GLEN? OR GLENDA? Interplay MYSTERY DATE Illegitimate Players at Live Bait Theater Late night used to be a free-trade zone of sorts for daring theatrical ideas, a time on theaters’ otherwise risk-averse schedules when directors such as Greg Allen and Mick Napier or performers such as Paula Killen could play around without having to be […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 2
Issue of Oct. 21 – 27, 1993
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Fun Times: support your local art mag
The loft space that houses the New Art Examiner on South Wabash is pin-drop silent. It is not at all the scene one would expect at a magazine on deadline. In fact, the NAE has got two: the one for its 20th-anniversary October issue, which is several weeks past, and the one for its November […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Charles Gayle
Cecil Taylor’s favorite saxophonist makes his Chicago debut. As that recommendation might suggest, Charles Gayle plays free jazz–very free jazz–and he does so unrepentantly, with storm-wind assaults on hell’s-loose rhythms, rubato wanderings at slow tempos, and plenty of upper-register cries in all cases. Gayle is known as the most ferocious of “energy” players, launching into […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hitch Up the Mules
HITCH UP THE MULES at Zanies Stand-up comic T.P. Mulrooney calls his Hitch Up the Mules, a one-man show at Zanies comedy club, “social psychology for people drinking in bars.” Well, what quicker way to trace neuroses to their source? In his clever patter with a philosophical edge, Mulrooney argues that since the 1960s, when […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Tofu Fight!
The nation’s top two natural-food chains have chosen the Chicago market for their first head-on battle. Some local operators are going to get hurt.
Posted inArts & Culture
Limbo Tales
LIMBO TALES Empty Houses at Cafe Voltaire Playwright Len Jenkin must thrive on twilight–that ambiguous time of day without identifiable beginning or end when the world gradually changes color. His plays are full of liminal images, in which time is suspended and reality is distorted as though it were being reflected in a fun house […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Raw Works
RAW WORKS Smartdance/Maureen Janson and Dancers at Link’s Hall, October 15 and 16 Maureen Janson’s dances are powered by an opposition between the “raw” and the “cooked,” terms that the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss invented. He says that cultures take the common raw material of humanity–sex, death, adolescence, old age–and “cook” it into a variety […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
Dear Reader: The water bed store in Evanston had a half dozen customers when the family walked in. They headed for a salesman and he told them he would be with them in a second. Other salesmen, too, were busy finalizing deals. The boy–he probably was three or four–pointed to a customer who had the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dave Hole
Australian Dave Hole’s guitar comes screaming at you like some tormented hellhound out of the outback, and his lyrics combine testosterone-soaked aggression with just enough irony to keep from crossing the line from politically incorrect to insufferably offensive. So why am I, with my general distaste for white-boy-boogie excess, recommending this guy? It’s partly his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Women’s Shakespeare
ROMEO AND JULIET Footsteps Theatre Company It wasn’t until around 1670, about a generation after Shakespeare’s death, that women were finally allowed to play women onstage. Everything promised to be a bit more true to life. Or did it? In recent years companies in Chicago, New York, and London have taken to performing Shakespeare with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Taming of the Shrew
When Randall Duk Kim left American Players Theatre with his cofounders Charles Bright and Anne Occhiogrosso at the end of the 1991 season (to work in Honolulu), some wondered whether the company could survive the loss. Two years later APT continues to deliver the intelligent, unpretentious, accessible productions of Shakespeare’s work that make it worth […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Heroes and Villians/PC Blues
Heroes and Villians There’s a new guy in a white hat in the local papers. His name is Forrest Claypool, and he’s cleaning up Chicago’s parks. There’s also a newly designated black hat, a whole gang of black hats, for that matter. They’re CID, the Park District’s Capital Improvements Division, which one recent Tribune article […]
Posted inFilm
We’re All Connected
SHORT CUTS *** (A must-see) Directed by Robert Altman Written by Altman and Frank Barhydt With Anne Archer, Bruce Davison, Robert Downey Jr., Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Lyle Lovett, Andie MacDowell, Frances McDormand, Matthew Modine, Julianne Moore, Chris Penn, Tim Robbins, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Madeleine Stowe, Lili Taylor, Lily Tomlin, Fred […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The main arteries leading to Bill Veeck Stadium were clogged with traffic before the start of game one of the American League Championship Series. Cars inched their way toward parking lots that were already filled. Ticket holders who had managed to ditch their cars somewhere along the route strutted past the traffic in a way […]