This winter Claudell Cain, a 12th-grader at Fenger Academy High School, managed to squeeze the story of his father’s life onto a pair of old dress shoes. In a series of tiny paintings that begin on the right shoe and continue on the left, he depicts his dad’s trajectory from street-level drug dealing to prison and then back to his family. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last October Cheryl Boone brought a pair of old shoes into the Fenger classroom where she teaches art....

I Am Yours, Cobalt Ensemble Theatre, at Stage Left Theatre. When this Judith Thompson play premiered in Toronto in 1979, it was welcomed as a groundbreaking psychological drama. Two emotionally damaged sisters vie for the center of attention, both aiming to be loved and desired. Dee (Jenny McKnight) is ruining her marriage by playing emotional and mental games with her husband, Mack (the sympathetic David Lowenthal). Mercy (Laura Bailey) revisits an illicit passion with an older man (Eric Danson) after her husband leaves her....

“It’s hard to be jaded about the trapeze,” says aerialist Raven Hinojosa. “Even if you’ve already decided you’re not going to be all that impressed by anything in life, you’re going to be impressed by the trapeze. You’re so totally engaged when you’re up there that it’s hard for the audience not to be engaged too.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hinojosa, who’s 25 and a native of Austin, Texas, ran away from home when she was 15; that’s also when she changed her name from Monica to Raven....

Mark Swartz protests a bit too much about the distance he keeps from the protagonist of his first novel, Instant Karma. Though Swartz seems to favor nonautobiographical fiction, young David Felsenstein, underemployed anarchist, fantasizes incessantly about blowing up the Harold Washington Library Center–where Swartz will read from his novel next week. Consider yourself warned. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I still have to sort out my feelings toward, one, David, and, two, the 27-year-old who wrote this book,” says Swartz, whose work lay “in a drawer” for seven years before City Lights Books in San Francisco picked it up....

Laugh Now, Eat Later Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The theater’s been operating since October, along with a fledgling training center managed by Angela Farruggia of Chemically Imbalanced Comedy. CIC had just lost its performance space at the Prodigal Son on Halsted a year ago when Farruggia saw a notice about Janisch’s project on a bulletin board and signed on to help. The theater is named for the building’s previous incarnation as a methadone clinic; it’s also been a church, a funeral parlor, and an art gallery....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An August report from the sheriff’s department of Pima County, Arizona, described a scam in which a Tucson man answered an ad seeking stars for adult videos. He was asked to wire $1,100 to help finance the shoot, which he did; he was told he’d be reimbursed and paid afterward. Over the next three days, in response to a series of promises, demands, and threats, the man sent the “producers” three more payments totaling $23,000 and got his parents to wire them another $20,000 before concluding he’d been conned....

Beth Reitmeyer: You Mean So Much to Me Donald Moffett: What Barbara Jordan Wore The front room of Standard, containing about half of Beth Reitmeyer’s installation You Mean So Much to Me, is itself provocative: 18 paintings of abstracted roses hang on walls covered with wallpaper made by screen printing similar patterns in red. In part a joke on the neutral white walls of the typical gallery or museum, Reitmeyer’s background both sensualizes the space and competes with her paintings for attention....

My husband-to-be is a conservative running for high political office in the Bible Belt. He has a good chance of winning. I am aware that campaigns can become ugly and personal. Before I met my husband I dated women, posed for naked pictures, was into drugs, and even appeared in a Girls Gone Wild video. I do not regret this; I just don’t do it anymore. My husband doesn’t know, and I don’t think he would understand....

Southern Baptist Sissies, Bailiwick Repertory. Del Shores’s fifth Texas comedy, highly praised in Los Angeles when first produced in 1999, already feels anachronistic. The four adolescent friends struggling with their sexual orientation in the shadow of an unsympathetic Baptist church share stories that we’ve heard before–endlessly. This is two hours and fifteen minutes of coming-out angst, concerned parents, and deep guilt peppered with uninspired drag, predictable tragedy, and bland hymn singing....

I can’t think of a better way to meditate on our “national values” this election season than by seeing this stark, intimate production by Theo Ubique Theatre Company. Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 volume of verse epitaphs–essentially monologues by the unquiet souls in a central Illinois cemetery–ripped the veil from small-town passions and hypocrisy; in 1963 Charles Aidman and Naomi Caryl Hirshhorn set about 70 of these epitaphs to a folk-music score....

Unlike familiar mainstream documentaries in which titles and an omniscient narrator tell us what to think about the images, Jesse Lerner’s films create disparities between image and spoken text that encourage the viewer’s active participation. While he focuses on the history of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula–which attempted to secede in the 19th century, had a socialist government briefly early in the 20th, and was host to a 1916 feminist congress–Lerner also implicitly makes connections to globalization: the Yucatan economy, historically based on the export of sisal fiber to the U....

Thomas Belelieu’s Master Stroke Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About the same time, the Whitehall Hotel was looking for a general manager to open its new high-end restaurant, Molive. Alcohol was already integral to the legacy of the Whitehall Club, the private dining room that preceded the hotel and once drew celebrities and wealthy Chicagoans–it was one of the first places in town to serve wine and spirits after prohibition....

The Ordinary Yearning of Miriam Buddwing Whatever the topic, the wearied sense that we’ve heard it all before is an indictment not of the subject but of the writer. There aren’t many complaints that Ulysses is just another goddamned book about how life is a journey. But Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s new play, commissioned by Steppenwolf, is just another goddamned play about how families don’t work–about how children consume their mothers and mothers eat their young....

Earth (1930) is the most famous of Alexander Dovzhenko’s masterpieces, but this white-hot war film, made the previous year and screening only once in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s invaluable Dovzhenko retrospective, is in many ways his most dazzling silent picture. Though it was commissioned to glorify the 1918 struggle of Bolshevik workers at a Kiev munitions factory against White Russian troops, Dovzhenko’s view of wartime and battlefront morality is too ambiguous and multilayered to fit comfortably within any propaganda scheme....

Killer Shots: A Photographic Response to War Though everything in “Killer Shots” has previously appeared in print, here the photos are insulated from the trivial surrealism that occurs when images of atrocity share pages with advertising. But there are other juxtapositions. Edelman pairs two portaits of exhausted, contemplative men–separated by 20 years and four time zones. Circular hubs figure in the backgrounds of both: the figure in David Burnett’s 1971 Fatigued G....

Dance R/Evolution If you expect an evening focused on dance classics to be more traditional than one focused on new dances, Dance Chicago has a surprise for you. “Dance R/Evolution,” featuring “remounted works from Chicago choreographers that shaped the dance scene…during the past century,” feels fresh and new while “New Dances” seems to have brought the traditionalists out in force. It’s no surprise that the cover photo on the “New Dances” program is of a dance performed in “R/Evolution”: that’s where the innovative work is on display....

Friday 3/30 – Thursday 4/5 31 SATURDAY On Easter Sunday in Lithuania, the Easter Granny traditionally arrives at homes before sunrise in a cart led by a wax horse and leaves eggs for children in a little nest or basket in the yard. After hightailing it home from church, families then sit down to the Easter meal, the first course of which is always eggs, and then might engage in a game of egg rolling....

Earn As You Learn Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The space was an art and antique shop when the Cahans first laid eyes on it last year, and it still is. There are baskets of old Chicago History magazines, matchbooks from long-gone businesses like the Silver Frolic (“a taste of Paris” at 400 N. Wabash), and license plates from the 1920s and ’30s. Plus striking new Chicago images by a dozen or more local photographers–culled with the eye Cahan developed in 16 years as picture editor at the Sun-Times and two years as director of the CITY 2000 project, which recorded Chicago life in a half million images for posterity....

Last year, when Ajay Bhatt was a freshman at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he looked forward to meals as a chance to relax and socialize with his friends from the dorm. The one thing he didn’t do too much of was eat. “All of Ajay’s friends became like my children,” says Darshna, who’s a senior chemist at Unilever. “When they go home, they are their parents’ children, but when they are in Chicago, they are mine....

The Joshua Redman Trio–Sam Yahel on organ and Brian Blade on drums behind Redman’s tenor and soprano saxes–has just released its debut album, Elastic (Warner Bros.). But in fact this is the second album in less than six months from these same three musicians; the first, recorded as a cooperatively led trio called Yaya3, was an eponymous release on Loma. Most of the younger players who revived the traditional organ trio format in the last ten years, like Larry Goldings, Joey DeFrancesco, and the trio Soulive, are influenced by the style’s pioneers: the Jimmys–Smith, McGriff, and McDuff....