ETTA JENKS Strawdog Theatre Company LITTLE BROWN FUCKING MACHINES A Stage of One’s Own “You have to like to travel. People you call friends become strangers. You can’t keep anything, because everything disappears.” So concludes the title character of Marlane Meyer’s Etta Jenks, a young woman who arrives in Los Angeles seeking a career as […]
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 16
Issue of Jan. 30 – Feb. 5, 1992
Posted inNews & Politics
Artists in Residence
Pilsen’s Pros Art Studio: Still Committed After All These Years
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Tulsa psychiatrist Mark Kelley, accused of abuse by patient Victoria Spiegel, admitted to a jury in September that he “allowed” her to suck his thumb during therapy sessions, but only because one of her multiple personalities was “infantile” and needed support. However, he denied Spiegel’s claims that any of the personalities had ever […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Urge to Picture
HEARTFELT/HANDMADE: EARLY ILLINOIS FOLK ART at the State of Illinois Art Gallery Cameras have made it a simple and convenient matter to obtain pictures of people and places, yet they have also meant a certain loss for most people: the experience of making pictures. Gone from everyday life is the kind of patient looking that […]
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Ben Sidran
Like his better songs, Ben Sidran is glib and slangy and considerably more complicated than that description would suggest. His piano style has a narrow focus, but within that range it’s consistently forceful and often inventive; his singing arrives on a breathy, idiosyncratic, and surprisingly malleable baritone; and the songs he writes are so well […]
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Hospice/Calm Down Mother/Twelve Angry Men
HOSPICE and CALM DOWN MOTHER Touchstone Theatre at the Halsted Theatre Centre TWELVE ANGRY MEN Amicus Theatre Company at the Heartland Cafe Studio Theatre Touchstone Theatre’s two current one-acts are a study in contrast: Pearl Cleage’s Hospice is dark, deliberate, and focused on one relationship, while Megan Terry’s Calm Down Mother is lighter, more briskly […]
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Dig My Talent
SPIC-O-RAMA: A DYSFUNCTIONAL COMEDY at the Briar Street Theatre Forget the subtitle: Spic-O-Rama functions superbly. John Leguizamo’s collection of monologues, a work in progress originally unveiled at the Goodman Studio and now transferred to the bigger Briar Street Theatre, is hilarious, painful, and beautifully detailed. The short, athletic, intense, and chameleonic Leguizamo is a virtuoso […]
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Border Dispute/Snake Bit
Border Dispute Nine months of Calvin and Hobbes reruns end this weekend in a blaze of effrontery. The first freshly minted Calvin since May will show up in Sunday’s funnies in a shape that cartoonist Bill Watterson is shoving down the papers’ throats. It’s a virtual square a half-page large, which Watterson decided during his […]
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Three Generations
Just outside the Belmont station the train came abruptly to a stop and we sat for a minute while the conductor and motorman conferred in low voices. With a tight look on his face, the conductor opened one of the doors, leaned out, and peered into the lightly swirling snow. “Hey,” he began calling into […]
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Work Kills
Joe Kinney’s Personal Crusade Against Negligent Employers and Unsafe Workplaces
Posted inArts & Culture
The Chris Hogan Show/Virtual Reality
THE CHRIS HOGAN SHOW Organic Theater Company Greenhouse VIRTUAL REALITY Upright Citizens Brigade at Kill the Poets The year I turned 12 I’d saved up enough money from cutting lawns to buy a portable tape recorder and a package of three blank cassettes. Before that, my friend Mark and I would spend our time hanging […]
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Kospodinov/The Secret Play/The Larger Problem
KOSPODINOV, THE SECRET PLAY, and THE LARGER PROBLEM Playwrights’ Center A kaleidoscope fractures an image into multifaceted beauty, breaking it up to create a more complicated picture. That may be the rationale behind the aggressive obscurity of these one-acts by William Vaughn Johnson, in a Playwrights’ Center premiere: they refract reality through extreme characters. Unfortunately, […]
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Paul Wertico Special Quintet
You might argue that the Paul Wertico Special Quintet, established by Wertico in 1990, needs no identifying adjective–that it’s been “readily distinguishable from others in the same category” (Merriam-Webster) from the start. With Orbert Davis’s cool, crisp trumpet leading the way, the band displays a breezy professionalism without masking its impassioned respect for the mainstream […]
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Abuse Is Irrational
To the editors: Re: “Men Who Beat Women” January 10. The narratives imply that it is psychotic, bitchy, rejecting women who are abused. Please understand that the impulse to scapegoat is irrational: It doesn’t need a reason. People who destroy property, kick the dog, hit the wife, or play sadistic mind games do it because […]
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Calendar Photo Caption
“At the Edge of Shelter: Homelessness in Chicago,” an exhibit of work by local photographers Tom Arndt, Angela Kelly, and Marc PoKempner, runs through April 12 at the Art Institute, Michigan at Adams, 443-4600. Museum hours are 10:30 to 4:30 weekdays (10:30 to 8 Tuesdays), 10 to 5 Saturdays, and noon to 5 Sundays; admission […]