RACING DEMON, Organic Touchstone Company, at Touchstone Theatre. The newly merged Organic Touchstone Company is off to a superb start with this production of David Hare’s thoughtful, touching, wryly humorous play. Like a cross between a Susan Howatch novel of Anglican angst and a sardonic Evelyn Waugh social satire, Hare’s drama examines moral wrangling and […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 51
Issue of Sep. 26 – Oct. 2, 1996
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Ya gotta have art. From a recent press release from the School of the Art Institute: “In his sculptural installation, Stephen Schofield transforms cloth membranes into crystallized mattresses by soaking them in boiling syrup and inflating them using vacuum cleaners whose air flow has been reversed.” Women not welcome here. Sandra Namath tells Jane Easter […]
Posted inMusic
Stepan Rak
STEPAN RAK Czech guitarist Stepan Rak is the sort of player that regularly achieves the impossible on his instrument, making things like contrary motion, autonomous simultaneous rhythms, and two-string tremolos seem as easy as barre chords. He’s also a double threat–a player and, since the late 60s, a composer. The 51-year-old resident of Prague has […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Life Support Systems
Emma’s Child Victory Gardens Theater By Carol Burbank Kristine Thatcher is perhaps best known in Chicago as an actress, appearing most recently in the Goodman’s Arcadia and in the long-running Three Hotels. But she’s written a witty and sentimental play in Emma’s Child, asking many provocative questions about adoption among other subjects: what if the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
After much inquiry and research I have reached a dead end as to how to get my home phone number taken off all telemarketing and tele-fund-raising call lists, locally and nationally. Even after I tell callers who want donations for local causes to stop calling me, the calls persist–and seem to multiply! I’ve searched for […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Richard Rezac shifts shapes
Richard Rezac’s 12 new abstract wood and metal sculptures at Feigen are easy to miss at first. Often small, sometimes mounted in corners or perched high on a wall, they look a bit like manufactured objects whose original function is now obscure. Rezac is not surprised by this comparison. “In undergraduate art school I fixed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: Playboy’s unlikely offspring
Jason Mojica was fighting insomnia one night a few years ago when he turned on the television and caught the biography Hugh Hefner, Once Upon a Time. Instead of putting him to sleep, the film made him realize that, contrary to what he’d previously thought, Playboy was more than just the sum of its body […]
Posted inFilm
For the Sake of Haniye
This 1995 Iranian film, directed by former film critic Kiumars Poorahmad, goes in several different stylistic directions at once but nonetheless is an effective tale of small-town intolerance and a boy’s courage. Olov, the captain of a fishing boat in the village of Tangak, is the only survivor of a storm, which is shown not […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Elephant Man
THE ELEPHANT MAN, Merattic Theatre Company, at Chicago Dramatists Workshop. In only 80 minutes playwright Bernard Pomerance turns a penny-dreadful plot–the short, cruel, crowded life of John Merrick, a severely disfigured “elephant man”–into an exploration of our humanity. The ultimate outsider, Merrick is a mirror reflecting the worth of those who see his value. Where […]
Posted inMusic
Tom Varner
TOM VARNER You can count on one hand the number of French horn players who have distinguished themselves in jazz, but Tom Varner has more to offer than extra points in a trivia contest. For starters, Varner improvises with enough flexibility, imagination, and timbral variety to make you wonder why more French hornists haven’t attempted […]
Posted inNews & Politics
WVON Won’t Take the Bait/Meigs and the Dailies: The Long View
By Michael Miner WVON Won’t Take the Bait Last year black ad man Lowell Thompson reached into his pocket and published a book called “White Folks”, his take on “the debilitating mental disease that afflicts ‘white’ America’s leaders whenever they are confronted with racial issues.” After a second dip into the same pocket, the paperback […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Winifred Haun & Dancers
Winifred Haun, whose daughter Athena is now six months old, calls one of her new pieces “the baby dance.” But that’s not its official name (it didn’t have one when I saw a rehearsal), and characteristically she describes it as not about babies at all: it’s an abstract suite based on four very roughly connected […]