Posts

THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA The first sign is Bernarda’s five mourning daughters scattered throughout the theater like living sculptures. The second is in the program, which provides neither a cast of characters nor the actors who play them, but insists you should experience the play as you would a film. New Age has never heard of opening credits? Instead of a list, you find a long-winded, masturbatory explanation of Garcia Lorca’s intentions by the play’s director, Rolando Arroyo-Sucre....

A shocking and powerful documentary by Nina Rosenblum–narrated by Susan Sarandon and shot by Haskell Wexler-about the recent “experimental” torture and attempted brainwashing of three women prisoners in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Each woman was arrested for political activity, given an unusually long prison sentence, and then isolated in a basement cell for almost two years, kept under 24-hour surveillance, periodically awakened several times a night, and strip searched daily....

TONE CLUSTERS and Civitas Theatre calls its program of one-acts “Plays That Dan Quayle Would Hate.” Of course this heading is taxonomically incorrect–real and fictional characters don’t inhabit the same spheres. And the people in these two dramas are far too real to be associated with the likes of Mr. Quayle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Joyce Carol Oates’s Tone Clusters opens, a crime has been committed and a suspect taken into custody....

A LOT OF FISH THERE ARE: OOBLECK SHORT PLAYS Most surprising about this evening is the lack of creativity in the plays. Rats was innovative in both its subject matter and its theatrical methods. But Fish is a wholly conservative affair, with all-too-familiar material presented in an all-too-familiar manner. Martin Greiner’s Somebody Gets Hits in the Head takes us inside the human body to watch a moment of trauma: Somebody (Danny Thompson) gets hit on the head by a Meany (Nancy Bishop)....

AN EVENING OF STRAVINSKY The resident artists have received rent-free apartments and other emoluments that freed them from financial stress and allowed them to hone their art. In return, they have arranged programs for the apartment complex’s residents and have planned one large program in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s Summer Nights Festival in Hutchinson Court. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year’s resident artist is clarinetist Janice Murphy....

What becomes a legend most? Longevity helps; so does clean living (even if it only comes in occasional and limited doses). But most of all, you need the kind of artistic charisma that poured out of Anita O’Day when she was discovered in Chicago in the early 40s, a quality that illuminated her years with Gene Krupa and then Stan Kenton; anyone who’s ever seen her under that hat and behind those elbow-length gloves, as she appeared in the classic concert film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, needs no further introduction to star quality....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ayers, who sounds to me as if he is still exactly the same rich suburban kid he started out to be–lives in Hyde Park now–probably one of the safest and most gentrified city neighborhoods around, with a decent record–not perfect–of integration. But in spite of this, over the past 25 years there has always been a tendency on the part of the “upwardly mobile” or “the have it made” residents to avoid the public schools....

Democracy has become a media event, and this year presidential candidate Larry Agran got written out of the script. Agran has some useful things to say about urban policy, and we’re never going to know what they are. But maybe that’s a small price to pay for order in political prime time. In late January MacNeil/Lehrer sponsored a candidates’ forum. Agran was not invited. We have read the nine-page letter Agran wrote pleading his case....

LIZ LERMAN/DANCE EXCHANGE AND MORDINE AND COMPANY DANCE THEATRE A recent performance and residency by the Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange is typical of the kind of package put together to get foundation funding. Four members of the company, not including Lerman, were in residence for a week at the Dance Center of Columbia College, running a workshop for local senior citizens and local dancers. Kimberli Boyd, the company’s associate artistic director, asked the 26 participants to create stories and movement about “the American dream,” then made a dance from their material....

My favorite memory of Danny Long: he’s in the middle of a typically smart set of piano jazz and classic vocal tunes when some guy walks in, an overdressed bimbo on each arm, and the three of them sit right down front and begin to talk like the musicians don’t exist, like that’s a hi-fi system onstage. Danny Long finishes the tune, thanks the crowd, and then smilingly notes how “the real music lovers always sit right in front”–a comment that satisfies everyone in the house except the three blabbermouths, who haven’t stopped talking long enough to hear it anyway....

FAR FRINGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pared to its simplest elements, Far Fringe is the story of six strange Chicagoans and their catastrophic coming together. The prime creator of the disaster is a manic-depressive and currently psychotic caterer (called “the girl” in the program). She has been hired by her selfish, socialite aunt to cater a huge Grant Park benefit for abused children....

Veteran pianist Henry Townsend is known among aficionados as an accomplished purveyor of the sparse, expressive Saint Louis keyboard style that developed in the 1920s and ’30s. Townsend achieves profound musical and emotional depth through uncluttered phrases and an unerring instinct for playing the right notes–and only the right notes–at the right time. But there’s more to his music than that; he also has solid roots in the rougher traditions of the Delta....

PLACE DE BRETEUIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Place de Breteuil seems to say something about sexual politics, something about respect, something about what happens when people become useless, when order becomes chaos, when people sink into their own private worlds. It seems to say a lot about John Wayne. But what it’s saying, I haven’t the slightest idea. Although interesting, Gautre’s script lacks any sort of focus....

DAFFY DUCK’S QUACKBUSTERS It seems more a matter of confusion at Warner Brothers than either poetic justice or business acumen that has denied this triumphant new cartoon feature a theatrical opening in Chicago, although it has recently become available here on video. After a limited if successful run in a New York theater last fall and several scattered theatrical play dates elsewhere in the U.S., Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters has entered the vast no-man’s-land of new features that are available for the most part only on tape, never having received the mainstream attention routinely accorded to other, mainly inferior, Hollywood releases....

TWISTER “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The second part of the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina applies pretty well to the eccentric Kansas family in Michael Almereyda’s oddball comedy Twister, but in a way that’s only half the story. Not only is the family as a whole unhappy in its own particular way, most of its members are out of whack with themselves, each other, and everybody else too....

Life has never been easy for Scott. The Chicago teenager has long suffered from periods of deep depression and fits of uncontrollable rage. His working-class parents couldn’t afford private care for him. So when Scott needed hospitalization last year, he ended up at Henry Horner Children’s Center, at 4201 N. Oak Park, the largest public mental-health facility for children and adolescents in the state, and a hospice of last resort for the poor, the parentless, and the underinsured....

How can a person “see stars”? When you exert yourself physically and then stop, you have these hundreds of little BBs zooming in space in front of you. I have actually believed I could touch them. Try staring at the ground about ten feet in front of you and follow one of the lights out of the corner of your eye until it blinks out. It’s kind of a kick. Explain how this physical change of sight and mind can occur as easily as doing a cartwheel....

In a season when the phrase “family values” has come to mean a very exclusive club indeed, it’s refreshing to find an artist whose vision of family is so inclusive it might actually unite disparate groups on the divisive issues he treats: racism, sexism, and homophobia. In Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, the final installment in a series about New Yorker David Rousseve’s Creole grandmother, he and his troupe Reality bring together country and city, the turn of the century and 1992, modern dance and hip-hop, nursery rhymes and work songs, rap and gospel....

AT LONG LAST LEO DemonLife Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though we never get to hear much of what’s in Leo’s tome, and most of the play’s characters don’t ever read it, it has an undeniable effect on all who come into contact with it, as they guess what might be contained inside. Leo’s sister Sheila, the bitter victim of a premature mid-life crisis, uses her perception of his theories to decide that she ought to take her young son and move to Seattle....

Friday, February 1 One of the artists freed by Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution–figuratively, at least–was Oldrich Kulhanek, etcher and illustrator. His work was political enough in the early 70s to get him jailed for “defaming the Soviet Union and its representatives.” Lately he’s turned to lithography and drawing; a recent work shows a series of bloated but menacing faces, each nicely punctuated with an uncomfortable, misplaced clown nose. A survey of his work from 1967 to the present opens today at the Jacques Baruch Gallery, 40 E....