimsical creatures that inhabit the books, or merely describing their individual, bizarre personalities. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tetley has probed deeper, and taken a sensitive look into the hearts of Carroll–actually the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a shy, stuttering mathematics don at Oxford–and Alice, the ten-year-old girl for whom he invented the stories....
Sleepy LaBeef’s prowess as a performer is legendary among rockabilly and roots-rock fans. He can ignite an audience seemingly at will, but his success is virtually impossible to analyze in terms of technique. Onstage he appears stolid, almost reserved most of the time, peering out at the crowd from under heavy, drooping eyelids. Even so, the passion that pours from him can elevate a crowd of drunken cowboys or bright-eyed baby boomers with equal facility, and his devotion to the country and rockabilly music tradition verges on the fanatic....
The tenth Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival runs from Friday, November 9, through Sunday, November 18, at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont; the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport; Horizons Center, 961 W. Montrose; Footsteps Theatre, 6968 N. Clark; Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark; and Rodde Center, 4753 N. Broadway. Tickets ($4 for most matinees, including 5 pm shows; $5 for most evening shows) go on sale a half hour before the first show; advance tickets can be purchased before the day of the show at Chicago Filmmakers....
THE LAND OF EVERYWHERE Avenue Productions, with Kinetic Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Land of Everywhere borrows from The Wizard of Oz–a debt acknowledged when a character tells the hero, “This isn’t the Emerald City you’re in.” The play begins with two actors preparing to perform a play in a church basement in Chicago, only to be interrupted by a sour-faced Janitor who informs them that they are not on the building schedule, and who cares about theater, anyway?...
THE MUSICIANS OF BREMEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Steve Totland loosely bases his sprightly 45-minute treatment on the Brothers Grimm tale about four enterprising animals who manage to outfox some robbers. Totland adds a love interest, subtracts the cock, and brings in a stream of nicely serviceable songs by director Jacquie Krupka. Rightly so–as Paul Sills’s 60s Story Theater version showed, this folk tale cries out for music all along its path....
American TV watchers, eat your hearts out! These four selections from “Ten to Eleven”–a series of short, experimental “essay” films made for German television by the remarkable German filmmaker Alexander Kluge, to be shown here on video–are not always easy to follow in terms of tracing all their connections, but they’re the liveliest and most imaginative European TV shows I’ve seen since those of Ruiz and Godard. Densely constructed out of a very diverse selection of archival materials, which are manipulated (electronically and otherwise) in a number of unexpected ways, these historical meditations often suggest Max Ernst collages using the cultural flotsam of the last 100 years....
TWELFTH NIGHT Set in the remote and exotic country of Illyria, known in Shakespeare’s time as a dangerous den of piracy, Twelfth Night concerns a pair of strangers in a strange land. Viola, shipwrecked in Illyria by a storm, thinks that her twin brother Sebastian has been killed; he presumes the same of her. Dressing herself as a boy, the rather reckless Viola soon becomes a protege of Duke Orsino, who sends her to plead his case to the lady Olivia....
On July 7, 1988, Alexander Pandis, a young man with a weight problem and a ready smile, entered a plea agreement in U.S. District Court. “Fraud charges clip high roller,” said the headlines, “Con man tells luxury life, fraud.” In a matter of months, Ponzi had become one of the best-known men in Boston. He was said to own 200 suits and two dozen diamond stickpins. He arrived at work in a limousine driven by a Japanese chauffeur....
Back when Harold Washington and Edward Vrdolyak were slugging it out for control of the local Democratic Party, a race for committeeman in the 49th and 6th wards would have telegraphed the future of local politics. But these days there’s little passion in the trenches–most party leaders have sworn oaths of blind allegiance to Mayor Daley, and there’s no struggle for control of the organization. As a result, several interesting matchups in the March 17 elections are going virtually unnoticed–whatever their outcome, these races will not affect the power structure....
This fabulous 1974 compilation of 20s and 30s cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer, highlighting (but not exclusively) their Betty Boop cartoons, looks just as wild and as wacky as it did 16 years ago. Over the years Tex Avery has become recognized as the surrealist master of the Hollywood cartoon, and with reason. But one shouldn’t forget that the Fleischers anticipated many of his free-form imaginative flights with charming and creepy fantasies and radical transitions that are in some ways even more dreamlike....
THE GRAPES OF WRATH I’m just thinking that $500,000 is a lot of money. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except it isn’t. Especially not in this case, the story in this case being The Grapes of Wrath–John Steinbeck’s tale of the Joad family, landless and desperate, making its way from Oklahoma to California during the dust-bowl calamity of the 1930s, hoping for a new start but finding only a more permanent landlessness and a greater despair....
JUNE Saturday 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eighteen-year-old Milton Ruben Laufer is one of 40 young pianists from the United States who will attend the Conservatory of Music in Moscow for an intensive two-week program this summer. To help raise money to cover Laufer’s travel expenses, the folks at Roberto Clemente Community Academy–the school with the largest Puerto Rican student population in the city–have organized a benefit recital....
