Darling Lauretta Duerrstein is dead. She died before her eighth birthday. Nearly a hundred years later I sat on her grave trying to sketch her stony likeness. She holds a headless dove on her left arm, while her right hand rests on a petrified stump. A bonnet and flowers lie strewn at her dainty stone boots. Her eyes stare beyond the shadows that shift across her long hair. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON With Patrick Bergin, Iain Glen, Richard E. Grant, and Fiona Shaw Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yet our hero teeters between two antagonistic cultures: between industrial civilization and the vast romantic wilderness where he enjoys a less cramped life-style. Sooner or later, though, a trickle and then a horde of bureaucrats and speculators will travel the very trails that the intrepid explorer blazed to escape them....
MARGARET JENKINS AND RINDE ECKERT Jenkins is a dancer and choreographer, Eckert a writer, singer, composer, and actor. Judging from the works on this program, Eckert is the more flamboyant talent, Jenkins a restraining force. The opening work, And So They (1988), has an almost British reserve–the voice-over, written by Eckert, is read by a woman with an English accent, and text and choreography both stress disjunction, disaffection, the expression of feeling through locutions so oblique that the feeling almost gets lost....
HOLIDAY MEMORIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Truman Capote’s autobiographical stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory” offer such reflection. Strange that the stories haven’t acquired the classic status bestowed on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or even Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Perhaps the tastemakers think people would be uncomfortable with stories about the love between a sissy boy and his spinster aunt....
Five thousand years after the Sumerians developed the first written language, sixty-eight years after American women gained the right to vote, and four years after Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice-president, Chicago has its first anthology of work by local women writers, Naming the Daytime Moon. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Imagine the stories waitresses could tell–their own as well as those they’ve overheard....
In jazz, the strength of any ensemble comes from the linkages formed within the rhythm section, and the heart of every rhythm section lies in the interplay between bassist and drummer. This may be an elementary lesson in jazz anatomy, but it helps explain why this pickup band should sound healthier than most. Bassist John Webber and drummer George Fludas have worked together in New York; they know each other’s moves, and that fact overrides even their individual excellence....
STARS OF THE BOLSHOI BALLET The Bolshoi Ballet, which has an enormous roster of dancers of breathtaking quality, frequently sends on tour smallish complements of dancers headed by one or two of its world-famous stars. This tour, headed by ballerina Natalya Bessmertnova and several other principals, was planned along the same lines but with a boost from glasnost. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When the 30-member troupe arrived in Chicago, they discovered that their sets, costumes, and toe shoes were still languishing somewhere in Moscow....
In a front yard in Lakeview, a boy runs full speed with a yellow plastic bucket in his hand, dips it in the water, whirls and lets loose, just in time to catch his brother full across the chest with a resounding smack. Both scream, dive after more water, take off. Standing silently on the walk nearby, a slender, pretty red-haired girl watches. When the boys are at the far end of the small lawn, she walks briskly over to the pool, picks up the one spare bucket, fills it, and waits....
For its local debut, the Peabody Trio–trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and now the resident ensemble of Baltimore’s Peabody Institute–will play a pair of recent works by transplanted Chicagoans. Shulamit Ran, last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, is represented by Excursions (1980), a neo-romantic string trio tinged with the hothouse sensuality of her native Israel. Four Movements for Piano Trio by Bright Sheng, the Lyric Opera’s composer in residence, is an assured, almost dazzling homage to Bartok in its blending of the neoclassical style with folk idioms; “folk,” in Sheng’s case, is the tribal music of China’s northwestern frontier....
With the death last year of Edward Abbey, the environmental movement–and the American literary scene–lost an aggravating and outspoken scribe. Aggravating, because he constantly offended readers with remarks that were branded sexist, racist, and otherwise politically incorrect. Outspoken, because there was no sacred cow he wasn’t proud to attack. He was a polemicist who seemed scarcely able to be a bore, whose fulminations were always a pleasure to read. He ranted, but he ranted eloquently....
Up in Evanston, in the lightly wooded area running north-south along the canal, there’s something amiss. And whatever it is, it’s big and mean. The kids at Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School (which sits on the canal’s eastern border) have heard rumors. “It’s a cougar,” they say, or “My grandmother told me it was a man.” They don’t chase their footballs into the bushes anymore. A dog has been killed....
This immense auditorium is so big, so bright, so surgically clean it’s unnerving. It is, in fact, the largest auditorium in the entire Chicago area–larger than the Arie Crown or the Lyric Opera–with seating for 4,554 persons. Ten minutes before the 11:15 AM starting time, the place is almost full of well-scrubbed, colorfully attired, bright-eyed folks who seem to be just tickled to death to be here on a Sunday morning....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In response to Eugene Dillenburg’s “new ideas” as reported by Michael Miner in last week’s Reader [Hot Type, March 3]: They were burying Hippie over ten years ago with a new material called Punk. It can be argued that for some listening to the Cure is true nostalgia, as in “Ah yes, I remember like yesterday po-going long into the night at O’Banion’s, way back in those crazy days of the late 70’s....
THE ROAD TO MECCA Raven Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Road to Mecca Fugard enters Martins’s life at the height of her depression, but in his version Miss Helen doesn’t kill herself. Instead she triumphs, standing up to the village parson who wants to move her into an old folks’ home. Though Fugard knew of Martins’s suicide, he’s reenvisioned her here as an embodiment of the creative spirit....
BROADCAST POWER, TAKE TWO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Best known for the insights that put the alternating current system associated with Westinghouse on a working basis, Tesla was a brilliant experimenter in electricity. He devised a system for broadcasting electrical power in the first decade of this century that, among other things, could (and did) light lightbulbs at a distance of 25 miles without their being connected by wires to a source of electricity....
WENCESLAS SQUARE The frame of the play centers around a narrator who tells the story of an adventure in Czechoslovakia in his younger days. The narrator portrays all the men that his younger self meets. This younger self, Dooley, is a student at a small midwestern college who befriends a rowdy and wild professor of theater. The professor, Vince Corey, had been in Czechoslovakia during the time of the invasion and watched the blossoming of the theater community as the artists responded to the crisis....
Eighteen theater companies are presented in six different programs of two to four plays each, organized along loose thematic lines by producer Doug Bragan and associate producer Judith Easton. That’s two more companies and two more programs than last year, when Bragan first stepped in to revive this non-Equity showcase founded and then discontinued by the League of Chicago Theatres. At the Theatre Building, through June 2. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 PM, Saturdays, 6:30 and 9:15 PM; Sundays, 3 PM....
Abraham Stokman is one of the city’s best-kept musical secrets. For years the Israeli-born pianist has zealously championed new works, particularly those of local composers; I still remember vividly his performance in the late 70s of Ralph Shapey’s Fromm Variations, in which he played nonstop for more than an hour and managed to make sense of the elusive structure of a monumental and devilishly difficult score. None of the works on Stokman’s solo recital program is quite that epic, but each demands virtuosity....
Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and Andres Pajares star as the headlining couple in the Elegant Variety Show, a vaudeville troupe entertaining Spanish Republican soldiers in 1938, shortly before their defeat by the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Traveling with a young deaf-mute assistant (Gabino Diego), they’re arrested in a town recently occupied by the fascists and are eventually compelled to perform a morale-boosting show for the fascist troops–as well as for Polish prisoners who are about to be shot–that an Italian lieutenant (Maurizio di Razza) will direct....
BRAAXTAAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On this Dutch group’s second album, Speechlos (Kontrans), the members abuse and recontextualize their instruments in such strange, fascinating, and funny ways that it’s impossible to tell how their work is intended. Is it deadly serious? Is it seriously Dada? Chances are you’re not meant to know for sure. Percussionist Theo Bodewes uses standard drums along with electronics and household objects; sometimes he keeps time and sometimes he demolishes it....
