By Michael Miner This brought Ratny to her story’s capper–her plunge a few days before into the elevator shaft of the four-story brownstone on West Erie where she lives and puts out her magazine. She wrote that she fell half a floor “and landed on my back on the mechanicals, a tangle of electric wires and criss-crossed metal tubing….For 90 minutes I half-sat, half-lay, half-stood in the black, 3×5-foot enclosure, fingering with enormous frustration the recalcitrant cell phone....

Wednesday, April 17, was Arts Advocacy Day in Illinois. I hope yours was pleasant. I celebrated in the traditional manner. As president of a small advocacy group called the Evanston Performing Arts Coalition (EPAC), I traveled down to Springfield to lobby my elected representatives for more money for the Illinois Arts Council–the state agency charged with “cultivating the arts in the lives of all Illinoisans.” As it happened, the library was lousy with librarians....

Like Harold Pinter, to whom he’s sometimes compared, David Mamet is a poet who happens to write plays, and any actor who ignores Mamet’s rhythms does so at his peril. Last season the American Theater Company produced Mamet’s American Buffalo–about a trio of losers scheming to rob a neighbor–and the production sagged. In the current revival the key role of Donny is taken by Chicago veteran Mike Nussbaum, who played Teach in the 1975 premiere....

Wealthy, disaffected Asian-American teenagers in Orange County progress from cheating to theft to murder in this controversial shocker by writer-director Justin Lin. There’s something refreshing about the violation of ethnic stereotypes, especially when the stereotype is politically correct and the violation is more than a simple counterstereotype, and Lin clearly wants to make the kids’ amorality troubling and difficult to process–not confused and ambivalent, as one reviewer has maintained. He charts the lifestyles of his “Chinese Mafia” without bothering to show us any of their parents, which limits the material somewhat, but his sense of how some of them conspire to get good grades is convincing, and it’s telling that the kids being shown, especially the overachieving narrator-hero, wind up seeming much more American than Asian....

Cocktail Confidential Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There comes a time in some artists’ careers when they unmistakably arrive. They may have been toiling away for years producing solid, even impressive work when suddenly the fullness of their potential is realized. It happened to Beau O’Reilly when he wrote The Third Degrees of J.O. Breeze, Larry Steger when he produced The Swans, and now it’s happened to Edward Thomas-Herrera....

Flamenco is indisputably one of the sexiest forms of dance around, curiously combining yin and yang, or what we think of as female and male characteristics. Both men and women pound the floor assertively, puff out their chests, and move their arms in strong, dramatic arcs. And both men and women wear high heels, caress themselves, and dance with delicate, floaty, filigreed hand movements. Though there’s little in the way of traditional partnering–men and women rarely touch, more often dancing alone or with other members of their sex–when the company’s mixed the air sizzles, the men looking down as if mesmerized at the women’s hips and undulating arms....

Re: Hot Type’s “Red Brigade” (February 21) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » R.J. Reynolds’s corporate spokesperson was “interested” but not too in the similarity between their Kamel Red logo and the Tribune’s RedEye minipaper. Have corporations gone soft on trademark infringement suddenly, or did the two giants look each other in the “Eye” and decide it would be too costly to wrassle? The explanation that a newspaper isn’t a competing cigarette is just smoke and mirrors....

The European Repertory Company’s U.S. premiere of this contemporary Russian play features such extraordinary performances that the piece is utterly absorbing despite its flaws in construction. Playwright Nikolay Kolyada’s imitation of Chekhov is not only sincere flattery, it’s reasonably accomplished: he succeeds in creating two characters as nuanced and fully human as any from the master’s pen. In such a pitch-perfect production it’s forgivable that some of the others appear to be in search of a plot, or a place in the audience’s sympathies....

“Women in the 1950s and 1960s thought they were the first–the first woman lawyers, the first woman doctors, and the first woman journalists,” says historian Rima Lunin Schultz, coeditor of a new biographical dictionary, Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990. But the precedent was set generations earlier. “They had been completely disconnected from early-19th-century history.” “Women played a very strong reform role in society. They wanted to humanize capitalism. They wanted to protect children and women....

It’s generally acknowledged that a beat-for-beat correspondence between music and dance can get old. But if the music is complex enough, dancing that follows its inflections can be deeply satisfying. When Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato sets his pieces to the Catalan songs of Maria del Mar Bonet, her exquisite timing and shadings form the perfect framework for his lyrical movement. Their collaboration Jardi tancat (“Enclosed Garden”) was first performed by Hubbard Street in 1998; during its 25th-anniversary spring season, the company is premiering their Cor perdut (“Lost Heart”)....

Human Tornadoes Hit the Stage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the biggest events of the season will take place on Monday, before the WMF even begins: the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey are giving a rare performance at the Chicago Theatre as part of the Chicago Turkish Festival, which runs through Wednesday. The dervishes are Sufis, or Islamic mystics, members of an order called the Mevlevi that was founded in the city of Konya by the 13th-century Turkish poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi....

In the 1990s alto saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra apprenticed in some of Amsterdam’s better genre-bending groups–pianist Guus Janssen’s game-playing septet, violist Maurice Horsthuis’s tuneful chamber orchestra, Joost Buis’s Sun Ra cover band the Astronotes. Soloing beside heavyweights like tenorist Tobias Delius, Dijkstra could sound a bit green, as he struggled to digest the dual influences of Steve Coleman and Michael Moore, but he was always soaking up good ideas. He’s blossomed in the few years since 2002, when he began dividing his time between Amsterdam and Boston, his current base, where he works with various Beantowners and the Vancouver band Talking Pictures....

When you consider his mercurial youth as a rock ‘n’ roller turned fusion guitarist–a period marked by musical excess as well as energy and craftsmanship–it’s hard not to grin at Larry Coryell’s measured passage into middle age. On one recent album he joined forces with his two grown sons, all of them on acoustic guitars; on another, the 1997 Spaces Revisited, featuring fellow 70s fusion god Billy Cobham on drums, Coryell gracefully augmented his old music’s original thunder with mature illumination....

Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were strummers; their lead guitarists, Scotty Moore and Luther Perkins, were pickers. But Link Wray was rock ‘n’ roll’s first thrasher. His archetypal instrumental “Rumble,” which peaked at number 16 on the national charts in 1958, opened the door for every guitarist since who’s put raw attitude and a coarse sound ahead of tidy execution: to dirty up his tone, Wray says, he jabbed holes in his amplifier’s speaker cones with a pen....

To study the disintegration of a marriage through the lens of wandering Odysseus and stuck-at-home Penelope is hardly original. But why strive for novelty when there are still riches to be mined from the same old story? “Such a mistake to want / clarity above all things,” Louise Gluck chides herself early in Meadowlands, her 1996 collection. But that book-length sequence of poems actively courts such clarification, as Gluck seeks to balance the passion and responsibility of love, the security and irritation of marriage....

Noticing a sign of spring in the mountains and bursting with the enthusiasm of early adolescence, a boy in rural Uzbekistan awakes his sleeping neighbors by shouting “The almonds are blooming!” and receives a brutal beating from the men of the village. His mother is long dead, and his severely alcoholic father soon joins her, expiring with the d.t.’s after the boy refuses him a drink. After the neighbors loot his home, the orphan sets out with his best friend on a Huck Finn-like odyssey across the countryside....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Retired systems analyst James C. Schaefer, 64, recently self-published an autobiography chronicling his struggle with “Wisconsinaphobia.” He developed severe back pain while living in Milwaukee in the 70s, and though it subsided after he relocated to San Diego, anything that reminded him of his home state–a car salesman with a Wisconsin accent, the logo of a Wisconsin company (Harley-Davidson), a Wisconsin-made product (Jockey briefs), even a public utility truck (he’d worked for the largest utility in Wisconsin)–triggered a bout of debilitating anxiety and insomnia; if he tried to make plans to visit family in Wisconsin, his back pain returned....

Early in Rachel Rinaldo’s 2002 video Division + Western the camera pans across an alley from a mural of a fist raised in a salute to Puerto Rican pride to a newly constructed condominium building outfitted with balconies and barbecues. Another shot captures an assortment of developers’ signs advertising new projects including an “Artists Village Condominium.” “All this marketing is targeted at people just like me,” says Rinaldo, seen on camera in the middle of Wicker Park....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s 15th annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe runs through 11/20 at the Curious Theatre Branch, 7001 N. Glenwood. Admission is $12 or “pay what you can”; for information and reservations, call 773-274-6660. It’s not easy to negotiate the subject of motherhood–to chart a course between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of gleeful attack. Veteran solo artist Jenny Magnus makes the attempt in Cant, a 45-minute monologue (with songs)....

Presented by the Chicago-based documentary production and distribution company Terra Nova Films, the eighth annual Silver Images Film Festival runs Monday, April 29, through Wednesday, May 29, at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Chicago Dept. on Aging Central West Center, 2102 W. Ogden; Columbia College Hokin Center, 623 S. Wabash; Dominican Univ., 7000 W. Division, River Forest; Evanston Public Library, 1703 Orrington, Evanston; Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N....