Brutality of Fact But even with a somewhat improved ending, revised by Reddin since the play’s 1994 premiere at the old Goodman studio (under the direction of the playwright’s biggest champion, the late Michael Maggio), the piece is unable to overcome Reddin’s signature smirky disdain for his characters long enough to create the kind of unease and tension the subject warrants. Most of his characters nurse their petty grievances and self-destructive addictions in equally numbing measure....

Lead Story Public Officials Looking Bad Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After robbers linked by authorities to the Irish Republican Army stole the equivalent of $50 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast, police announced in February that the bank would take the drastic step of withdrawing roughly $575 million in paper money from circulation and replacing it with new bills printed in different colors....

Though I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly 22 years, until recently I’d never set foot in Iowa. But when an editor came back from a road trip raving about loose-meat sandwiches and Niman ham with pepper foam and cauliflower polenta, I got excited about our neighbor to the west. My friend Michelle and I set out on Easter weekend, primed to sample a mix of regional specialties and vanguard cuisine....

My boyfriend of four years enjoys wearing women’s clothing and acting like a submissive woman when we have sex. Nothing gets him off more. We have only just started exploring his fetish in the past year because he has been ashamed of it all his life. I have encouraged him so far, and now we have a couple hundred dollars’ worth of sexy women’s clothing that fits him. Last night he asked me if he could wear a latex mask of a woman’s face during sex....

Ten years after its world premiere at the Goodman, August Wilson’s 1940s entry in his decade-by-decade examination of African-American life receives a rich, careful staging from Derrick Sanders for Congo Square Theatre Company. Wilson’s discursive script covers the last days of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, a one-hit bluesman who’s returned to Pittsburgh’s Hill district from Chicago to win the hand of Vera, his onetime lover. Set a few years before the civil rights movement caught fire, Seven Guitars skillfully captures the anguish of waiting–for inconstant lovers to prove themselves true, for white managers to make good on promises, for the ghosts of the past to provide ways to move forward....

For the past several months South Loop resident Peter Ziv has made a pest of himself, criticizing city officials for ignoring their own plans and allowing a developer to build a 34-story high-rise at the northwest corner of Polk and Clark. Last month the planning department shut down Ziv’s attempt to hang four large protest signs on the side of his building. “It doesn’t get any pettier,” Ziv says. “They killed this sign because they didn’t want the community telling them what to do....

Former English majors should get a nostalgic kick out of Eugene Ionesco’s classic fit of social-cultural-political-linguistic-logical-dramaturgical Tourette’s, offered here on a double bill with Michael Glen Barker’s Off. Both plays are nicely (if a little greenly) done under Jaclyn Biskup’s direction–especially the Ionesco, with its convulsive performance by Elizabeth Kline and Jana Anderson’s understatedly overstated costuming. But you have to wonder why a company called Experimental Theatre Chicago would revive a script that did its ground breaking more than half a century ago....

Every Saturday at midnight for the last six years The Hot Karl folks have started their gig by announcing that they’re going to create the foulest, most disgusting fully improvised show in Chicago. Then they do it. The group’s name comes from a sex act that involves pooping on your partner, and when I recently saw the show, the MC set the tone by asking for audience suggestions while riffing on the subject of fisting....

For anyone with a hankering for hockey after a winter without it in Chicago, the place to go, of course, is the beach. North Avenue Beach Sports runs a street-hockey rink near the big ocean-liner-style beach house. It organizes leagues of various skill levels and will even place interested individuals on a team if they can’t find enough friends for their own. (See nabsports.com for details.) If Oak Street Beach to the south is where the svelte and the tan go to see and be seen, and beaches to the north offer their own diversions but tend to be more utilitarian, more for Chicagoans wishing to cool off in the lake and sun on the sand, then North Avenue is the fitness beach, the jock’s beach–and the hockey rink is its most unusual attraction....

According to PR for this inaugural production, Theatre 5.2.1 plans to burn each original script after the tenth and final performance because its work is “like a match struck in a dark room illuminating, exposing, then burning out.” That kind of self-importance doesn’t bode well, but this original musical, created by the ensemble with music by Dan Schiller, is a goofy exercise free of pretension. It breaks no new ground but provides a pleasant showcase for the players, as an avaricious slumlord moves into his building, begins waging war against the mice, and eventually loses his grip on reality....

In 1822 Schubert abandoned his most famous and beloved work, the Unfinished Symphony, having completed only two movements, though he did sketches for a third. That same year he was diagnosed with syphilis, which would take his life just six years later, when he was 31. The symphony, which he never heard performed, is among the best in the orchestral repertory, maintaining a powerful tension between stunningly beautiful lyricism and overwhelming longing and despair....

Mark Yonally’s latest tap-dance narrative, Changes: A Science Fiction Tap Opera, is even more campy than last summer’s “The Tell-Tale Tap: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.” Set entirely to songs by David Bowie, the evening-length Changes begins where “Space Oddity” leaves off: Major Tom gets lost, then crash-lands on a planet ruled by cruel dictator Altego (played by Yonally himself, “glammed the hell out,” as he says). Eventually Major Tom frees the planet’s citizens from slavery in what Yonally calls a “rousing space adventure” with a subtext: the sci-fi angle allows him to satirize egotistical leaders and state-sanctioned torture....

Catherine Opie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By choosing distinctive aspects of each city and treating them in accordance with self-imposed restrictions, Opie demonstrates the strength and durability of documentary photography. For the Chicago series, she focuses on the way the city is lit, the buildings by streetlamps and window lights while the lake scenes are naturally illuminated, with no visible light sources–no sunrises or sunsets....

San Francisco shit-rock kings the Dwarves were originally the Suburban Nightmare, a psych-garage band formed in 1983 by four rambunctious lads from Highland Park High School. They retained their Seeds/Standells influence on their first album as the Dwarves, 1986’s Horror Stories, the back cover of which originally featured the band in fitted paisley finery, with a contact address near Ravinia. After moving to San Francisco and partaking of the city’s excellent drugs, the band quickly reinvented itself as a Cramps/Dead Boys-influenced hardcore punk act, their main interests encapsulated in the title of their debut LP for Sub Pop, Blood Guts & Pussy....

Andrew Perez’s new play has two disparate halves: a melancholy young man in a dingy basement apartment decides to drink himself to death on his 21st birthday by downing five bottles of Scotch, while outside an apocalyptic battle rages between comic book superheroes. Perez, who also directs this Red Jacket Theatre production, tries hard to bring the two stories together, but the comic book high jinks consistently undermine the other plot’s emotional sincerity....

A performance by Justice Yeldham & the Dynamic Ribbon Device, aka Australian noise artist Lucas Abela, is as hair-raising as fingernails on a chalkboard. But in this case the fingernails are his face and the chalkboard is a pane of glass, which is rigged with a contact mike that’s attached to a belt girded with effects pedals. After squirting KY Jelly on his face and into his mouth, Abela rubs the glass across his face with varying degrees of pressure while blowing, screaming, and sucking....

IIn 2004, after moving across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, Jonathan Gitelson found that his car was being festooned daily with nightclub flyers. He collected more than 1,000 of them, spent three months sewing them into a car cover, and took pictures of his covered car in front of the nightspots advertised. Eight of these large photos are now on view at Peter Miller, along with the car cover, in a show that not only has a unique history but that “talks back” to our culture....

Letter-Perfect Pop Josh Chicoine has a dark secret in his past, and its name is Jamestown. It’s the Chicago band he fronted after graduating from the University of Dayton and moving here in 1995. Jamestown became an attraction on the local frat-boy circuit, playing strummy tunes a la Dave Matthews in rock clubs and sports bars, but after four years or so, Chicoine says, he felt trapped and musically estranged from the other players....

No comic filmmaker in America works as hard as Todd Solondz to ride the knife’s edge between humor and pathos: his characters are lonely, unhappy, and helplessly cruel to one another, but intimate encounters between them often crash past the barriers of misery into hilarity. This is his first movie since Storytelling tanked at the box office in 2002, and it’s almost defiantly noncommercial. A young girl gets pregnant, submits to her mother’s demand for an abortion, runs away from home, and winds up with a born-again couple who tend to a blissfully happy adopted family of deformed and handicapped children....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Belgian label Sub Rosa has released a series of albums that showcase some of the rawest, most passionate examples of Morocco’s greatest traditional music; the latest installment is by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, the famed group of trance musicians from a small village in the Rif Mountains. In the past their music has made converts of Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Ornette Coleman, Brian Jones, William S....