The women gather every Wednesday afternoon at Cook County Hospital. Today they’re in a conference room, the fourth meeting place they’ve had in the last two months. Space is precious at the hospital, and nonmedical activities must yield to the demands of the critically ill. So this support group has yet to find a lasting home. The 15 women who are here sit in a kind of semicircle. A few are white or Hispanic, the majority are black....
ALWAYS, PATSY CLINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This kind of show is not so much a biographical play as an 80-minute impression. The audience knows of course that this is an actress portraying Patsy Cline, but the propensity of audiences to confuse the actor with the character–particularly when the character is a well-documented and familiar figure–sometimes makes one wonder just who is being applauded, and for what....
“This is my response to George Bush and the Supreme Court, which is no. Women are going to have their rights taken away. The Supreme Court bonehead idiots, testosterone-driven power mongers, are saying that we’ve got to roll backwards. My piece is saying that with the fetus, you tell it to roll backwards and whatever they’ve decided its new definition is it will agree with. The same thing with the child....
BATMAN DIED FOR OUR SINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Usually we think of improvisational comedy as offering the artist a great deal of freedom, but watching the Underground Theatre Conspiracy’s Batman Died for Our Sins (“76.4 percent improvised”) at the Roxy, it struck me just how restrictive and stifling the conventions can be. One such convention is audience participation, so this five-actor company did several skits based on audience suggestions: the “diminishing returns” exercise, for example, in which the scenes get progressively shorter, and the “change of condition” exercise, in which characters switch emotions and physical dispositions every few seconds....
Friday 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most Chicago guide books feature Graceland Cemetery on the north side as the preferred resting place of local luminaries but unjustly neglect the south side’s Oakwood Cemetery. More a park than a graveyard, Oakwood has more than half a dozen lakes, immaculately kept lawns and gardens, a chapel, and the largest mass grave of Confederate soldiers north of the Mason-Dixon Line....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The President’s Advisory Council of Harold Washington College [“Comment: How to Save the City Colleges,” January 24], is comprised of people from business and the community, as well as representatives from the college’s student body, faculty, staff and administration. Our task is to provide the president with recommendations, when implemented, that will best serve the students, college and the community it serves....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If so, the Reader may have deleted the passage discussing Israel and her actions vis a vis the Intifada. While I do not condone many of Israel’s actions I resent the comparison of Israel to terrorists. Israel may do things wrong, but she does not attack innocent civilians in airports around the world, or people enjoying a holiday at a local beach....
When Ida Cox proclaimed “Wild women don’t have the blues,” she could easily have been singing about guitarist Memphis Minnie. It was unusual enough between the 1920s and 1950s for a woman to play lead guitar, front bands, and write most of her own material, but Minnie also drank, dipped snuff, cursed, fought, and led jam sessions with gutsy aplomb. Johnny Shines described her, admiringly, as a “hellcat.” Historians point to her as one of the most important blues stylists of the pre-World War II era....
MISTER RICKEY CALLS A MEETING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t think they were disappointed. Schmidt’s play–a hypothetical gathering of Paul Robeson, Joe Louis, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson with Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947 to decide the future of a young baseball player named Jackie Robinson–displays exhaustive research and an astonishing technical virtuosity for a playwright so young....
OBJECTIONS TO SEX AND VIOLENCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Caryl Churchill’s script concerns a would-be terrorist named Jule who is hiding out with her boyfriend, Eric–another radical of sorts. Indicted on minor drug charges, Jule and Eric are suspected of bigger crimes–including a possible bombing–most of which remain unspecified. Churchill contrasts these two with Arthur and Madge, a middle-class married couple. She’s a self-righteous civil servant, appalled by sexuality; he indulges in pornography....
SINS OF THE FATHER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Become a great artist. It is the only way to justify the pain you will cause,” says Jacob Kahn to Asher Lev, the 13-year-old Orthodox boy with the disturbing gift for art. “What do I have to justify?” wonders this prodigy, who will find that his search for truth and fulfillment takes him farther and farther from his family, his culture, and his religion....
Mooo! According to University of Chicago entomologist Monte Lloyd, when the 17-year cicadas emerge, “There can be more meat on the lawns of a suburban neighborhood than on a dairy cattle farm.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Good thing we don’t have yellow journalism anymore. Now it’s white. From the 48th Ward Progressive Network News (May 1990): “Shortly after Washington’s election, both major papers printed disinformation that claimed that the directors of the Washington Fund were about to resign because the Fund had been mismanaged....
Theater League Lays Back Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It didn’t take long for the League of Chicago Theatres to revert to its blase attitude. In the wake of the resignation of executive director Diane Olmen and early attempts to revitalize the ineffective trade association, a meeting of the League’s full membership was called for September 10 to ratify a new bylaw officially expanding the board of directors to 21 from 15 members....
WINTERY TAILS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Happily it does, easily and impressively, through 40 minutes and two stories. Zlateh the Goat by Isaac Bashevis Singer and “Dolce Domum” from Kenneth Grahame’s beloved The Wind in the Willows are simple, winning tales about the joy of comradeship, the pain of homesickness, and the challenge of finding your way home through winter’s perils. And it’s a properly evenhanded program, one story inspired by Hanukkah, the other by Christmas....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is it really more valuable in terms of our evolution to feel that we can now articulate down to the minutest detail what it is that we hate about Madonna, if such insight must be obtained only by continuing to remain ignorant about everything else that is exciting and powerful and beautiful that’s happening around her?...
Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a performer, Richard Elovich is elfin but intense; as a writer, he’s funny, but in a painful kind of way. Elovich, who has been involved with both ACT UP and Gran Fury, the artists’ collective recently involved in controversial negotiations with the CTA over a series of explicit AIDS education billboards, is in town this weekend to perform his one-person play, If Men Could Talk, the Stories They Could Tell....
CONNECTIONS OF THE HEART Imagine my surprise–to quote Holly Near–when I found myself actually enjoying Paula Berg’s very funny all-women show. It certainly fit the usual Mountain Moving profile: well-intentioned, with loads of lesbian-affirming material. But it was also good. And considering Mountain Moving’s technical limitations–high ceilings, small, minimally equipped stage, no stage lighting–that is quite a triumph. Director Karen Gerbig deserves kudos for bringing off this very smooth, very polished production....
EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON This makes “good” children’s theater hard to define. Good adult theater tends toward subtlety, complexity, and harmony. A good play in the opinion of grown-ups engages the head as well as the heart. For kids, a good play is more visceral. The characters must be cartoonish, the plot fast-paced, and the costumes a riot of color. Remember, we’re talking about an audience that sees catharsis in Saturday-morning cartoons....
“Perfect intonation is infinitely flexible.” As with many things Francis Hunt says about music, it is not immediately clear whether he is speaking technically or metaphorically, about literal acoustic theory or an observation on the human spirit. He looks like Santa Claus is the first thing one thinks. “What you have to do,” he says as he weaves a ribbon of red felt between the piano wires, “is set what’s called the equal temperament....
RITUAL and the Kinetic Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This serious theme is boldly explored through a story and style that veer energetically, sometimes erratically, and always invigoratingly between overt poetic stylization, soap-opera melodrama, and barbed comedy of a particularly waspish sort. Ritual is often very funny, even when it’s most serious; and Clay’s ambition and intelligence, as expressed in the slick and edgy midwest premiere of his play, directed by Douglas Alan Mann at the Chicago Theatre Company, make for an exhilarating experience in the theater....
