The Underpants, Noble Fool Theater Company. A woman’s underpants fall down during a civic parade, infuriating her husband and enrapturing two male spectators. They rent rooms in the couple’s house, hoping to seduce the flasher and delighting the voyeuristic spinster upstairs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carl Sternheim wrote this play in 1911 as a satire of the European bourgeoisie. But adapter Steve Martin–yes, that Steve Martin–scolds the audience less, concentrating more on the characters and love quadrangle....

City of Fools: Chicago’s Clown Theater Festival Danzig is also the mastermind behind the first “City of Fools: Chicago’s Clown Theater Festival,” a three-weekend event that’s at least as risky as anything he does in 500 Clown Macbeth. But sitting through this year’s offerings it was hard not to wish every performer shared Danzig’s devotion and perfectionism. Of the four pieces I saw, only 500 Clown Macbeth felt fully formed and rehearsed....

Rock, Pop, etc. CHICAGO LABOR & ARTS FESTIVAL CONCERT Music and poetry on two stages with Amoreys, Bucky Halker & the Complete Unknowns, Home Cookin’, Brenda Cardenas & Sonido Ink (Quieto), Michael Watson, Common Taters, Carlos Cortez, Jimmy Keane & Bohola, Bill Adelman, Ellen Rosner, Kevin Coval/Low End Summit, Kent Foreman, Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton & others. Sat 9/21, 3 PM, UNITE Union Hall, 333 S. Ashland. 773-761-1229. PAMELA SUE FOX Free concert....

Secular humanists and pagans need holiday cheer too, and Redmoon Theater’s deliberately artless annual celebration of the winter solstice gives it to them. This year Lookingglass Theatre stalwart John Musial conceived and directs the show, and musical polymath Mark Messing heads up the four-piece band. A beleaguered mother (Meghan Strell) and her daughter (Katie Connolly) struggle to take care of seven infants despite constant power outages. (Shoshanna Utchenik’s puppet babies are a little disturbing: their outsize bobble heads brought Eraserhead to mind, and an observant tyke behind me exclaimed of one puppet, “Its head is falling off!...

In 1999, a hacker group calling itself the Yes Men created the Web site gatt.org (now wtoo.org), designed to look exactly like an official World Trade Organization site but chock-full of articles on the hidden evils of globalization. The site was so convincing that it netted the masterminds a mistaken invitation to speak at a 2000 Austrian trade conference. The group jumped at the chance and its delegate, in attendance under the nom de guerre “Andreas Bilchbauer,” proceeded to confound those present with a long speech about the laziness of Italian workers....

Atom & His Package Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adam “Atom” Goren seems to be maturing–a strange word to apply to an adult who refers to Taco Bell as a “restaurant.” On the brand-new Redefining Music (Hopeless) the Pennsylvania native’s production sounds more polished than ever; if you take out the “de,” the title is actually pretty accurate. But that’s not to say this record will alienate old fans: though Goren’s voice has lost some of its adenoidal edge, his music is the same speedy, cartoonish punk–think Bis before their growing pains, or the Descendents before Milo went to college–with a pop bounce courtesy of the band’s only other member, a Yamaha sequencer he calls the Package (Goren also sometimes plays guitar)....

“We’re at the beginning of the 21st century in the middle of what many pundits refer to as the new economy,” says Howard Learner of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Illinois Issues (April). “Yet we rely for about 60 percent of our electricity supply in Illinois on coal plants that were built mostly in the 1950s and ’60s.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Will “NRA-style Catholics” be lobbying against the death penalty or against abortion rights?...

Cynthia on Celluloid Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite her reluctance to have greater significance attached to her work (she told Salon last summer that all she was trying to “say” was “Look at this chorus line of gorgeous penises, left and right and swirling around. Aren’t they pretty?”), she’s also achieved the status of bona fide artist. In 1997 she was invited to lecture on portraiture at the School of the Art Institute, and last summer she mounted an exhibit of her collection at New York’s Thread Waxing Space gallery....

On May 22 the state legislature named September 1 American Indian Day. In the past, similar proclamations have honored Native Americans with special days or months, but this one is different–it declares a state holiday that will be listed on Illinois’ official calendar from this year forward. The new holiday will be initiated without much fanfare: the river won’t be dyed red, city services will continue uninterrupted, and the mail will be delivered (as much as usual)....

Debra Tolchinsky’s show at Artemisia, “Case Studies,” uses photography, computer animation, and text to create portraits of eight fictional characters who, in an attempt to find happiness, modify their bodies in ways that range from familiar to haunting to hilarious. Most striking are six digitally altered Polaroids pasted on graph paper and accompanied by typewritten diagnoses that seem torn from a psychiatrist’s journal. “Jocelyne” hopes to save her marriage by transforming herself into a cat, and her black-and-white photo shows a fuzzy tail arcing out from an otherwise human body....

Seagull Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At least at the beginning it’s possible to pretend. When Masha, the estate manager’s daughter, claims to be in mourning for her life in the first lines, we can still laugh it off. She’s so adolescent–so goth, in fact–in her black clothes and condescension. Likewise stagestruck Nina as she puppies after celebrities. And Konstantin, the avant-gardist with baby-pink cheeks, as he makes his grand pronouncements regarding love and art....

Gwenan Wilbur was working at the literary journal TriQuarterly when she began volunteering at Chicago Women’s Health Center. The 20-year-old nonprofit collective in Lakeview had been founded in 1975 by members of the pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service known as Jane; it offered gynecological and obstetric care as well as counseling, education, and outreach programs regardless of a woman’s ability to pay. When a full-time position in the center’s prenatal program opened in 1998, Wilbur left her job as managing editor to join the staff as a health worker and doula....

Timothy Linh Bui’s debut feature is bathed in nostalgia for Camp Pendleton, a halfway facility that hosted the first wave of Vietnamese refugees in 1975, and for the delicate social fabric of Vietnam that was torn apart by the war. The script, by Bui and his brother Tony (Three Seasons), turns the camp into a microcosm of Saigon; among its denizens are a boy and girl whose parents are missing, an uncle of theirs who serves as the refugees’ leader and conscience (Don Duong), a businessman burdened with two wives, and a couple of hotheads determined to build a new Vietnam....

By Cara Jepsen When Harding was seven, she started having psychotic episodes that eventually included terrifying visions and demonic voices telling her to die. But it wasn’t all bad, she says. “All of my hallucinations were not horrifying. Some were extremely pleasant and I took refuge in some of them–like the Blessed Mother talking to me, or imaginary friends who were creatures that were protective of me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the Editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In many parts of medieval Europe, Jews were prevented from exercising most professions and from owning land. One of the few professions they were allowed to practice was money-lending. It was considered immoral for Christians to lend money at interest, but business and government needed loans in order to function. So Jews were hypocritically reviled and persecuted for practicing one of the few profitable trades left available to them....

It’s a half-assed Internet comic someone whipped off at his temp job. Two karate fighters–static, fake-looking clip-art figures–ponder the insane idea that they themselves could make up imaginary fighters to practice battle techniques that aren’t even real yet. “But dude, what if they turned real on your ass? Would they battle you?” On David Rees’s My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable (mnftiu.cc) Web site, begun in April 2001 and updated sporadically, the blustering fighters repeatedly get their asses kicked by shifts in the very fabric of their cartoon reality....

Lysistrata, Side Project, and Bowlscrapers to Skyscrapers: Business as Usual, Side Project, at the Side Studio. Adam Webster in his new 70-minute adaptation of Lysistrata pays little attention to Aristophanes’ exploration of sexual politics and indictment of war. But he wholeheartedly embraces the comedy inherent in this story of Greek women withholding sex until their men agree to end a ten-year battle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Director John Shaterian delivers a broad farce complete with lewd humor, pratfalls, and bold double entendres....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month in Argentina, the legislature debated a bill authored by Senator Jorge Capitanich that was meant to help restore voters’ faith in their elected officials. (The country is gripped by the worst economic crisis in its history; food riots and violent protests have paralyzed major cities, and a slogan popular with the public translates to “Get Rid of Them All!...

With puppylike excitement, the San Francisco trio Numbers mixes electronics on the verge of meltdown with the more rhythmic elements of 70s no-wave. But they’re not just full of vim–they’re smart too. Their severe, cagily constructed tunes reach far beyond math rock’s dull precision and hardcore’s embarrassing feral rage, hitting a mark that’s brainy but still fun. The four tracks that constitute their first recording (soon to be released by Archigramophone, an experimental label in Portland, Oregon, as a split EP with Emergency) aren’t overburdened with mounting tension: “TV Life” begins to blister in the first measure, and “Too Cool to Say Hi” piles on the two-bit pop melodies from the get-go....

Shut Up and Love Me! But in her newest full-length effort, Shut Up and Love Me!, I’m not sure Finley would know or care if anyone was laughing at her ideas or her performance. And that’s both the best and the worst thing about this maddeningly incoherent but somehow riveting evening of rants, physical comedy, metaburlesque striptease, and plain old what-the-fuck looniness and self-absorption. It’s amazing to see Finley send up her own naked-provocateur persona: the piece ends with the slathering of a foodstuff, in this case honey, on her naked bod....