To the editors: The world-view of Bultmann and similar German theologians is the proper way of interpreting the Bible Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, Sheehan does not accurately assess the view of Jesus we get from Mark. I agree with him that the ending of Mark is questionable from a textual perspective (Mark 16:9-20), but there are several other passages in this gospel which teach the deity and bodily resurrection of Jesus....
AKASHA DANCE COMPANY Akasha Dance Company recently celebrated its tenth anniversary at the Ruth Page Theater in a program of works created over the last nine years. But the artistic range was narrow. Akasha is unique in the Chicago area for its long-term devotion to humorous dance–it’s unusual to see such technically accomplished performers so ecstatic at the opportunity to look ridiculous. As a repertory group, it relies on commissioned work, and Akasha has provided a creative outlet for such talented Chicago choreographers as Shirley Mordine and Timothy O’Slynne....
Lura Armstrong and her mother came to the Black People’s Convention because, Lura says, “we want to get a sense of where the black community is going. We’re not politically active, we’re not affiliated with any community organization, but we try to keep abreast of what’s going on. If my understanding is right, out of this convention and out of the plebiscite next month will come one candidate that black people can stand behind....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kateri Butler and Gloria Ohland argue that “biological determinist theories” like sociobiology (and, by inference, the older ethology and the newer innatology) rise “as a response to feminist scholarship and the women’s movement.” All this, of course, to “defend the status quo” from feminist scholars who, no doubt, would have otherwise overthrown the government by now!...
MELO With Andre Dussollier, Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, and Fanny Ardant. In the second cadenza, near the end, a few years after the suicide of Romaine–who began a brief, secret affair with Marcel the day after he delivered the above-mentioned monologue–her husband and Marcel’s friend, Pierre, recites to Marcel by heart, the letter that she wrote to him before drowning herself in the Seine. Twenty-five years later, while one can certainly single out Resnais features that are flawed (Je t’aime, je t’aime, L’amour a mort) or relatively minor (Stavisky, La vie est un roman) or both (La guerre est finie), only two of Sontag’s complaints seem to hold up: Resnais’ films are all synthetic, and they lack directness of address....
A young black man stands in the middle of a bare floor, holding a broom. He’s quiet, passive, virtually paralyzed. Standing next to him is another young black man, high-strung and shouting at nerve-racking volume: “Stop standing there and go out and do something with your life! Stop staying in these fucking boxes, missions, airports. Jesus! I don’t know why God put me in this body!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
What Valerij Smahlij wants us to know is that things aren’t usually like this in the Soviet Union. Usually Hrono–the band he manages–plays for thousands of adoring fans in huge arenas and outdoor stadiums. There aren’t small, dingy clubs like this in Ukraine. In Ukrainian stadiums, Hrono uses lasers and smoke machines. There usually isn’t quite so much ear-splitting feedback back home, where they have better sound systems. And their dressing rooms there are a bit better equipped than the one here in River Grove....
By that time you’d either be better or dead. “A walk-in patient at Cook County Hospital’s Fantus Clinic may wait up to eight hours to see a doctor,” reports the Metropolitan Planning Council in its Issue Brief (May 1990). “The waiting time for a non-obstetrical adult appointment at the city’s Englewood Neighborhood Health Center is about six months.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If I can gain something from heterosexual or heteroerotic art (for instance, those innumerable heterosexual Renaissance love poems), then heterosexuals necessarily should be able to glean something of universal value from gay art,” argues Paul Varnell in Windy City Times (May 17)....
THE NUTCRACKER Attending The Nutcracker has become a holiday tradition for many American families, and productions abound in every city. In Chicago, we’ve become accustomed to a long run every year of Ruth Page’s delightful version at the Arie Crown. But the Des Moines Ballet, recently renamed Ballet Iowa, has been bringing its own smaller-scale but uniquely humorous and charming version to Centre East for a number of years. I recall fondly a particularly funny scene with several plump chefs carrying oversize ladles....
THE PERFECT PARTY A.R. Gurney’s sly, literate sex farce, The Perfect Party, begins by lampooning these frivolous party journalists and ends by commenting ironically on contemporary theater, the state of the nation, and, in true postmodern fashion, those who would comment on theater and the state of the nation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tony, an ex-professor of English and powerless (but rich) descendant of “what was once the ruling class” in this country, decides that his ticket to celebrity is to throw the perfect party and have it covered by Lois, the first-string “party critic” for an influential but unnamed New York daily....
ANOTHER TIME These issues are all too often forgotten, or simply ignored, in a media-saturated world where art is a commodity–in which consideration of the emotional (as well as ethical) issues involved in a work of art, and of the artist’s compulsion to make art, takes a distant second place to considerations of how it will affect the celebrity the artist must be seeking. (Why else be an artist in the first place?...
THE DANCE SAMPLER at Northeastern Illinois University Najwa Dance Corps performed Frokroba, choreographed by Yao Marshall and staged and directed by Najwa I, an energetic initiation dance from the Malkine people of Guinea in West Africa. The eager audience enthusiastically solicited a brief encore. The Hatzabarim Israeli Folk Dance Company did three dances, each more showy than the last. The final work, Kormim–The Vintners, is almost a dance sampler of its own, incorporating the steps from many kinds of folk dance....
MASS MURDER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, Ed’s not one of the dozen multiple murderers profiled in Prop Theatre’s Mass Murder. But there are plenty of kindred souls present: Gibbering grotesques like David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam murderer, who claimed to get demonic messages from his neighbor’s dog. Dark angels like Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, who seems to have considered himself a kind of nocturnal spirit of predation....
FIGHTER OF A FITFUL DREAM Knowing all this, one might expect SST’s plays to be either didactic staged lectures or feel-good mush. But Fighter of a Fitful Dream, which expands SST’s thematic focus by addressing the topics of unemployment and marital breakup, is neither of those things. Harking back to the social and psychological explorations of Ibsen on the one hand and Strindberg on the other, it’s a rather surprising mix of naturalistic drama and expressionistic dream theater....
Fifteen years ago a young activist named Pat Quinn began a crusade against currency exchanges. At the time he had no political base, and few people paid any attention. Quinn’s still waging that campaign, only now he’s the state treasurer and people all over Illinois are taking notice. His latest effort, a proposal to cut the fees currency exchanges charge to cash government benefit checks, has created intense turmoil and debate....
INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL In this year’s International Theatre Festival, the third so far, certain weaknesses have begun to emerge. It has become apparent, for instance, that festival directors Jane and Bernie Sahlins share a pronounced weakness for epics. The Sahlinses helped bring an eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby to Chicago in 1983, and now they’ve made marathons a sort of signature for the festival–most notably with the 1988 English Shakespeare Company production of “The Wars of the Roses”: a cycle of seven history plays running from Richard II, through three Henrys, to Richard III, which took only slightly less time to see than it took for the wars themselves to be fought....
Nobody donated legal services to Winick, who chooses his words carefully when talking about the case. He says he feels “victimized by people’s web of conspiracy theories,” and he’s quick to point out that during his career as an architect and urban planner he has worked for a number of nonprofit, public-sector organizations. While in graduate school, for example, he was an intern with Peoples Housing, a low-income housing-development organization based in Rogers Park....
Pere Ubu’s new record, Cloudland, is a pop monstrosity: it’s Eraserhead crossed with disco, or the Archies with a cleft palate. “Sloop John B” is transformed into a lurid rocker on a song called “Nevada!”; “Breath” equates a failed relationship with urban renewal. Which is to say that it’s a Pere Ubu album, despite the pop sheen. Stephen Hague of Pet Shop Boys fame produced several cuts, including the shimmering “Breath” and an all-out rocker called “Waiting for Mary....
The past often looks curiously familiar. In 1899, the ostentatiously macho Teddy Roosevelt urged American men to follow him to new heights of masculinity. Decrying what he called the “soft spirit of the cloistered life,” he advocated the hard, martial regime of the “strenuous life” as a kind of salvation for upper-class men who had become overcivilized and flabby. Roosevelt called for a resolute reassertion of testosterone at home and abroad....
I pick him up on 47th Street, somewhere around Morgan or Racine, an industrial no-man’s-land between decaying neighborhoods. It’s the middle of a chilly, winter’s-coming, late-September night. Usually they watch the door, gauging where the bus will come to rest. But he watches my face–as if he’s afraid I’m going to roll on by. “A guy came up to me, a black guy,” he says, his eyes finding mine in the mirror....
