Posts

The Hairy Ape, American Theater Company. It’s no accident that Eugene O’Neill made the protagonist of his 1922 expressionistic powerhouse a stoker on an ocean liner: for O’Neill, such steel behemoths epitomized everything thrilling and terrifying about American modernity. Crashing relentlessly forward, the ocean liner both pays tribute to the force of human ingenuity and crushes the luckless human beings feeding its mighty engines. O’Neill’s hero, a young firebrand with the emblematic name Yank, thrives on coal dust, convinced that because he fuels the engine of modernity he and his fellow stokers are the only ones who belong in the world–all the rest are “tripe....

After a disappointing 2003 run at the ever awkward Lakeshore Theater–whose cavernous dimensions and raised proscenium stage made it hard to hold the audience’s attention–this warm, wry, rhyming-jive condensation of Dickens’s Christmas classic comes back to the intimate space where it premiered two years ago. Though the show’s largely unchanged, stars Patrick Zielinski and Tyler Bohne are better than ever, seasoned by last year’s experience and reenergized by the altogether more favorable layout at Frankie J’s....

I have a question that has plagued me for a couple of years now. A few years ago I had a history professor who told me about a group of monks called (and this may be spelled wrong, but it sure sounds funny) the flatulents. He told my class they were dedicated to relieving the pain of Jesus’s atonement through self-inflicted injuries. To prove to us he wasn’t lying, he showed us a picture of a large statue in Rome of a monk holding a wicked-looking whip....

Why didn’t Eskimos get scurvy before citrus was introduced to their diet? They have a traditional diet of almost entirely meat and fish. Where did they get their vitamin C? –Kevin Carson, via the Internet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much of what we know about the Eskimo diet comes from the legendary arctic anthropologist and adventurer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who made several daredevil journeys through the region in the early 20th century....

The Fastest Clock in the Universe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We can now add to that vainglorious lineup Cougar Glass, the protagonist of Philip Ridley’s black comedy The Fastest Clock in the Universe, currently receiving a smart, tangy production at A Red Orchid Theatre. Ridley–the Brit who penned the screenplay for the 1990 crime thriller The Krays–possesses the rare gift of writing darkly and humorously at the same time....

Ordinarily, state’s attorneys who desire reelection or higher office portray themselves as courageous crime fighters responsive to their communities, who leave no stone unturned to put evildoers in prison. Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine, now contemplating a run for governor, has recently turned that tradition on its head. No Illinois inmate has ever walked away from death row by dropping a claim that he was tortured by police. Indeed, various death penalty experts from across the United States, including Brenda Bowser of Washington’s Death Penalty Information Center and University of Colorado professor Michael Radelet (the author of several books and studies on the death penalty), could name no other inmate in the history of the nation who got off death row this way....

When Mansooreh Saboori was 19, her father, a popular Tehran physician, was imprisoned for speaking against the shah of Iran. “One of the accusations was that he was a communist, which was a common accusation at that time,” she says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Saboori married and earned a degree in biology at Tehran University before moving to the U.S. in 1972. The Watergate scandal was heating up....

Twelve years ago Teresa Mucha was making ends meet slinging coffee at Gourmand cafe in Printers Row when she struck up an acquaintance with one of her regulars, artist Tony Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had just bought an etching press and had plans to start up a fine-art print studio in the South Loop building that housed his World Tattoo Gallery. Impressed, Mucha, then a printmaking student at the School of the Art Institute, says she “pestered him” until he gave her a part-time job....

For a dancer, Bill T. Jones has a long and very public history. Now in his early 50s, he still heads the company he started 20 years ago with his lover Arnie Zane–who still gets equal billing despite his death in 1988 of an AIDS-related illness. But then the mythology of the company–the tragically cut-off relationship between Jones and Zane, Jones’s own HIV-positive status–is a big part of its identity. So is controversy....

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t say this San Francisco power trio is the best new band I’ve seen lately, but it’s definitely the best lit. When Black Rebel Motorcycle Club played the Double Door a few weeks ago the musicians, clad head to toe in black, spent the entire set in darkness, illuminated from spots set toward the back of the stage and low to the ground....

The inaugural Chicago International Doc Film Festival, featuring documentary films and videos, continues Friday through Sunday, March 28 through 30. Screenings are at the Biograph, Facets Cinematheque, Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8, $7 for seniors and students; passes for ten screenings are $65; for more information call 773-486-9612. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment...

The pioneer vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, who grew up and learned music in Chicago, died last Labor Day weekend; the first of undoubtedly many tributes to him comes this weekend, when the Chicago Jazz Orchestra opens its four-concert season. The program will offer a retrospective of Hamp’s career, from the time he joined Benny Goodman’s mid-30s trio–the band that broke the color barrier in publicly performed jazz–through his leadership of a big band that in its prime ranked among the most explosive in jazz history; and CJO director Jeff Lindberg has invited the right guest artists for the job....

Coda Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kritz was born in 1925, the youngest of six children of a Chicago cantor. He began piano lessons at age 6, went on to the bass fiddle and cello, and at 11 started to study composition with Paul Held at the American Conservatory. He graduated from Senn High School at 16 and enrolled at Northwestern University as a music major....

The Gatekeeper–produced, directed, and written by someone you’ve never heard of, with a cast that’s equally unknown–is a realistic, no-nonsense independent feature about Mexican immigrants enslaved just after crossing illegally into the U.S. Masked and Anonymous–a Bob Dylan vehicle packed with stars, directed by a sitcom veteran, and produced by the BBC–is a fantasy about a legendary singer giving a benefit concert for wounded counterrevolutionaries in a slum-infested city where the country’s dictator is dying....

Seth and Kimberly Guterman were alarmed to learn last month that a developer intended to tear down a turn-of-the-century three-flat on their block. They and their neighbors on West Newport came up with a plan to save the building by turning the whole block, which runs unbroken from Halsted to Sheffield, into a landmark. a demolition permit without contacting the planning department and at least holding a meeting on the matter....

In a program note, Side Project adapter Adam Webster describes Stephen Crane’s 1893 novel about hardscrabble immigrant life in New York’s Bowery as a love story. He even has Crane wander about reading love letters. True, one of the book’s main plot lines is a budding romance between impossibly naive Maggie–who “blossoms in a muddle puddle”–and doltish Pete, but their doomed relationship is more sociological exhibit than love story. Like Upton Sinclair, Crane depicts characters as victims of violent social forces that crush the weak and turn the strong into brutes....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a November report in the Boston Globe, some callers to the city’s major homeless shelters became “frantic” or “outraged” when their offers to help on Thanksgiving were rejected (urban shelters routinely have too many volunteers at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and too few the rest of the year). Callers even tried to cajole officials to let them bypass waiting lists (one shelter, which started accumulating names in August, had a backlog of 170 by Thanksgiving), despite suggestions that they help instead at less popular suburban facilities....

This was my first time here. I wish they’d had white zinfandel, which is my beverage of choice. Instead I was fucked-up on chardonnay–that’s ten times more fucked-upness. I was blackoutful. The music was fabulous on the first floor, but why was I the only one dancing? I had these passes, so my friends and I left to go to the DuSable Museum for this concert, which had already started. I come into that place like I’m the Mack Daddy of the party....

Two devils are hanging out in hell. One says to the other, “Still, I miss the seasons.” A vaguely Afghan-looking figure does the Charleston on TV. “Oops!” says a viewer, “we bombed ’em back to the Jazz Age!” Of course these jokes are better with their simple line drawings, whose shabby modesty sets up the punch lines, but they can at least give you an idea of P.S. Mueller’s twisted worldview, on full display in his new collection Your Belief System Is Shot: Cartoons and Stuff (Jones Books)....

Let There Be Light…! I’ve found nothing in Huston’s autobiography that indicates he wanted to subvert the military’s happy-talk message. He spent three months at the hospital with a full crew of cameramen, led by Stanley Cortez (who shot The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter), filming individual and group therapy sessions. And over the course of the hour-long film we witness more than a few psychiatric miracles. In one scene, sodium pentothal is used to treat a soldier’s psychosomatic paralysis....