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Returning, after two years’ hiatus, under the auspices of producer Doug Bragan’s Douglas Theater Corp., this third not-so-annual event features 16 non-Equity companies in as many one-act plays, organized in programs of four (during previews, programs of two). The selections range from experimental drama to camp melodrama to medieval farce to musical comedy to good ol’ American naturalism. “One might select one of the four packages because of a particular play included in it,” says a press release....

To the editors: Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article, “Nihilism for the Masses” [February 2], starts out sounding like a welcome defense of Michael Moore’s Roger & Me against Harlan Jacobson’s criticism in a recent Film Comment. Unfortunately, Rosenbaum goes on to make a similar mistake as he is criticizing. He tells us that the film causes us to laugh at our own impotence and takes advantage of us as victims. Further, he suggests that the film does not do what it should have done....

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE I became aware of Mendelsohn’s rebellion when my first son was born and we started shopping for a doctor. As a baby-boom baby, I’d had the penicillin-for-everything rule shoved at me with a vengeance. I didn’t trust the medical priesthood, with its tendency to give plenty of prescriptions but no reasons. And then, too, Mendelsohn’s contention that shots are unnecessarily intrusive made a kind of meta-ecological sense....

“What is God?” “Are you just saying that to make Daddy happy?” The little boy is silent again. He shifts uncomfortably in a big, wheeled office chair. He shrugs. “That’s right,” the man says, turning to me. “He’s too young to know. He doesn’t have all the information to make a rational decision yet.” Why not, Forbes asked. “No,” Sherman replied. “We’re atheists.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evening turned out just as Sherman had expected....

Friday 13 After a period of intense media exposure, the situation in South Africa has been given relatively sparse news coverage of late–proof of the efficacy of the Botha government’s press blackout. To help remedy that, the International Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa, a group based in London, has organized a pair of traveling photography exhibits–one on long-imprisoned black leader Nelson Mandela, the other examining South Africa’s military and economic battle with neighboring black-ruled countries....

Her first LP revealed your basic pop-jazz-soul chanteuse, albeit one blessed by an unusually strong and flexible set of pipes; her second, titled simply Dianne Reeves (the first Blue Note album by a vocalist that I can recall) proved the lady might become a serious jazz singer, too. Carmen, Sarah, and Betty can rest secure for the moment, but Dianne Reeves seems to have the same kind of sheer musical moxie that characterizes those doyennes of improvisatory singing–a point driven home by her audacious quickstep arrangement of “That’s All,” which is always performed as a weepy ballad....

DOWN THE SHORE Fresh from his stunning New York success–remounting Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room–David Petrarca has returned to direct a very different kind of play: Tom Donaghy’s Down the Shore. Where McPherson deftly mixed comedy with barely repressed sadness to create a work that literally had its audience laughing and crying at once, Down the Shore is much colder and crueler, about people far more emotionally stunted than those who populate Marvin’s Room–characters alienated from themselves and totally incapable of empathizing with others....

LE DORTOIR Chicago has nothing like Montreal’s Carbone 14. Few cities do, I suppose–rarely will you see theatrical images this imaginatively conceived, grandly designed, and expertly executed. Le dortoir (“The Dormitory”), created by artistic director Gilles Maheu in 1988, exemplifies the kind of exquisite craftsmanship that has rightfully garnered Carbone 14 its world-class status. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maheu’s design is paradoxically both specific and placeless....

LOVING LITTLE EGYPT This last flaw is the worst, because the key to Loving Little Egypt–a witty blend of real and fictitious events in the manner of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime–is the complexity of highly intelligent, often ruthless characters. The story is propelled by the actions of a group of scientific geniuses whose brilliance, accompanied (and perhaps stimulated) by their physical limitations, sets them apart from the world in which they still must live....

At 56 John Mayall is an unheralded elder statesman of modern blues and rock. His Bluesbreakers, originally formed in 1962, were the prototypical British blues band: they fused raw energy with youthful rock-and-roll passion in a way that perfectly captured the heady exuberance of the times. Theirs was the sound that ignited the furious interest in the blues among young white musicians that spread through Great Britain and the United States in the mid-60s....

Sunday and Monday night are looking to be a merry melange of musical mates and comradely cameos. R.J. Abrams and Anthony Poulos of Concert One Productions have a partner, Josh Gottheil, who was recently stricken with leukemia. They’re responding with a benefit at the Cubby Bear Sunday night to raise funds to help others in a similar situation. Their star is Peter Holsapple, the slightly bent, surpassingly melodic pop theorist behind the dB’s....

PHANTASIE For 30 years D has been content to love and be loved by her adopted mother, Leah. If she thought about her birth mother, it was to conjure up some fantasy figure, Myrna Loy or a hillbilly or a renegade Rothschild or even Lassie. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But make-believe goes only so far. Now married to Michael Cruz, a loving 35-year-old writer, D will soon have a baby: this new life triggers in D a yearning to close the circle, to meet the woman who gave her up for adoption....

In the life of a jazz ensemble, there are plateaus, there are peaks, and there is sometimes something even beyond those: a point of unusual artistic union, which defies description more fiercely than it resists comprehension. That sounds slightly cosmic? Deal with it. Quest reminds me of John Coltrane’s quartet in their ability to find the high plane, to illuminate it for listeners, and then to return there on a regular basis....

People don’t ask “Do you want to eat Italian tonight?” anymore. Now everything’s Italian. Spaghetti joints have been replaced by ristorantes–and the trattorias that are supposed to be cheaper but aren’t–and pasta comes in every shape imaginable, even radiators. I don’t miss the limited menus of the past, but I still have an occasional craving for spaghetti with meatballs and garlic bread so potent you could only eat it if your date did too....

ROUTE 142 Route 142 is a road show on a particularly small and human scale: if Les Miserables is a tank, Route 142 is a lightweight bicycle. Last year Eisen got a grant with no strings attached and decided to create a work that he could take on a midwestern tour. Chicago’s concert was to be the last of 20 cities in a tour completed in two months. To move that fast, you have to travel light....

TALKING TO MYSELF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this Northlight production, the acting ensemble is superb. The staging is stark but effective. The graphics are riveting. And the way the music weaves through the script is as magical and unobtrusive as a dream. Yet, despite its complex and often fascinating subject–Terkel himself–Talking to Myself is remarkably lightweight. After two acts and nearly 90 minutes of theater, this exercise in nostalgia seems a little too familiar....

THE LITTLE LOVES OF SHAKESPEARE That seldom happens in the Avenue Theatre’s ironically titled The Little Loves of Shakespeare. “Little” indeed . . . Both well- and lesser-known love scenes are lifted from the context of some seven plays. And this 180-minute assemblage manages to grind down Shakespeare’s astonishing emotional range to the assembly-line dimensions of an interminably tedious community-theater audition. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fact that you don’t have to pay royalties to Shakespeare is not reason enough to perform his work....

Everybody has heard that in the early days of radio broadcasting, there were people who received broadcasts through their teeth. A psychologist who is writing about it in a forthcoming book told me that he could find no actual or authentic case. I recall the play Something for the Boys in 1944 with Ethel Merman, and the movie of the play with Carmen Miranda, in which the actresses pretended they heard broadcasts....

About a year ago I asked the question, “When did mankind figure out that SEX = BABIES?” (I mentioned that I’d read about the discovery being alluded to in some Abyssinian or Hittite texts.) So far I haven’t seen the answer in print. What’s holding things up? –Larrie Ferreiro, Alexandria, Virginia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The general run of humankind, though, is thought to have tumbled to the concept early in the New Stone Age, which began after 10,000 BC....

What’s Happening With the Cultural Center? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To help pass the time, perhaps, until the next mayoral election, Weisberg decided to conduct focus groups to gather opinions about what to do with the building. That research is now concluded, and a summary of the findings is circulating. But don’t expect the report (if you can find a copy) to propose a treasure trove of creative answers....