SPARE CHANGE | STAGE LEFT THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McCullough also wondered what was really behind the caller’s apparent altruism. As she writes, she considered whether it was another case of “the white man help[ing] the poor ‘colored’ girl.” That was the germ of Spare Change, receiving its world premiere in a sharp, efficient staging by Stage Left. What responsibility, McCullough asks, do privileged whites have toward underprivileged nonwhites in their community?...

When a feminist writer pursues an expose of a strip club also targeted by an evangelist who wants to replace it with a “GodMart,” the story’s pretty predictable. The dancers’ warmth is no shocker either, a slight variation on the “whore with a heart of gold” stereotype. But their character quirks–one’s a NASA PhD, another does Seinfeld impersonations–provide a steady stream of pleasant surprises. Playwright Scott Oken introduces supermeaty dynamics in this Factory Theater production: the preacher and strip-club owner are brothers, the journalist has a pornographic past....

Carol Bui’s full-length debut, This Is How I Recover (released on her Drunken Butterfly label), stands up to and often surpasses the work of her avowed influences–Jeff Buckley, Throwing Muses, Mary Timony–and its angular guitars call to mind Bellini and Victory at Sea, two more of her favorites. The 25-year-old D.C. native plays introspective songs that are leavened by her wide-ranging and tuneful voice; on the title track her singing and her roiling guitar work make for a contrast as piquant as wasabi ice cream....

Now in its fourth year, the Chicago Palestine Film Festival runs Friday, April 15, through Thursday, April 28, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are listings through Thursday, April 21; a full festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a true story, this tense Italian thriller (2004) explores the divisions that emerge in a Palestinian family after its home becomes occupied by Israeli soldiers....

Having ignorant bullies running the country isn’t just embarrassing, it’s bad for the economy, writes Richard Florida in the Washington Monthly (January/February). He quotes from an e-mail he received from a University of Illinois entomologist: “Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia. From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening....

Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art Smart Museum of Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the established individual artists, perhaps Andrea Zittel best sets the tone for the exhibit. Her wall-label quote reads: “I am not a designer–designers have a social responsibility to provide solutions. Art is more about asking questions.” She’s been asking questions for a while now. In the early 90s Zittel created a brand, “A-Z,” meant to simplify daily living by reducing consumer choices....

Thomas Schmidt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas Schmidt’s cracked, unglazed ceramic works at Dubhe Carreno suggest fragmentation and randomness. Schmidt directs the cracking to some degree, selectively applying pressure to hardened clay, but the details are out of his control; still, he manages to give emotional nuance to the results of his chance operations. He’s hung four rectangular slabs on the walls like paintings, giving them a humorous implied importance belied by their chaotic patterns....

SEPTEMBER The female-to-male drag troupe the Chicago Kings meets another kind of king tonight at the Empty Bottle: Elvis impersonator Patty Elvis. Also: musicians Ember Swift and Ellen Rosner, the Lickety Split Radical Cheerleaders, and DJ Pussy Galore. It’s a benefit for the International Drag King Extravaganza, a three-day conference set for October. The show starts at 10 at the Bottle, 1035 N. Western, Chicago, 773-276-3600; it’s $10. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The three artists in “Value” all make functional objects, apparently mass-produced, that critique consumer culture. Ian Bally uses store receipts in his jewelry, Hye-Young Suh includes plastic bottle caps and synthetic jewels in her colorful necklaces, and Frankie Flood makes ornate pizza cutters that borrow forms from biker culture. All three entered the graduate metals program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and graduated in 2004; the program chair, Billie Jean Theide, curated the show at I Space....

Podhalanka Polska Restauracja Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I was a lad I was repulsed by the big smelly holiday meals served at my Polish grandmother’s house, preferring the steak and french fries found at my assimilated Italian grandmother’s. I’m still a little grossed out by golabki (stuffed cabbage), but I crave my gram’s sour mushroom soup and her buttery pierogi, which, though approximated pretty well by my aunts and mom, are, in their pure form, lost to history....

The Slits Somebody’s Miracle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Slits, UK punk’s first visible all-girl band, for example, are mentioned as forebears or “punk’s grandmothers” in every girl-punk history. While that certainly counts for something, their legacy as it’s commonly understood and recited abnegates the sense that they may have had any true talent. The established “facts” are these: They could not play....

There’s too much unprocessed life and not enough art in Michael Stock’s play. Chaplin’s career is recalled by his last wife, the frenetic Oona (Eugene O’Neill’s daughter), who talks about a clumsy chain of sex scandals (including statutory rape), FBI intimidation, four mainly miserable marriages, forced exile, unhappy children, and tabloid trifles. Jonathan Pereira as Chaplin is oddly suave and wooden, while Jenni Fontana’s needy, neurotic Oona wears out her welcome aeons before the play’s 150 very long minutes are over....

Arkansas tomboy Melissa King ditched the south for the big city at the less-than-tender age of 27. She picked Chicago because, as she writes in her new memoir, She’s Got Next (Mariner), she was looking for someplace “cold, expensive, and the setting for at least one violent television show.” And though she doesn’t come out and say it, she was also looking to find herself. Subtitled “A Story of Getting In, Staying Open, and Taking a Shot,” her book–which had its start in a 1998 Reader cover story–is about how she did just that by playing pickup basketball....

Singer-guitarist Mem Shannon worked as a New Orleans cabdriver for 15 years before he released his 1995 debut, A Cab Driver’s Blues, which wove his somber musings with recordings of the drunken tourists and down-and-out streetwalkers he encountered while on the job. He’s continued to cultivate an image as a brooding blues poet since then, but his meditations on life, love, and loss haven’t always meshed with the good-time funk on subsequent albums....

Evolution via natural selection is the great unifying idea of biology, so explaining it to students is part of a day’s work for Jerry Coyne, who teaches in the University of Chicago’s department of ecology and evolution. Coyne also spends a good amount of time speaking to nonstudents–the Alaska Bar Association, North Shore businesspeople, and the Graham School of General Studies, to name a few–on the overwhelming evidence that life developed pretty much as Darwin says, not as the Bible says....

In the Pleistocene epoch of journalism, the newspaper telephone operator did a hell of a lot more than merely direct calls to a reporter or editor [Hot Type, May 20]. She–it always was she–also tracked down people with whom a reporter wanted to speak, saving him or her (it wasn’t always a him) considerable time. These operators were darn good at, for example, locating a sheriff or deputy in a remote county so the reporter could find out about a shooting, traffic fatality, or what have you....

The five members of the Orion Ensemble, founded in 1992 and now in residence at Roosevelt University, play with great technical assurance and musicality. They gave an outstanding performance of Shostakovich’s Trio no. 1 in November, and their gusto and wonderful phrasing can be heard in their new CD of lesser-known contemporaries of Brahms. Their unusual combination of instruments–violin, viola, cello, piano, and clarinet–gives them a remarkably wide range of repertoire possibilities, from Mozart to Messiaen and beyond, and they’re committed to performing unusual works and new commissions....

Gary Griffin’s 75-minute version of the Bard’s craziest comedy is an irresistible introduction not just to Shakespeare but to the world of theatrical make-believe. The touchstone of this gracefully goofy retelling is the play within a play “Pyramus and Thisbe”–a sort of miniature Romeo and Juliet. However inept the acting by hopeful thespians desperate to please, they’re driven by the same impulse that produced the mismatched lovers, feuding fairies, and elegant classical couple at the center of A Midsummer Night’s Dream....

Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara produced one of Abbas Kiarostami’s early features and won praise for his own work, including Prince Ehtejab (1974). But state officials began rejecting his film proposals in the mid-70s, and for much of the past 30 years he’s lived in the West. In this welcome comeback (2000) he plays a middle-aged director, rather like himself, who ruefully agrees to make a documentary about Iranian death rituals for Japanese TV....

Pity the poor Stereophonics. They’re arena-headlining stars in their native Britain but get a steady stream of flak from critics, tabloids, and Thom Yorke, while in America they’re reduced to warming up theater crowds for the likes of VH1-approved coffeehouse refugee Howie Day. Despite the continued efforts of their label (the Welsh combo was the first signing by Richard Branson’s V2 imprint), an armful of UK hits, and the raffish good looks of singer Kelly Jones, the band has never been able to break stateside....