Actor Ryan Colwell and playwright Alexander Holt, the brains behind the brand-new Narcissists ensemble, team up for this impressive meditation on the psychology of addiction. Colwell stretches out mightily in his ten-character, ten-monologue performance, delivering everything a casting agent might expect while avoiding technique for technique’s sake. Holt’s articulation of the algebra of need is accomplished and Selby-esque, nailing old, aching, abstract truths to the writhing viscera of mortal existence. Once or twice both artists slip from portraiture to caricature, and their collection of troubled souls is a little more rooted in the demimonde than it has to be, blunting some potentially universal observations....

Gillo Pontecorvo’s powerful and lucid 1965 docudrama about the Algerian struggle for independence in the 1950s was screened for Pentagon employees last August, though one wonders how helpful it might have been; the terrorists in this film aren’t suicidal or religiously motivated, and their orientation appears to be quite different from that of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorists in other respects. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see this–it’s one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling....

Tennessee Williams didn’t intend his semiautobiographical 1944 play to be done as kitchen-sink realism, but usually it is–a choice that often diminishes its power by sentimentalizing the work. Director Sean Graney’s relentlessly unsentimental take on the desperate Wingfield household utilizes many of the playwright’s original nonrealistic touches, notably the use of projected words and pictures, excised from the first production on Broadway. These accents–coupled with jagged expressionistic lighting and the slightly heightened emotional tone of the acting in this Hypocrites production–make it crystal clear that this is no nostalgic look at prewar Saint Louis....

Amerikafka Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the early 20th century, Yiddish theater symbolized everything that “respectable” German-speaking Jews wanted to leave behind. The 1899 Prague anti-Semitic riots, which destroyed many Jewish-owned businesses, were fresh in the city’s memory; Kafka’s father, a successful shopkeeper, had escaped attack by registering his family as Czech nationals. Like many “civilized” Western Jews, he’d made every effort to assimilate and forswear the “old ways,” even giving his children German rather than Jewish names....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto makes two local appearances this weekend, the first at Kendall College on Friday. From 2-4 PM, he’ll demonstrate cooking tuna pizza and daikon fettucine with tomato-basil sauce, followed by a tasting with wine. It’s $39. On Saturday he’ll be signing Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking at Fox & Obel from 1-3 PM. There’s a cooking demo beforehand, but it’s full, as is the waiting list....

The saga of the property tax relief bill known as the 7 percent cap took a twist last week with the release of a letter from House Speaker Michael Madigan to dozens of aggrieved home owners. To provide relief–and to get people to stop calling his office with complaints–in 2003 Houlihan proposed a cap that would have limited the hike in assessments to no more than 7 percent a year. The General Assembly passed a watered-down reform bill in 2004, providing some relief for taxpayers not by capping reassessments but by increasing the home owner’s exemption (a standard deduction from the assessable value) from $4,500 to $20,000 for a period of three years....

A LOOK AT THE honor boxes on any busy streetcorner shows Chicago’s stuffed with printed matter, from the society rag CS, a local project that expanded to other cities, to the nightlife guide UR Chicago to the green living Conscious Choice. Factor in Time Out Chicago, the local edition of an international chain, glossy monthlies like Chicago magazine, and neighborhood pubs like the salmon-colored Chicago Journal and it would appear the town is covered from Rogers Park to South Shore....

In what must be part of some grand Canadian takeover scheme, the Constantines have teamed up with fellow Toronto band the Unintended for a split 12-inch of Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot covers, to be released later this year. Until then the money shot is their new full-length, Tournament of Hearts (Sub Pop), which is everything those who loved Shine a Light might’ve hoped for. The songs are crisp and tight–lush pop with postpunk twinges–and the brittle ballads, like “Soon Enough,” put the brakes on the band’s intensity only to make the full-throttle version seem even more powerful later....

Montreal literary comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly presents a triple bill of recently published author-artists. The stories in Kevin Huizenga’s Curses, featuring an alter ego named Glenn Ganges, are sophisticated and thought-provoking, often drawing on scholarly source texts to examine mystical visions, the existence of hell, and yes, curses. But Gabrielle Bell’s diaristic Lucky uses a poor-me confessional tone to relate her daily life in Brooklyn, full of bad performance art and shallow NYU yuppies; fortunately there are plenty of cool fellow artists to commiserate with....

Douglas Hoerr’s nightmare is that one weekend you’ll decide to make over your patch of backyard, buy a bunch of plants, and squeeze them in however you can–and later realize that they’re dying, running wild, or just in the way. Then you’ll decide that gardening just isn’t your thing. You wouldn’t redo your kitchen that way, says Hoerr, the principal of Douglas Hoerr Landscape Architecture, and he hopes that after you see Garden in a City–an eight-day show that’s all about designing and planning before you buy–you wouldn’t think of gardening that way either....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month filmmaker William Richert sent out a mass mailing to Chicago critics with DVDs of his 1986 drama Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? and copies of a feverish 17-page letter detailing the movie’s tortured genesis. Based on Richert’s autobiographical novel and produced by Island Pictures, the movie was a coming-of-age story, set in 1962, about a high school lothario (River Phoenix) seducing various women and clashing with his abusive father as he tries to scrape up money to ditch his native Evanston for a new life in Hawaii....

Improv is a spectator sport. Its excitement lies in seeing whether skilled players fumble or score as they toss comic ideas back and forth in intricate patterns. The unique energy generated by loopy, free-associative long-form improvisations is palpable in close quarters, with the performers just a few feet from the audience. That should be apparent Friday when celebrity alumni of ImprovOlympic (recently renamed I.O. in deference to the U.S. Olympic Committee’s proprietary pressure) drop in to jam at the company’s intimate Wrigleyville home as a warm-up for Saturday’s sold-out ImprovOlympic’s 25th Anniversary Reunion Show at the Chicago Theatre....

I heard a best-selling author once say that he paid a vanity press to publish his first novel. Then, loading his car with copies, he drove from bookstore to bookstore throughout his home state, trying to persuade sellers to stock his book. My job is to autograph my books for the people who buy them. Someone has put two black pens on my table so I’ll have plenty of ink for signing, and the way they’re lined up so neatly parallel to each other on the white tablecloth fills me with hope....

In the summer of 2003 Joe Swanberg was just another floundering college graduate. He had no job and no savings, and he was living with his parents in Naperville. Many of his friends were moving to Los Angeles and New York, but he had a girlfriend he didn’t want to be away from. Though close to his family, he worried about “getting stuck,” about not “breaking in.” He promised himself that by the fall he’d move into Chicago, even if he had to work at McDonald’s....

Quartet His politics weren’t much different: a constant undermining of accepted texts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Choosing to remain in East Germany when he had more than one chance to leave, Muller assumed leadership of Bertolt Brecht’s prestigious Berliner Ensemble and won the Lessing prize but also endured bouts of official proscription. His Stalinism discomfited the avant-garde while his avant-gardism upset the Stalinists....

“I think Vietnam made us a little bit crazy,” says Mark Rudd, a former member of the Weather Underground, the radical groupuscule that protested the war by bombing government offices in the early 70s. When you realize that your country is killing thousands of people a day for no good reason, and most of your friends and neighbors either approve or don’t care, then what do you do? Rudd’s not sure, but he doubts he got it right the first time....

The Society of Professional Journalists has rejiggered a joint venture with a PR newswire, and the results are passing the sniff test. But was the controversial deal cleaned up or simply doused with perfume? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The deal soon vanished from the ethics committee’s radar. But Tatum and Milana kept talking, and eventually they offered revised terms to Gary Hill, chair of the ethics committee (and director of special projects at a Minneapolis-Saint Paul TV station)....

Tell ‘Em What to Think “Reprehensible,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Rush Limbaugh thundered, “This is the kind of thing that ought to force him to resign in disgrace.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Readers who believe what they’re told to believe would have been foaming. But other readers like to make up their own minds, and they must have noticed the missing fact–namely, what the FBI agent had said in the e-mail Durbin read to the Senate....

In the spring of last year Tom Testa made the painful decision to sell off a piece of his legacy–a 300-million-year-old fossilized chiton called Glaphurochiton concinnus, an oblong mollusk whose modern relatives graze on algae that cling to wave-swept rocky shores. Back then, in the middle Pennsylvanian period, Testa’s chiton crept along the muddy floor of a shallow inland sea whose long northern coastline arced through what is now Kankakee, Will, and Grundy counties, about 50 miles southwest of the Loop....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Kessenich is a regular customer at the small slaughterhouse where we brought his mulefoot hogs Cong and Cherry earlier this month. They’re the first swine he’s raised to slaughter, but he’s brought plenty of sheep and a few Highland cattle there before. He’s on friendly terms with with the USDA inspector that normally works on the killing floor, looking for signs of disease in the organs and carcasses of the animals that pass through, and purple-stamping her approval if they’re healthy....