DIANE COX at North River Community Gallery Each of Diane Cox’s five new environmental sculptures provides rich and complex layers of rhetoric–even if at first glance each seems to make an obvious statement, there are subplots. The more you demand of this work, the more answers it provides. All of these pieces–with the exception of […]
Tag: Vol. 20 No. 21
Issue of Mar. 7 – 13, 1991
Posted inNews & Politics
Jay’s OK, Let Him Stay
To the editors: Poor Mr. Heydendahl [Letters, February 15] and all the other “thousands of aggrieved listeners (repeat: listeners).” He doesn’t want his exclusive little club joined by any of those who enjoy Mr. Andres’s style. (Are they the right kind to be listeners to WFMT?) There are thousands and thousands of us who have […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Gee, if we can’t get the farmers to rotate their crops, maybe we can get them to rotate their chemicals. The Illinois Natural History Survey Reports (February 1991) notes that entomologists have long advised farmers that the best way to control corn rootworms is not to plant corn on the same land year after year, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Opera Theater’s Night of Horrors/Theater v. the Tribune: Raw Deal?/Medley Malady/Kvetch Moves Up/United Airlines’ New Minister of Culture
City arts administrators are pleased to note the arrival of United Airlines’ Elizabeth Close. She’s been assigned to spend the company’s money and raise its cultural profile downtown.
Posted inNews & Politics
He Said? She Said!
To the editors: Somewhere in the editorial process, my February 22 review of Joe Goode Performance Group’s Disaster Series at the Columbia College Dance Center acquired a small but troubling error: a quote that I meant to attribute to Elizabeth Burritt was attributed to Joe Goode instead. Goode placed his broad, splayed hand on Burritt’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Crossing Delancey
CROSSING DELANCEY Avenue Theatre It can’t be a coincidence that Susan Sandler’s charming romantic comedy Crossing Delancey first opened in New York City in April 1985, smack-dab in the middle of the most backward-looking decade in recent memory. After all, Crossing Delancey reaffirms many of the central tenets of the Reagan reaction: that the old […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Flashing Back to the 60s
Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, Terry Southern, Richard Meltzer–as Fritz leafed through the reprints his teeth began to pick up tinny vibrations. The pangs of memory…why now after all these years?
Posted inNews & Politics
Life and Death in the Organ Queue
To the editors: Last October I wrote a story about three people waiting for organ transplants: Rose Brooks, who needs a pancreas and a kidney; Gary Isenogle, who needed a liver; and Dick Jackson, who needed a heart. Readers of that story might be interested in knowing that Isenogle, who had been waiting for a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In the Realm of the Senseless
GOOSE AND TOMTOM Transient Theatre Superman, Batman, and Wonderwoman went into the woods and they went to the house where the pigs lived. They saw a wicked witch. She gave them poisoned food. Then they died. Then Wonderwoman had magic and they woke up. Everybody didn’t wake up. Then they woke up from Wonderwoman’s magic. […]
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Music Notes: Kevin Mason’s lust for lutes
Chatting with Kevin Mason about the lute family is like talking to a royal genealogist about the noble houses of Europe: you’re apt to learn about the members’ origins and histories, their proclivities and shortcomings, and other details too arcane for the layman. “Take the theorbo, for instance,” Mason says of his favorite lute. “It […]
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An Enemy of the People
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE Northlight Theatre Back in high school I was friends with Ruthie Mendelsohn, whose father was a pediatrician. All I knew about Dr. Mendelsohn at the time was that he never felt that he had to clear out when Arnie and Jeff and I came over to see Ruthie. In absolute […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Human Circus
JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATREat the Civic Center for Performing ArtsMarch 1 and 2 Randy Duncan is a versatile choreographer with a knack for giving the same moves–high kicks, high extensions, self-conscious wriggles–different moods. The variety in his choreography comes from the circus of human feeling; the shifting dramas of social relationship permeate his work. […]
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My Blue Heaven
MY BLUE HEAVEN Footsteps Theatre The publicity for Jane Chambers’s comedy My Blue Heaven promises “Green Acres with a twist,” but it seems to me more like a lesbian-affirmative variation on The Fox. Mark Rydell’s 1968 movie version of D.H. Lawrence’s phallocentric fable depicts a metaphorical henhouse torn apart by a furry predator, when a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
So far as I know, the groundhog is the only rodent to have its own official day. It also has its own song, an old southern Appalachian banjo tune about an epic hunt. It is only fitting for banjo players to sing about groundhogs–or whistle pigs, an alternative name that shows up in some versions […]