Many plays better than this domestic drama are less moving. The conflicts between erstwhile singer Betty Ann and her family may be predictable, but everyone with a mother will be crying when Betty Ann wails that if she leaves to resume her career no one will know how to calm her son after a nightmare. Playwright Javon Johnson, who also wrote the sophisticated House That Jack Built, can’t get beyond stereotype here: the good daughter, the bad daughter, the hustling eldest son....

My wife and I have been married four-and-a-half years, and we both are bi. We’ve been propositioned by–and played with–a number of sexy friends heteroflexible enough not to want or need full swap. So our play with others has been limited to oral and light petting. Sure, SC, but the first bit of advice I wanna give you is rhetorical. Only pre-Vatican II nuns and modern Mormon virgins use the phrase “light petting....

Still Schmoozing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since 1993 Iltis and Sikich have also operated a subsidiary, Iltis Sikich Associates, a producer’s rep firm that negotiated sales and was the only local service of its kind. Their first project together was a little basketball doc produced by Kartemquin Films called Hoop Dreams. “[The filmmakers] saw us at an IFP [Independent Feature Project] seminar when we were just starting out,” Sikich says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was in the shittiest mood all day, and then I got the new Xasthur record, so now I’m in the shittiest mood, but with an appropriate soundtrack. The press release for Defective Epitaph says that the album is “steeped in contempt and white-hot hate”, which I’d call a pretty accurate reflection of my current emotional state. Nothing says “I’m having a bad day” like inchoate shrieking and cheaply-recorded black metal sludge....

Friday 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » YO-YO MA & THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE Cellist Yo-Yo Ma hasn’t been shy about using his star power to introduce listeners to sounds from around the globe; on individual albums he’s made excursions into music from Brazil, Appalachia, Argentina, and elsewhere. But he’s invested the most energy into his Silk Road Ensemble, which pulls in a revolving cast of master musicians from countries along the legendary Silk Road trading route, which spanned the Middle East and Asia....

Written by Joseph D. Pistone, Bobby Moresco (who also directs), and Leo Rossi (who stars), this stage adaptation of Pistone’s memoirs–he was an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the mob–has a flat, committee-written feel. Though Pistone’s story was fascinating in the 1997 movie Donnie Brasco, we only glimpse that high drama here, mostly when he prepares for a meeting with a crime boss that may end in Pistone getting whacked. Most of the piece consists of short lectures about the mob spiced up with a little cheesecake–actress Carrie Long in heels and a one-piece bathing suit–and slide and video presentations so elaborate it’s easy to forget this is supposed to be live theater....

Joe Preston isn’t just a genius–the influential heavy-music groups he’s passed through include Earth, the Melvins, Sunn 0))), and most recently High on Fire–he’s a prophet. Both doom and electro have entered the universal hipster lexicon in the past few years, and when the inevitable fusion of the two genres hits the pages of Vice, true believers of the Church of Preston will protest that it’s not half as heavy–or half as much fun–as the monstrously bizarre crossbreed he’s been playing since 1994 as the Thrones....

On May 5 city officials will address planners from all over the country at the first Preserve and Play Conference, set up by the National Park Service, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and other organizations to promote “successful ways of preserving our recreation and entertainment heritage.” There will be sessions on the need to preserve recreational spaces and speeches about Chicago’s grand tradition of building lovely parks. One thing that probably won’t be mentioned is the playground next to the old settlement house dedicated in 1905 by Jane Addams and known as Association House, in the 2100 block of North Avenue....

In the 40s and early 50s blues singer Alberta Adams was a regular headliner on Detroit’s Hastings Street strip, and she kept some big-name company on the road: Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan both hired her as a featured performer. But though she worked with top-flight musicians and recorded sides for prestigious labels like Chess and Savoy, her career never really took off. It’s hard to figure out why–her phrasing had a swinging propulsiveness, she could easily shift from a plaintive murmur to a sanctified wail, and her uncanny knack for sounding both worldly-wise and naive seemed to make her a perfect fit for a pop market that was moving from adult-oriented swing and jump blues to adolescent rock ‘n’ roll....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What may be the best television show ever aired gets a good going-over by Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James at Slate. (Hat tip to Whet Moser.) Money quote: “I have repeatedly discovered as a documentary filmmaker what you, Alex, so brilliantly captured in There Are No Children Here: There’s no substitute for putting in the time it takes to really get past seeing people as mere symbols—be they symbols of good or bad, or the powerful or desperate....

SAY THAT JERK falls off his bar stool after you barely even punch him and wants to make a federal case out of it. Or you forget to check out at Dominick’s, and the security guard thinks you meant to steal that six-pack. Or you’re careless enough to smoke your joint in public and a squad car happens by. The long arm of the Chicago Police Department is about to grab your collar....

David Bazan has put the Pedro the Lion moniker to bed after years of hard use and is now a “solo dude”–not that big a change for him, really, since PTL was always just Bazan and whoever else wasn’t busy for the next few weeks. He’s lightened up musically, but his tongue just keeps getting sharper by the song. His solo debut, last year’s Fewer Moving Parts (Barsuk), sounds like the ol’ boy lashing out after a decade of Christian decorum....

Site Seeing: Photographic Excursions in Tourism Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While some of the shots here are straight tourist photos, whether professional or personal, many comment more on sightseeing than on the sights. Tseng Kwong Chi has photographed himself at tourist meccas around the world, always wearing sunglasses, a Mao suit he found in a Montreal thrift shop, and a fake photo ID labeled “Visitor,” as in L’Arc de Triomphe, Paris (1983)....

FRIDAY NIGHT FOLLIES, at Frankie J’s MethaDome Theater. Proprietor-impresario Frankie Janisch celebrated his place’s second anniversary last weekend with an extended version of this long-running vaudeville show–a mix of improv, music, and magic–in the downstairs restaurant. Hosts Chad Kodiak and Andy Ross, decked out in red bow ties and suits that made them look like the dorky white-boy auxiliary for the Nation of Islam, revealed charm to burn but spent too much time on lengthy bits that didn’t pay off....

His Cover’s Blown Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Preib, a Chicago native, has been on the force three and a half years. Prior to that he was a reporter for a small-town newspaper near Detroit, a college English and classics major, and, for nearly a decade, a hotel doorman and reformer in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. (You might have seen him outside the Allerton, or the Hyatt on Printers Row....

Jackson Pollock changed the rules of painting by laying his canvases on the floor. Keith Rowe did much the same for the guitar four decades ago by placing it on a table. Instead of playing notes and chords, the British musician agitates the instrument with bows, rulers, springs, electric fans, and a host of other items, turning the guitar into a sound-generating system. He also uses it as a sound conductor: playing radios near the pickups, he inserts snatches of songs, dialogue, and static into the music, creating an auditory analogue to Marcel Duchamp’s found art....

Jennifer Stevenson’s raunchy, funny, and disturbing first novel, Trash Sex Magic, is full of bewitching weirdness. Set in fictional Berne, Illinois, on the Fox River near Saint Charles, it’s stuffed with all three titular aspects. The heroines, mother and daughter Gelia and Raedawn Somershoe, live in a trailer, as do most of their neighbors. Still foxy at 60, Gelia has an irresistible sexual power over the men of the area, as does Raedawn....

A cold rain had failed to dampen the turnout for a March 4 lecture by renegade Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. “I don’t think I’ve seen the room so full in some time,” said Donna Robertson, dean of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, as she looked out across Crown Hall. Among the people stuffing the center court were UIC architecture students and local architects Carol Ross Barney, John Vinci, and Helmut Jahn....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In May, after reviewing previously classified reports and correspondence, the AP revealed the origins of an alert issued earlier this year by the Defense Department warning that coins rigged with tiny transmitters had been planted on U.S. military contractors traveling in Canada. Apparently the coins that had the contractors worried enough to file confidential espionage reports (calling them “anomalous” and suggesting they might contain nanotechnology) were just special-edition 25-cent pieces, commemorating Canadian war dead, that featured a bright red poppy against a silver background....

Melissa James Gibson’s irritating play concerns four bright young things–a couple of grad students and their boyfriends–whose emotional constipation is manifested in a hopeless inability to communicate with one another despite (or perhaps because of) their exceptional verbal facility. The inadequacy of words can be fertile ground for a playwright, but Gibson’s one and only method of exploring it is chirpy chatter about word choice and idioms. Sample exchange: “I’m indisposed....