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In Lookingglass Theatre’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s oral history Race, Cheryl Hamada plays a submissive geisha who commits hara-kiri. “I’ve been regarded this way of course,” she says. “The geisha stuff of feeling oppressed is very subtle. I didn’t know it until I was an adult. For a young girl, to be seen as pretty, nice, feminine–all flattering things–is a blessing. The problem comes in when you get to be an adult, when you express aggression, anger, not-so-delicate emotions–the negatives of being a person....

Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) established her strong and graceful screen persona with this 1994 Hong Kong adventure, which retells the centuries-old legend of a village heroine celebrated for her skill in the martial arts. The title character is a virtuous tomboy who learned her fighting skills from an abbess and wears mannish clothing (to the chagrin of her neighbors), and after rescuing a young widow from a gang of bandits she becomes entangled in a comedy of mistaken identity and mismatched love....

A Hollywood-Style WhoDunnit, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. What little laughter there was at this lame late-night murder mystery came from a single person in the audience. And I have my suspicions who it was, given that someone coming from backstage after the performance said, “Hi mom.” The rest of the people there were probably just as disappointed as I was when a character remarked about 20 minutes into the show, “It’s way too early to figure this out....

The faces of the Quest puppets are the shape of crescent moons, their posture that of caparisoned giraffes. But when their procession commences up the center aisle of the church sanctuary, heralded by a chorale and banners, these ten-foot-tall apparitions invoke all the grandeur of angels on parade. Audiences for this 30-minute pageant, currently touring Chicago-area congregations, are likely to be familiar with the events surrounding Jesus’s birth, but a score composed of original songs and traditional carols tells the story with a simplicity accessible even to those who might be encountering the sacred myth for the first time....

Don’t Touch the Plumbing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Security was tight last week when Lookingglass Theatre conducted a press tour of its new digs, still under construction at the Water Tower Water Works on Michigan Avenue. After the usual check-in, the crowd had to produce photo IDs and don double badges before being shepherded from the woebegone tourist center (who decided this space needed a fast-food restaurant?...

The vulnerable Achilles is the perfect metaphor for the damaged macho men of Lloyd Newson’s dance-theater work, performed by Britain’s DV8 Physical Theatre and filmed by Clara Van Gool. Seven blokes gather in a pub, where they throw darts, watch sports on TV, and harass a guy who appears to be gay. They also play air guitar and vault over a pool table with balletic grace. Newson’s choreography probably looks rough-and-tumble onstage, but set in an actual bar or alley it creates a heightened, almost kitschy sense of reality....

Sonic Youth Murray Street (DGC) I’m not suggesting the letter writers were jumping on the bandwagon–on the contrary. The Onion bit springs to mind because I’ve been thinking about how soundly the faithful sleep until the sirens wake them up. I mean, how did Phillips get through? Why is New York letting the rest of the world write her history? Why do we think Sonic Youth will always be here? What is theory without praxis?...

Like many great musicians, jazz pianist Dave Burrell has paid a price for refusing to work within a single category. He first emerged in the late 60s, playing intense energy music with the likes of Archie Shepp, Giuseppi Logan, and Marion Brown; his style combined the dense clusters of Cecil Taylor with deeply lyrical improvisation. But while most of his free-jazz contemporaries had a solid grounding in early jazz history, Burrell was one of the few who actively pursued an interest in ragtime and stride....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your September 26 article on the proposed Rogers Park TIF [“Why Here? Why Now?”] was generally accurate. However, there was one instance in which I was misquoted. The article quoted me as stating that the members of the Rogers Park Community Action Network (RPCAN) were “disruptive” at a June 18 community meeting and that the meeting was “marred by RPCAN’s sudden appearance on the scene....

Alan Greenberg’s 1982 documentary–his first and only released film–has been praised by Werner Herzog and Jim Jarmusch, the latter calling it “an organic portrait of the very soul of Jamaica, and the earthy, pervasive substrata of Rastafarianism.” Greenberg, who lived in Jamaica on and off for 26 years, decided to document the funeral of Bob Marley but then went on to explore the culture of the Jamaican countryside, interweaving preachers, performers (reggae star Gregory Isaacs), writers (revolutionary poet Mutabaruka), and ordinary folk (a man who presents the various toads living in his region)....

Nate Quinn’s paintings are striking on many levels. For one thing, they’re huge–the sprawling panels, which Quinn makes out of wood he salvages from construction sites, are sometimes as large as 7 by 12 feet. Then there are his subjects’ expressions: frequently disaffected, sometimes despairing. But what’s most arresting about the paintings is the space between the people in them. A boy and a girl holding balloons stand on opposite sides of the frame, as do a beaming policeman and a smiling woman....

Laura Frankel and Dennis Wasko started experimenting with fine kosher cuisine in 1997. Frankel had kept a kosher kitchen at home for ten years and Wasko had never set foot in one, but both found the challenge of working within the strict culinary restrictions inspiring. They started a small catering company, testing the market for upscale kosher cuisine with innovative dishes like macadamia-nut-crusted snapper with mango-papaya salsa. They stored the hits away for future reference, and when the business took off, decided to try opening a contemporary kosher restaurant....

What is the bottom line with Koko the gorilla’s ability to learn sign language? I know she only communicates through her handler, who seems to engage in a great deal of subjective translation. I saw an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine of a supposed Internet chat with Koko a few years ago that made me rather dubious that the gorilla was capable of any use of language. Nonetheless, there is a strong perception out there that Koko has learned to sign....

Art Sinsabaugh: American Horizons With this boast came unparalleled modesty. Sinsabaugh’s classic Illinois landscapes and cityscapes are cropped top and bottom until some of the prints are little more than an inch tall. Look into the next gallery at the Art Institute, where contemporary photographs are displayed, and you’ll see that Sinsabaugh’s mammoth camera turned out miniature prints compared to today’s standard-issue murals–we have much grander expectations of size. Today most photographers would scan Sinsabaugh’s long, skinny images into a computer and make digital prints as big as walls....

Curated by Chicago filmmaker Jim Trainor (The Bats), this quirky program mixes avant-garde and instructional films to subvert Disney-style anthropomorphism and stress the otherness of animals. Jean Painleve’s educational short The Vampire Bat (1934) contains so many shots of its weirdly masticating “hero” that it crosses the line into obsession. In Sirius Remembered (1959) Stan Brakhage takes an unstinting look at a family pet as it decomposes in the woods; the rapid, swooping arcs of the camera make the moments when it comes to rest on the corpse all the more horrifying....

The Grey Zone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I kept thinking of Levi’s words as I watched A Red Orchid Theatre’s production of Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone, a taut, well-directed, finely acted play based in part on Levi’s writings and in part on the reminiscences of other camp survivors, including Filip Muller and Dr. Miklos Nyiszli. Fortunately a good piece of theater can communicate in ways words alone cannot....

Put Beth Orton onstage alone with a guitar and it’s tough to tell she’s anything more than an old-fashioned folksinger and songwriter. But in fact the Londoner made her name in the mid-90s by contributing vocals to electronica producer William Orbit’s Strange Cargo III and the Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust, and on her 1997 debut, Trailer Park–a natural extension of these collaborations–she wrapped her singing and strumming around danceable, midtempo drum loops....

Buddy Miller has made a decent living as a sideman, playing guitar with Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, and Julie Miller’s tunes have been recorded by Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks, but the couple’s most heartfelt efforts are saved for their own albums. On his new disc, Midnight and Lonesome (HighTone), Miller is at his craftsmanlike best. Like its predecessors, this album features songs written by or cowritten with Julie and mixes old-school honky-tonk (“Wild Card”), droning Celtic rockers, introspective balladry (“I Can’t Get Over You”), stomping country rock (a cover of the Everly Brothers obscurity “The Price of Love”), and bluesy soul (the Percy Mayfield classic “Please Send Me Someone to Love”)....

June 8 First Annual Beachwalk 312-435-4548, ext. 16 Scotland has the Loch Ness monster, Churubusco has Oscar the Turtle. The legend goes like this: In 1948 a farmer spotted a snapping turtle with a shell as big as a dining room table, a head the size of a ten-year-old child, and a neck as wide as a stovepipe. The search for “Oscar” in Fulk Lake made national news in 1949, but no monster reptile ever turned up....

The title refers to the Carl Sandburg poem in which “fog comes in on little cat feet”–which is apt since on every level Monte Merrick’s new play is indistinct. Hedging his generational bets, he never decides if the focus of his seriocomic script is mom, a once wild poet now coping with creeping Alzheimer’s, or the more unhappy of her two daughters, the one in New York with the faltering career and no boyfriend....