One of Latin America’s best-known poets is 17th-century nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. A court favorite in Mexico, she was ordered to stop writing by the Catholic church after she sent a private letter to a bishop expounding on women’s right to an education. Karen Zacarias in The Sins of Sor Juana, directed by Edward F. Torres for Teatro Vista, uses snappy, anachronistic modern language to make the nun sharp and real....

THE SPACE BETWEEN TWO, at Link’s Hall, through January 14. One subgenre of performance art seems to descend directly from museum audio tours, enforcing how long an audience looks at an image. That approach may be justifiable, but it’s not a substitute for images that reward scrutiny. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “Space Between Two” program, curated by Local Infinities (visual artist Charlie Levin and theater artist Meghan Strell), intersperses selections from three works in snippets of 1, 3, 6, and 20 minutes....

Forty years later, I dimly remember a bologna contingent. There was also a tuna fish faction, and the chicken-noodle-soup-in-an-Underdog-thermos brigade. A fringe weirdo or two might’ve favored liverwurst. But the plurality, if not majority, of the brown baggers in my grade school lunchroom were staunch peanut butter and jelly devotees. I ate a PB & J sandwich every single day of grade school. I never got sick of them, and so far as I can recall, nobody got sick from them, either....

Talk about an idea waiting to happen: after 16 years the Neo-Futurists are finally doing a children’s version of their hit show. Quick and dirty, the format requires viewers to yell out numbers to determine the order of the 30 plays delivered in 60 minutes; other audience-participation opportunities are equally nonthreatening but thrilling. High points include Ryan Walters as an Evel Knievel type peddling furiously up an incline on a tricycle and the “Emoting Larvae Players” performing Little Women–only adults will fully understand the allusions, but everyone loved it when the irritating Beth deflated....

Two women hug inside a fluorescent-lit currency exchange. Two men at a construction site work their way across wet cement, smoothing the surface with trowels. Seen through a window, a giddy couple in a gym spar with rapid martial arts moves. A sleeping boy snores in his bed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These and 71 other disconnected scenes make up Something More Than Night, a film directed by Daniel Eisenberg (who also recorded sound) and shot by cinematographer Ingo Kratisch over two years in Chicago between nine at night and four in the morning....

Israel Horovitz’s adaptation of a Morley Torgov short story barely pushes beyond the point of transcription. And it’s curious there’s no mention of Torgov in Chicago Jewish Theatre’s program notes for A Rosen by Any Other Name, the second in a trilogy of plays set in the Canadian city of Sault Sainte Marie. Questions of ownership aside, the script is light-years beyond Neil Simon’s revoltingly sentimental attempts to depict the Jewish experience in North America during World War II....

The first time this 1996 Broadway hit played Chicago, in 1998, headliner Savion Glover did not perform the role he originated: “da beat,” our rhythmic guide through the show’s history of tap dance. It was nevertheless not only educational but fun–and it should be fabulous with its star in place: Glover, who also did the Tony-winning choreography, is joined by four other deft dancers. Helping flesh out the show’s historical narrative are two percussionists, a singer, and a narrator, who delivers Reg E....

Chris Mullins and Jim Ziniel named their zine, the Soft Sandwich Chronicles, after the soggy, sweaty, homemade meals they’re prone to eating on long car rides. That weird, insider sense of humor permeates the offbeat publication, and–more than anything else–keeps it going. In these digital days they put out a zine that’s unapologetically old school, and even by the standards of DIY culture their production schedule is extremely leisurely: their first issue, which came out in the spring of 1998, was three years in the making, and number two is still in production....

In 1903 Austrian composer Hugo Wolf died in an asylum at the age of 42, a victim of depression and venereal disease. Despite his early death, Wolf left a rich legacy of over 200 songs, now regarded as a pinnacle of the lied, a genre that fuses music and poetry into dense, nuanced art song. Wolf was a thorough romantic, subject to mood swings and creative bursts, his sense of estrangement fueled partly by his expulsion from the Vienna Conservatory....

Tape two paper clips to the tail of an old disposable razor. Straighten two more and hang them perpendicular to the middle of the handle. String a bit of wire between one straightened clip and one of the clips at the end. Rest the razor atop a cup of salt water so that the straightened clips are immersed, and plug the two at the end into an electrical outlet. Voila–you’ve got a light for your smoke....

By Michael G. Glab Now McCallum smiles. McCallum is positively giddy. He bounces in his seat as he identifies every bit player and names their subsequent films. Once a pack of four kids stood him up against a wall to punch and kick him. When they stopped, McCallum spied a pile of wood nearby. “I grabbed one of the timbers,” he says. “I ran after them, screamed at the top of my lungs, and swung it at this one kid I singled out....

When Johnny Knoxville made the cover of Rolling Stone last year, he wore a jockstrap over his jeans, his wrists were lashed with rope to a red-and-white target, and there was a large bull’s-eye painted on his bare chest. Knoxville, the star of Jackass: The Movie, which pulled in $22.7 million when it opened last weekend, may look like Donny Osmond on a bender, but there’s no denying his star power....

Local producer-programmers Chris Grabowski, Joe Hahn, and Mark Hardy formed K-Rad in 1996, and they have come to see the group as an ongoing experiment. They pride themselves on making new music for each show, and have issued 17 homemade CD-Rs via their Web site, www.padk-rad.com, which also served for a time as an archive of their complete works. Deli Mood Spot (Some Odd Pilot) is their first “real” album, and it honors the sprawling nature of their previous CD-Rs....

Lead Story Compelling Explanations Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » High school teacher Sonia Ornelas and her husband, of Pearsall, Texas, were charged with providing alcohol to minors after police found their son and about 60 other Pearsall High students–mostly football players, band members, and cheerleaders–drinking at a postgame party at the Ornelases’ home in September. The Ornelases defended themselves by saying that they had no idea alcohol was being served and they were upstairs asleep the whole time....

Hirsch Perlman Abstract and narrative film- and video makers alike have long tried to synchronize music and image, as in Disney’s Fantasia or Oskar Fischinger’s abstract films. But such amalgams are arguably artificial, because a projected moving image and music are too fundamentally different to blend. Ernie Kovacs deliciously parodied the absurdity of such combines, even–or especially–when the synchrony is perfect, in a “city symphony” video of streets coming to life at dawn, unexpectedly and hilariously matched with Bartok’s complex Concerto for Orchestra....

There are only a few Spanish civil war veterans left in America. Three thousand young romantics joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the fascists in Spain in the 1930s. Inside the spare chapel of Forest Park’s Forest Home Cemetery, one of the hundred still living stood up to say a few words about a comrade who hadn’t made it as far. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Speaking as loud as he could, Hall told a story about Balchowsky....

Expect a slew of Revolutionary War entertainments to crop up in the next few years. Comparisons of the Iraq quagmire to Vietnam, the cold war, World War II, and even that nasty north/south scrape in the 1860s will no longer cut it. With personal liberties under siege, Americans are now fighting for their freedom at home as well as abroad. Or so claim Paul Kampf and Michael Oswalt in their split-personality play, which has one foot in 1775 Massachusetts and the other in a present-day Boston bar during imagined riots after a bogus election....

DALEK 5/2, EMPTY BOTTLE These days it seems like hip-hop is pronounced dead almost as often as rock. And as with rock, such postmortems are usually delivered by folks who listen to little outside the mainstream–there’s always gold to be mined from weird little veins in the underground. This trio’s second album, From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots (Ipecac, 2002), tingled the nerves of those who remember fondly the spacey, spiritual wit of early De La Soul and the front-loaded sonic assault of classic Public Enemy....

Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11, Second City. A CTA anthrax scare, a security crackdown aboard an airplane, a firefighter trying to live up to his heroic post-9/11 image, a sheepish Arthur Andersen accountant trying to explain away his actions–these are some of the subjects Second City targets in its fast-paced, frequently hilarious new main-stage revue. Director Joshua Funk (also responsible for the long-running Holy War, Batman! at Second City E.T.C.) and his sharp ensemble have created a lively lampoon of our preoccupation with carrying on in the face of tragedy and global instability....

In case you hadn’t noticed, the rich are coming. Upper-income people (those who make 120 percent or more above the median) made up 29 percent of Chicago home buyers in 1993-’94, but 35.1 percent in 1999-2000, according to the Woodstock Institute’s “Home Buying by Income, 1993-2000,” written by Dan Immergluck and Geoff Smith. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The best and only sane answer to the threat of terrorism is to leave the Middle East alone,” argues J....