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Mental status today reveals a neatly and casually dressed . . . man who has never married. His hair is graying, he is alert and in good contact. He is normally oriented in all spheres. Memory for recent and remote events is intact. . . . Calculating ability is accurate. Knowledge of current events is appropriate. Abstracting ability with familiar proverbs is appropriate. Stream of thought and association are normal. No psychotic ideation or hallucinatory activity is elicited....

NEVER IN MY LIFETIME So it’s all the more remarkable that in Never in My Lifetime British playwright Shirley Gee can create a modern Romeo and Juliet, a British Protestant soldier and an Irish Catholic girl whose innocence seems almost as strong as the hatred that surrounds them. Almost–because in this poisoned land innocence is not enough. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom is a lonely country boy bored and frightened by his assignment, counting the seconds till his time is up....

ROCK Michael Kearns at Circle Theatre December 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Rock Kearns plays four characters who have a relationship with Hudson spiritually, metaphorically, or literally. We never actually see Hudson himself; however, we do get a kind of Rashomon portrait of him as we listen to the stories each of the characters tells. Rocky (from Little Rock) changes his name the day Hudson dies, which is also the day he loses his virginity, the day he realizes that like Hudson he is gay, and the day he leaves his mother for good....

LAUGH, RED MEDUSA! LAUGH, LAUGH . . . A PERIOD PIECE Laugh is a study in wrenching, often hilarious polarities: it’s structured to contrast and finally bring together two intensely opposite sexual worlds. The first is a self-sustaining collective (they call themselves a “space”) of four women; although living in different places, they’re linked by the letters they send each other, each written in red ink (three are displayed in the lobby)....

After years of fighting physical setbacks that might have destroyed many lesser men, blues patriarch Sunnyland Slim finally eased into semiretirement last year. This will be his first gig in months; such one-shot reemergences are always a bit risky, but Sunnyland can pull it off if anyone can. At 84 he no longer has to prove anything, but his pride and determination burn as fiercely as ever: expect a vital, urgent performance from him–easy-rolling Delta shuffles, his trademark cascading treble flurries and stentorian voice, and the gruff tenderness that’ve endeared him to fans the world over....

SUSAN MARSHALL & COMPANY Of the works on the Dance Center program by this New York-based choreographer, Arms (1984) seemed the clearest expression of Marshall’s technique: a throwaway surface that belies the dark subtext. She captures the way that movement, all by itself, can reveal the obscure intent. Despite its abstraction, this duet (danced by Jackie Goodrich and Andrew Boynton) evokes street kids in love. The intensity of their affection shades into violence–an amorous approach can look like aggression and be met as if it were, a caress is often not bestowed by but forced from another....

THE PRIVATE EAR and The Public Ear, the more conventional of the two, concerns a very square London office boy, Tchaik, with virtually no practical aspirations but with an almost religious love for his stereo system, which he gives the name Behemoth. Tchaik falls hopelessly and unreasonably in love with Doreen, a woman he meets at a concert, and turns to his hip friend Ted to show him what to do....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I enjoyed James Krohe’s January 19 article about Mayor Daley’s GreenStreets program, and I wish Edith Makra the best of success in revitalizing Chicago’s urban forestry. But as a native of Akron, OH, I must object to Mr. Krohe’s derogatory reference to a Chicago without trees as little more than “an Akron with a lake.” If Krohe had ever been to Akron, he would know that per square mile Akron has both bigger and better trees, and probably more trees per capita, than does Chicago....

On instruments from baritone sax to flute, Los Angeleno Vinny Golia makes music with power, precision, and poetry: demanding, challenging, and worth everything you put into it as a listener. (If Marlon Brando had played jazz, I fancy it would’ve sounded like this.) His technique bristles with the integrity typical of those who’ve tamed the “free jazz” idiom, and he underscores his improvising with a keen sense of structure; his solos aren’t necessarily linear, but they spin out with a discernible and delectable logic that allows him to tell a story almost every time....

Warren Goes to Washington “Against the advice of a lot of people who said he had no experience in editing and was a quirky personality who wouldn’t be up to it and would cause trouble”–so Tyner recalls his decision today–he turned Tempo over to Jim Warren. We knew Warren as a brainy, sarcastic workhorse who covered labor and then media for the Tribune and also wrote a weekly column in Tempo on the media and another on magazines....

Zeami Motokiyo (1364-1443) was the father and the greatest actor of the Japanese No theater. With over 200 plays–written under the patronage of a powerful shogun and each increasingly emphasizing the symbolic, spiritual core of drama over the representational–he single-handedly elevated the previously crude folk form into an intricate, stylized aristocratic art. His creative and inner life after he was banished from the court by jealous courtiers is the subject of this 1963 prizewinning play by Masakazu Yamazaki, one of Japan’s leading literary figures and a vocal exponent of the Western-influenced Shingeki (new theater) movement....

ALL MY HOPES AND DREAMS When I go to New York I generally find the performance work there tedious and self-important. But whenever Randolph Street Gallery brings in New York artists–Richard Elovich, Split Britches, and now Lisa Kron–I find the work exhilarating. Of course, the incredibly intelligent bunch at Randolph Street are responsible. They continue to provide some of the most intriguing programming in Chicago–it’s difficult to have a bad time there....

THE FILMS OF WILLIAM KLEIN At a time when the National Endowment for the Arts is under siege–and not only from yahoos like Jesse Helms, but also from certain anarchists, leftists, and intellectuals–the general paucity of information and understanding about national funding of the arts in other countries only helps to underline how isolationist this country has become in cultural matters. As a rule, our overseas news coverage and our access to foreign films both seem to operate according to the same chillingly reductive circular reasoning: if people don’t already know about something or understand it, they aren’t likely to be interested....

For a long while the Chicago Ensemble, the city’s most durable independent chamber group, seemed to be in the doldrums. Though many of its subscribers were fierce loyalists who’d supported the ensemble from the start, it had trouble attracting the younger crowd. And the ensemble’s performances, while elegant and skillful, often locked fire. On the other hand, the group’s founder, Gerald Rizzer, has always maintained a healthily venturesome approach to programming; over the last 15 years he and his colleagues have given local debuts to more works than any other chamber bunch in town I can think of....

For John Nowak, the Chicago world’s fair of 1933 was “a marvelous thing.” He was a boy then, from a poor Catholic family. Each Friday, admission to the fair was reduced to a nickel. Over the summer and sometimes during the school year, Nowak’s mother would pack him a couple of salmon salad sandwiches (Friday meant no meat, of course) and off he’d go by streetcar to enjoy the fair. His lunch was always those sandwiches and a Coke....

Southend Musicworks reopens tonight, at 1313 S. Wabash, putting the city’s savviest presenters of late-20th-century sound and fury back in business. That the largely raw space will be even moderately finished and furnished is a small miracle. “It’s hard to organize work crews,” says Leo Krumpholz, speaking of the extremely mixed bag of volunteers who make Southend tick. “Everyone’s too clever–they try to figure out better ways of doing everything, instead of just doing it....

DR. SPRAY Dr. Spray, Marc Smith’s rather abbreviated one-man show, concerns the once-notorious turn-of-the-century rogue, coroner, and alienist. A member of Chicago’s notorious Whitechapel Club, founded in the late 1880s by the likes of Peter Finley Dunne and George Ade, Spray is best known as the man who supplied the club with what some described as “the finest collection of skulls in the country,” many of which had been made into gas lamps....

LANDSCAPES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD, PHOTOGRAPHS 1972-1987 PIONEERING MATTAWA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frank Gohlke’s most dramatic photos are the ones that demonstrate the violence that often characterizes this interaction. After a tornado hit his home town of Wichita Falls, Texas, in April of 1979, killing 46 people and wiping out 2,600 homes, Gohlke rushed there to record the destruction. He returned a year later, set his camera up at the same sites, and photographed the rebuilt town....

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint just when the game got ugly. Maybe on a sunny Arizona morning in 1989, when Dave Foreman was awakened in his bedroom by three FBI agents pointing Magnums at his head, charging him with conspiracy to topple nuclear-plant power lines at several locations in the southwest. Or it could have been several years earlier, when Foreman was dragged by a pickup–suffering permanent knee damage–along a logging road he and other environmentalists were trying to blockade....

KIDS IN THE DARK Kids in the Dark is based on a sensational murder in Northport, Long Island. Actually, it was an unremarkable murder. A teenager who was high on angel dust, a drug notorious for inducing violent behavior, murdered one of his friends. What made the case sensational is that even though the killer bragged about his crime, and took people into the woods to view the decomposing body, none of the kids informed any adults for two weeks....