Rebecca Gilman’s portrait of five young women in a small Wisconsin town (and one annoying interloper from Winnetka) is a minor-key chamber piece, with a few wince-worthy dramaturgical air horns thrown in. Set in the bar of a bowling alley, it follows the women’s lives over two years, from the farewell party for soon-to-be-incarcerated Jaycee (the dynamic Heather Chrisler), caught helping her father sell prescription meds, to a celebration for Sam (Becca Savoy), whose bowling scholarship to Ohio State promises a way out....

With the release of Governor Rauner’s whacked-out scheme to seize control of the Chicago Public Schools, the time has come to once again explore one of my favorite themes. Ah, the good old days. Thus, the governor, having declared CPS bankrupt, would get to preserve the contracts that enrich his pals—like the borrowing deals that pay outrageously high interest to bankers, while ripping up the contracts that benefit his enemies, like Chicago’s teachers....

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. After our first positive test, several nurses had symptoms who were there on that day, who were not wearing the right equipment. We didn’t test them. I haven’t been tested. If you don’t have a fever and you’re not a high-risk person, then you’re not getting tested. You would never feel good about sending a person like this home with no intervention....

Remember the days of crashing an art gallery opening for free wine and a fat gourmet cheese spread? Now the thought of a crowd going open season on a platter of brie and sharp cheddar gives you the chills. Thankfully, galleries got savvy, hiring videographers to host virtual walk-throughs of shows with a voice-over from the showing artist, or in Gallery Guichard’s case, offering a virtual catalog loaded with past and current exhibitions....

Few Chicago bands have embodied the freewheeling spirit and omnidirectional potential of the city’s independent rock scene—whose many subsets include punk, postrock, no wave, and art-rock—as thoroughly as Joan of Arc. Since the group emerged in 1996 from the breakup of emo instigators Cap’n Jazz the previous year, they’ve been in constant flux, dipping into a confounding variety of genres with an intuitive illogic that’s both passionately earnest and playfully perverse....

Interrobang Theatre Project presents the midwest premiere of Emily Schwend’s low-key, but surprisingly substantial drama about a working-class woman fighting like hell just to keep the lights on. Amber (a seething, world-weary Brynne Barnard) lets her deadbeat wandering husband, Chris (Patrick TJ Kelly), back into her life, but can never decide whether his presence makes life easier or harder. Chris’s older brother, Jim (Kevin D’Ambrosio, carrying the emotional weight of the whole play), is always hovering around Amber’s house, going out of his way to do her favors....

In 2017, Reader music critic Peter Margasak called Kevin Drumm a “restless creator who’s seriously invested in trying new things within his abstract milieu.” The Chicago tabletop guitarist and electronic musician hasn’t slowed down since then—it seems like every time Gossip Wolf visits his Bandcamp page, there’s more sublime new experimental work to download. Drumm’s herculean output means that a subscription to his Bandcamp—for $28 per year you get access to his huge back catalog as well as new music as he releases it—is an incredible bargain for longtime fans and noise-curious folks alike....

The WFMT Radio Network (spun off from the radio station in the 1970s) is launching a Kickstarter campaign Thursday. The goal is to raise at least $75,000. The loftier and ultimate goal is to create an easily accessible, searchable digital archive of the more than 5,600 programs Studs Terkel recorded for WFMT 98.7 FM between 1952 and 1997. Allison Schein will manage the archive. She also manages the audio archive at Experimental Sound Studio in Edgewater....

Virtual events coming up:

The socialists are coming! Debs is the subject of a new documentary, American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. The film is screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Friday through Thursday, and director Yale Strom is scheduled to appear at the Saturday showing for an audience discussion. But as American Socialist shows, socialists had their biggest impact a century ago, when Debs and the labor movement helped push through the New Deal, labor laws, even the creation of Labor Day itself....

You probably are well aware of the benefits of kratom by now: pain relief, euphoria, reduced anxiety, and more. As a result, kratom is exploding in popularity lately. But where to get some? And which vendors are trustworthy? For this post we set out to answer that question. After doing 30 hours of research and testing 11 different online vendors, we found the six best kratom sellers online. These shops were all scored against four main criteria: quality, variety, shipping, and of course, packaging design....

It seems that audiences now expect film festivals to be road shows of the latest and greatest in independent, art house, and foreign cinema rather than an opportunity to discover work not yet buzzed about. This year’s Chicago European Union Film Festival lineup has plenty of the latter, and the chance to discover new films and filmmakers makes perusing the schedule all the more exciting. Polish master Krzysztof Zanussi, whose works from the 70s and 80s are among the greatest Polish films ever made, again foregrounds his preoccupation with faith in Ether, a Faustian historical drama in which the anesthetic, here in the hands of an amoral doctor, serves as a metaphor for both power and pain, specifically the ability to either exacerbate or alleviate the latter....

One of the headiest of all avant-garde jazz heads is Alan Braufman. The veteran saxophonist, flutist, and composer has been wielding his polymathic wizardry since the early 1970s, when he helped put New York City’s loft-jazz movement on the map. But most younger listeners didn’t get their first chance to immerse themselves in his towering, soulful, and freewheeling maelstrom until 2018: that’s when Braufman staged his improbable second act, thanks to a reissue of his out-of-print and hard-to-find 1975 debut, Valley of Search, a crucial document of fire-breathing downtown NYC out jazz....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. FOH Pod Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee What we’re ordering: v

Enigmatic former Chicagoans Wrekmeister Harmonies wrote their seventh full-length, We Love to Look at the Carnage (Thrill Jockey), in a cold, isolated farmhouse in upstate New York and recorded it in Brooklyn the following summer with producer Martin Bisi. This time around, the core duo of J.R. Robinson and Esther Shaw added insightful, versatile percussionist Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater) and confrontational, challenging electronicist Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Neither of these musicians is a stranger to the trevails of laying oneself open in dark and challenging work, which makes them perfect collaborators for an album whose loose concept has to do with the late hours that start well after midnight and end before dawn....

Qwife issues. lack of intimacy. cuckold, etc. —need help And if restoring your sex life isn’t incentive enough to drop the subject, NH, this Savage Love reader’s experience might inspire you to drop it: “My husband, almost exactly ten years older than me, confessed a cuckold fetish to me shortly before our fifth anniversary,” a happily married straight lady wrote me in 2012. “I said no, but a seed was planted: Whenever I would develop a crush on another man, it would occur to me that I could sleep with him if I wanted to....

Born Edward Larry Gordon in 1943, composer, zither maestro, and experimental musician Laraaji has spent his life making music that captures humanity’s pulse and then some. He’s walked a colorful path while connecting threads between Sun Ra’s experimentation and Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotional music with new age mysticism and critically championing ambient music and performative public art. Born in Philadelphia, Laraaji took up musical composition with a scholarship to Howard University, got hooked on the comedy circuit, moved to New York, and wound up with a role in Robert Downey Sr....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Years after Studs Terkel published his best-known work, he was writing letters to the editor in the Chicago Reader in response to pieces he disagreed with—and some he agreed with as well. The first that survives in digital form is from 1991 and concerns a story about venerable journalist John Callaway; the last is from late 2002, when Terkel was 90 years old....

Summer doesn’t officially start until the 21st, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting out and enjoying yourself. Below are your ten best bets, and be sure to check out our Summer Guide for a complete rundown of midwest road trips, beer gardens and alfresco restaurants, and everything else that’s happening. Sat 6/6-Sun 6/7, 10 AM-TBA, Printers Row Lit Fest, Dearborn between Congress and Polk, 312-222-3986, printersrowlitfest.org, free. Chicago Blues Festival...

Time Bandits For the rest of the month, the Logan Theatre hosts a retrospective of films by Terry Gilliam, the favorite director of college freshmen everywhere. All kidding aside, I have a begrudging fondness for the expatriated director, whose films are famous for their elaborate concepts, sociopolitical satire, and highly detailed production design. Admittedly, most of my gripes have nothing to do with the director himself—I hate that La Jetée is regarded by some as little more than a prequel to 12 Monkeys, and the cult surrounding the philosophically juvenile Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is completely insufferable—but I nevertheless admire his work....