Editor: All through the 3/20 Family Law, I was trying to figure out where I had seen “the monk” before. It wasn’t until your Out of Town column [March 24] that I found out it was James (formerly Jamie, if I remember correctly) Sie, also formerly of the Lifeline Theatre. That is where I saw […]
Tag: Vol. 29 No. 29
Issue of Apr. 20 – 26, 2000
Posted inArts & Culture
Dream Play Distorted
Dream Play Distorted, the Mammals, at the Space. The action in August Strindberg’s A Dream Play centers around the Hindu sky god Indra’s curious daughter, who wants to learn the ways of mortals. Her visit to earth reveals misery, injustice, and ugliness; when she returns to heaven, her human companions, mired in ignorance, can’t follow. […]
Posted inFilm
Immaterial Worlds
Films by Christian Lebrat The Melba Films By Fred Camper In 1969 P. Adams Sitney, a leading critic of avant-garde cinema, published an article called “Structural Film” in Film Culture outlining a growing trend, only a few years old, toward the use of “predetermined and simplified” forms. Most of the filmmakers Sitney named–among them Ernie […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
RIGHTS AND WRONGS, PART TWO Last week’s column about the myth that wife beating jumps 40 percent following the Super Bowl reminds me of another hard-to-swallow statistic I’ve run across, this one in Baker v. Vermont, the 1999 Vermont supreme court ruling that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights as married straight couples […]
Posted inArts & Culture
True Books
Is Menstruation Obsolete?, by Elsimar M. Coutinho, MD, PhD (Oxford University Press, $24). Synopsis: A woman’s period is a recent phenomenon. In early times women were typically either pregnant, lactating, or dead. Animals generally don’t menstruate, except for a few apes and “some bats and shrews.” End it through medication, or surgery. Representative quote: “Hysterectomy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
To Hell and Back
Place of Angels A Red Orchid Theatre By Justin Hayford It took my father 50 years to tell anybody in the family what it was like to be at the D-day invasion. As a kid I’d heard one snippet from who knows where: on one of the many occasions he steered an LCT full of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Advocate for the People
Dear editor: It is disappointing that your article regarding the possible merger of Illinois Masonic Medical Center and Advocate Health Care (April 14) fails to accurately report our genuine interest in maintaining and enhancing access to the full range of health care services for community residents. It is even more disappointing that your reporter failed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lois Maffeo
LOIS MAFFEO One of punk’s most cherished ideals is that anyone can play rock ‘n’ roll, but I could show you shoe boxes full of dreary singles that prove not everyone should. Lois Maffeo, on the other hand, makes you want to believe all over again in the utopian promise of rock: she took up […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
Friday 4/21 – Thursday 4/27 APRIL By Cara Jepsen 21 FRIDAY Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1911 novel Alraune tells the story of a genetics professor who conducts a nature-versus-nurture experiment by using the semen of a hanged man to impregnate a prostitute. The result is the bad seed Alraune, who takes her name from the mandrake […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz, Emerald City Theatre Company, at the Old Town School of Folk Music Children’s Center. Toto, a toy, leaps well–when thrown from the wings. The Munchkins wear tiny feet at their kneecaps. The tornado is an eddy of actors swirling crazily, and the wizard a giant glowering puppet head. Emerald City’s efficient […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Jilted Loverboy
Damn you, Monica Kendrick! You totally spoiled our plans for Friday’s URT CD-release party (Spot Check, 2/18). Here we were, all ready to shock the crowd by wearing red leather pants and terry cloth headbands, and you had to go and ruin the surprise. Derek had been working for weeks on his Mike Reno impression, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Mai
THE MAI, Irish Repertory of Chicago, at Victory Gardens Theater. “If you had the luck of the Irish,” John Lennon once sang, “you’d be sorry and wish you were dead.” This is certainly the opinion of Irish writer Marina Carr, who heaps hardships on her heroic protagonist, Mai. It isn’t enough that this 40-year-old single […]
Posted inArts & Culture
John Duncan
JOHN DUNCAN Audiovisual artist John Duncan, who’s from Wichita but is now based in Italy, says he’s obsessed with learning what it means to be alive–and in his work he’s taken some rather extreme approaches to the subject. For his 1976 performance piece Scare, a response to an attack by a street gang during which […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Room for Argument
Subsidized housing, Uptown-style: there’s too much, there’s too little, and you don’t have to be poor to live there.