Fefu and Her Friends “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are,” begins María Irene Fornés’s radical 1977 drama, which is variously about madness, women’s agency, and internalized misogyny. The speaker, Fefu, is herself “fascinated with revulsion”; she and her husband, Philip, play a game in which she shoots him and he dodges her “bullets.” (The gun isn’t loaded—or at least Fefu thinks it isn’t loaded....

Courtesy Uncanned Music Scott McNiece of Uncanned Music calls the Akai GX-635D reel-to-reel deck at Sportsman’s Club “an indeniably sexy machine.” Every so often we ask you to show us something. This week it’s Sportsman’s Club’s reel-to-reel tape player.

Welcome to the Reader’s cannabis column, To Be Blunt. We’re here to answer your canna questions with the help of budtenders, attorneys, medical practitioners, chefs, researchers, legislators, and patient care advocates. Send your cannabis queries to tobeblunt@chicagoreader.com. “Pop-up cannabis supper clubs have existed in the Chicago area for years! Supper clubs’ origin as underground Prohibition roadhouses fits perfectly with still-illicit cannabis. Illinois’s new adult-use laws do not take effect until January 1, 2020....

Portland trio Sávila explore their Mexican roots through the venerable style of cumbia, which spread among popular big bands in the 1950s and remains a staple of family celebrations and weddings throughout the Americas. Launched in 2016 by guitarist and bass-synth player Fabiola Reyna (founder of She Shreds magazine) and vocalist and percussionist Brisa Gonzalez (who were soon joined by drummer Papi Fimbres), Sávila take the genre centuries forward and into an altered space....

One of the major cinematic events of the fall is the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective at Doc Films, which runs on Sunday nights at 7 PM through December 3. The series, consisting of nine features (all showing on 35-millimeter), is organized in chronological order, and this allows spectators to consider Fassbinder’s remarkable—and remarkably fast—evolution as it played out. Despite the fluctuations in tone from camp to searing drama, Bitter Tears is one of Fassbinder’s most formally controlled efforts....

Friends who were in Britain at the time tell me anyone who wasn’t can’t imagine how vile the Brexit campaigning on both sides was. That said, in the aftermath, the media should take the lead in getting a grip. Without support from the scum of the earth, Brexit wouldn’t have carried; but that doesn’t mean the scum is either “Britain” or even a plurality of it. Egan didn’t care if he muddied those waters because Britain isn’t what was really on his mind....

Few mainstream trumpeters over the last decade have matched the muscle, dexterity, and soul of Jeremy Pelt, who has morphed from a rising star into a trusted presence. Though he’s a dyed-in-the-wool postbop technician heavily influenced by protean but thoughtful blowers like Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw, he’s been known to make subtle but meaningful adjustments in his practice, changing the personnel and focus of his bands to explore groove-based electric settings or plush, acoustic contexts....

The National Association of City Transportation Officials held its annual conference in the Loop October 30 through November 2, drawing some 800 leaders, planners, and advocates. Workshop topics included “Designing streets for kids,” “Breaking barriers to cycling,” “Introducing empathy into the public process,” and “Bringing racial and social equity into transportation planning.” “Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism” outlines strategies to prevent the latter outcome. “As cities guide the autonomous revolution, we want technology to solve our mobility challenges; not settle for more of the same,” NACTO president Seleta Reynolds said in a statement accompanying the document....

While listening to Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers, the most recent release by operatic baritone Will Liverman with pianist and recital partner Paul Sánchez, I realized with a start that time had ground to a halt. But when? Had the clock stopped with H. Leslie Adams’s churning 1992 composition “Amazing Grace”? Was it when Liverman first slipped into his silken falsetto in Damien Sneed’s 2017 song “I Dream a World”?...

As a guitarist for Strawberry Jacuzzi and founder of Bernice Records and Tapes, Shannon Candy has been one of Chicago’s most productive punks for the better part of a decade, so of course she hasn’t been sitting on her hands during quarantine. In fact, Candy tells Gossip Wolf that she’s spent the past few months working on her first solo LP, So Long, while “listening to a lot of Le Tigre, the Coathangers, and Vivian Girls....

It was the biggest local story since the Stanley Cup. News coverage of Trump’s visit ran on page six, next to coverage of Trump’s problems with a Chicago brewery.

Argentine native Gabriela is the first female principal cellist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her husband, Marty, is a successful architect initiating his first skyscraper commission. Life is great, even if Gabriela’s domineering mother, Soledad, has overstayed her visit by three months. Then, through murky circumstances, two strangers arrive at Soledad’s birthday party and reveal a horrific secret, tying both Gabriela and her mother to the darkest moments of Argentina’s 40-year-old Dirty War....

For its second year, the first with new partners Empire Productions, the two-day Chicago Doomed and Stoned Festival has scored some big names: on Friday the headliners are Florida heavy legends Torche, warming up for the July arrival of their new album, Admission; on Saturday, they’re occult-rock primogenitors Coven, who formed in Chicago in the late 60s, and eerie flute-wielding Canadian witch rockers Blood Ceremony. Led by front woman Alia O’Brien, Blood Ceremony work their penchant for folk-magic aesthetics and their obvious Jethro Tull influence into a distinctively sparse, primitive fairyland sound....

Just inside the front door is a tiled bench in blue, green, and yellow hues that looks like it belongs in a plaza in southern Spain. Spanish-tiled floors, ornately wrought iron chandeliers, and an entire leg of jamon iberico (cured Iberian ham) that sits behind the bar, ready to be carved, all contribute to the illusion that you may have just wandered into a Seville bar for a bite to eat....

ARTIST: Chema Skandal SHOW: Santa Vida celebration featuring Dos Santos, Lester Rey, and DJ Que.Madre at Sleeping Village on Sat 11/2 MORE INFO: chemaskandal.threadless.com

On August 2 at Freedom Square, a tent city raised across the street from the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility as a protest against police brutality, Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglas Park held an alfresco strategy session. Local resident Sharaya Tindal outlined the group’s grievances against the festival, which debuted in the west-side green space in September 2015, for 16 or so people gathered on folding chairs under a canopy....

Songs don’t so much rise out of Yves Jarvis’s Sundry Rock Song Stock (Anti-) as they swim around, fray, and dissolve. In that sense, the most characteristic track on the Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist’s new album, the woozily liquid “Ambrosia,” is one of the oddest. Anxiously percolating keyboard and an echoing, violinlike noise wander past each other for the first two-thirds of the song, at which point a distant, distorted bass beat creates an abstract, aspirational groove, as though a dance floor is trying to coalesce from a primordial but pristine pool....

In the surreal world of American Ballet Theatre’s Whipped Cream, a boy is hospitalized after gorging on sweets, sending him into a vibrant fantasyland of dancing desserts while a drunk doctor and a gang of syringe-wielding nurses attempt to treat his illness. This massive spectacle cost nearly $3 million to create, blending two ambitious, unique creative perspectives to revitalize a largely forgotten 1924 score by composer Richard Strauss. A team of set and costume technicians had the challenge of translating Ryden’s designs to the stage, finding solutions that would vent heat, allow for movement, and provide visibility for dancers moving large pieces through a cast of 65 people....

In the parking lot of a grocery store in Beverly, I heard the most Chicago sentence ever spoken. Then came the immigrants, who adopted Inland North and added elements from their native tongues. Few languages other than English include the “th” sound. That’s how “Throop” became “T’roop,” and why “dese, dem, and dose guy” is a term for a salt-of-the-earth white ethnic Chicagoan, usually from the south side or an inner-ring suburb....

Jesus Alberto “Beto” Lopez Gutierrez, 24, was on his way home from a camping trip with friends when their car was pulled over by police in Iowa. Officers then transferred him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Since May 2019, Gutierrez has been held in immigration detention. As told to Irene Romulo. I work in after-school programs teaching art. I was giving the class, I was talking, doing all the things, but at the same time I felt like I was not present....