In Sławomir Mrożek’s 1965 satire of life in communist Poland, everything’s topsy-turvy. A family and a couple hangers-on live in a chaotic household in which every member’s role is constantly shifting. It’s a vision of society in flux and disillusioned despair—which shouldn’t be difficult for Americans in 2019 to identify with. At the beginning, Arthur, the uptight son, is imposing his will on the rest of the clan. Arthur is bent on restoring a sense of order to his anarchic home, but can’t quite settle on a unifying theory under which to govern....

When I write that most of the movies I previewed from the Peace on Earth Film Festival play like educational films, I don’t mean that pejoratively. This free four-day event aims to educate viewers on the subjects of nonviolence, tolerance, and social justice, with many selections spotlighting issues and communities one rarely encounters on mainstream TV news, let alone movie screens. Even the titles I didn’t like taught me something new, and most made me think seriously about how people might change the world for the better....

“Having the necessary arrogance to assume that a failed production of a play is not necessarily a failed play, I have prepared this new version for publication and subsequent reappearance on other stages. . . . As for my depression over the failed production, I believe it is temporary,” wrote Tennessee Williams in his foreword to Out Cry, his published revision of The Two Character Play, which opened to critical rejection in London in 1967, wrecked his relationship with his literary agent in Chicago in 1971, and lasted all of ten days on Broadway in 1973....

Before the pandemic, seeing a play often meant sitting in the dark and fading away amongst the crowd of other audience members, but with Court Theatre’s Chicagoland premiere of Theatre for One: Here We Are, “the audience is front and center,” according to Miranda González, director of Pandemic Fight and Thank You For Coming. Take Care. Moreover, unlike Zoom meetings where individuals have access to their self view, the platform does not allow for either the audience or artist to see themselves, making the experience feel all the more intimate....

Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com, which includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history as well as a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods....

When bartenders Adrienne Stoner (Lost Lake) and Elizabeth Mickiewicz (EZ Inn) meet up to chat, it’s usually over queso dip at Lonesome Rose in Logan Square. So when Stoner decided to challenge her friend as the next participant in the Reader‘s Cocktail Challenge series, she had no trouble picking the ingredient: Mickiewicz would have to make a cocktail with Lonesome Rose queso dip. Who’s next: Mickiewicz has challenged Laura Kelton of Sportsman’s Club to create a cocktail with sweet-and-sour sauce....

Now we know. The tronc in tronc, Inc., which Tribune Publishing became Monday, stands for Tribune Online Content. “From pixels to Pulitzers” is the motto being stitched into CEO Michael Ferro’s digital samplers. Hang in there, tronc employees. Your job might depend on it. “It’s about meeting in the middle,” you’re told by Anne Vasquez, tronc’s chief digital officer. “Having a tech startup culture meet a legacy corporate culture and then evolving and changing—and that’s really the fun part....

I Anecdotally, this seems to be an unusually high number of bike crashes for a 30-day period. But it’s a difficult thing to prove, since collisions that don’t result in serious injuries or fatalities often go unreported. And while the Illinois Department of Transportation is responsible for documenting local crashes, the agency doesn’t release its findings until about two years after the fact. The first of the three crashes that resulted in serious injuries took place on June 21 at the intersection of Wilson and the Lakefront Trail....

Willie T. Donald has been imprisoned since 1992 for a robbery and murder in Gary, Indiana, that he always insisted he didn’t commit. Now he might be just a day or two from going free. The key development in Donald’s potential release, Vanes says, was finally locating Rhonda Williams. Vanes says Lake County Superior Court based its reversal on the failure of the state to share exculpatory evidence with the defense, but he thinks the court also had serious doubts about Donald’s guilt....

This year, I celebrated Father’s Day with the Pacific Ocean between my dad and me.

Few figures have been as important, ubiquitous, and reliable in modern British folk music as singer and guitarist Martin Carthy. He was born in 1941, and like so many teens of his generation was sucked into music by England’s mid-50s skiffle craze. The first song he learned to play was “Heartbreak Hotel,” but by the early 60s he’d become fully absorbed by the folk revival. Nearly six decades later he remains one of the genre’s greatest and most profound proponents....

If you look carefully over to the right, you can see the line where I gave up dusting this table. I haven’t written about a Local Option beer in more than a year, but not because they haven’t rolled out anything new. The saison Walk ov Shame debuted on draft in November, and a second batch, split between kegs and 500-milliliter bottles, started shipping about a month ago. And a bottled beer is a beer I can review at home....

Sun-Times Media A mass eviction in Chicago in 1970 Ta-Nehisi Coates loves Chicago. But again, Coates sees the systemic racial inequality of redlining and other housing policies as a national ill, not just a Chicago one. He notes that in the 1920s, 20 to 30 percent of the population were home owners. By the 1940s, that number rose to 50 to 60 percent. This era of wealth building, however, excluded blacks....

Museums can often feel like a cold, overly formal place. On one hand, that setting promotes an aura of respect around the artwork; on the other, it can lengthen the distance between the art and its viewer. “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago” is an antidote to that. Famous for creating unexpected yet harmonious combinations of vivid prints, Olowu also takes his tailoring seriously. According to Goldman, what makes his garments special is “a lightness in fabrics and extraordinary taste in color and print mix....

Jake Barningham’s narrative, glimpse (2013) Tomorrow night at 6:30 PM Chicago Filmmakers will present a program of recent video work by local artist Michele Smith and former Chicagoan Jake Barningham at Columbia College’s Hokin Hall. The event is but one highlight in a month full of noteworthy avant-garde video screenings and exhibitions. On Friday at 6:30 PM Jesse Malmed, a multimedia artist and programmer at the Nightingale, presents a program called “UNTITLED (JUST KIDDING)” at the U....

Horse Money Every once in a while I’ll see a movie in which the use of a piece of music leaves me floored: the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” in Mean Streets, New Order’s “Dreams Never End” in Carlos, or, hell, all of the music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such a thing happened to me last Friday, when I saw Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s latest film, the hypnotic and slow-moving Horse Money, at the Gene Siskel Film Center....

Shervin Lainez The two Johns of They Might Be Giants, Linnell and Flansburgh At the start of 2015, unstoppable nerd-pop geniuses They Might Be Giants relaunched the Dial-a-Song service that had helped them build their devoted audience in the 80s. From 1983 till 2006 fans could call an answering machine whose outgoing message, usually on cassette tape, consisted of an unheard TMBG recording—often a demo or sketch of a song that would later see conventional release, but sometimes a skit or fake jingle....

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, several jazz musicians from New Orleans took refuge in Chicago—including trombonist Jeff Albert, bassist Matthew Golombisky, and drummer Quin Kirchner. During their stay, those three forged lasting connections with the local scene, and one product of those new relationships was a band called the Lucky 7s. Golombisky and Kirchner, neither of whom is a Crescent City native, settled in Chicago, but Albert eventually returned south....

Nothing is more precious than the relationship between parent and child, and it’s a hell of a thing when they’re separated by death—especially when the child is the one to go. Justin Townes Earle, the firstborn son of singer-songwriter Steve Earle, was a well-established Americana artist in his own right when he passed away from an accidental drug overdose last summer at age 38. Adult children of iconic musicians have often paid tribute to their parents by performing their music, but Steve Earle reverses that pattern on his new album, J....

Footwork is often characterized by aggressive sounds and high speeds, but Chicago producer and Teklife member DJ Phil fills in the music’s framework with remarkable restraint. In the solo recordings he’s dropped on the Web over the past few years, he uses samples to set the mood, often providing them with so much breathing room that nothing else filters into the song for long stretches. From there he uses his nuanced touch to tweak the audio just enough to let listeners know that a familiar melody is about to be transformed....