Most likely nobody you know has read one, but more than 50 million books in the Left Behind series have sold in the past decade. Six of the 12 apocalyptic thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have entered the New York Times best-seller list at number one. LaHaye is influential in more direct ways too: in the run-up to the 2000 election he co-led the Committee to Restore American Values, a group of evangelicals who subjected Republican candidates to a questionnaire to test their allegiance to the right-wing agenda....

In repertory with its riveting revival of Lillian Hellman’s classic drama The Children’s Hour (reviewed, along with this play, this week in Section 1), TimeLine Theatre presents William Luce’s one-woman portrait of the playwright. Janet Ulrich Brooks gives a charismatic, perfectly modulated tour de force performance as the middle-aged Hellman, waiting in a hospital for news about longtime lover Dashiell Hammett, who’s dying of cancer. Hellman’s reminiscences range from showbiz name-dropping to moving anecdotes about her New Orleans childhood, her turbulent relationship with Hammett (including their shared battle with alcoholism), and her 1952 appearance before Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee....

Two of the world’s finest installation artists are now on view in Chicago: James Turrell, an American, recently designed a permanent structure at the University of Illinois, and French artist Daniel Buren has created a site-specific installation, Crossing Through the Colors, for the Arts Club. Buren began doing paintings of his trademark stripes–8.7 centimeters wide, inspired by a piece of awning fabric–in the 60s. By the mid-80s he was creating installations, including striped columns at the Palais Royale in Paris that interacted with the courtyard’s baroque architecture in a mildly bizarre, thought-provoking way....

This multidisciplinary event, presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs weekends 3/11-4/10. The avant-garde showcase, now in its third year, features presentations by some of the city’s most adventurous artists working in theater, performance, circus arts, puppetry, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art. The shows range from family-oriented to adults-only. Participants include Goat Island, the Curious Theatre Branch, Free Street, Theater Oobleck, the Hypocrites, the Neo-Futurists, Plasticene, Teatro Luna, Mathew Wilson, Mad Shak Dance Company, and many more....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not so much fun: The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals tries to put the opposition to gay marriage on a scholarly, non-bigoted, non-religious basis. Co-editors Robert George of Princeton and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago present eleven papers delivered at a Princeton conference in December 2004. “We are moving from this natural, universal model to a greater embrace of what I call ‘disembodied procreation’ in same-sex unions, where sperm and egg meet only in a Petri dish and foreplay is a legal contract....

“Rock star” Scotty Iseri and his longtime roommate, known only as Tim the Roadie, get off some good lines in this cabaret version of a stadium show. Iseri’s satirical songs can be funny, especially “I’m Sorry, Mr. President (I Just Fucked Your Daughter).” And the one number that pulls out all the stops, with Tim puffing away on his cigarette in lieu of a fog machine and Iseri prancing around in red pleather pants, is endearingly clunky....

The Fall was featured on John Peel’s radio show more than any other band, recording 24 sessions between 1978 and 2004. Mark E. Smith, the group’s lone constant, hired and fired more than 30 musicians during that time as he leapt fearlessly from postpunk to slick college rock to sleek disco to straight-up garage rock to utterly fucked collages. The Complete Peel Sessions, the six-CD collection released last year, is the handiest one-stop documentation of those ups and downs we’re likely to get....

Anyone who tells you she can permanently shrink your pores is a big fat liar. I know because plastic surgeon Norman Leaf and registered nurse Rand Rusher told me so, and they’ve carved up enough celebrity faces to have a clue what they’re talking about. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I said I was hungry the effervescent Kate brought me a sleek ceramic platter covered with little finger foods, garnished with a fresh-picked orchid....

I have heard that diamond prices are held at an artificially high price by the De Beers company and that many Africans live a life of despair and poverty while mining diamonds. What is the truth about the diamond market? Most important, can I use it as an excuse for not buying diamond gifts for my wife? –Gregg Barr, Lenexa, Kansas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than 20 years ago journalist Edward Jay Epstein wrote the definitive expose of the diamond business, initially published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982 and subsequently as a book, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds....

Wendy Liebman, whose broad smile and imposing jaw conjure the spotlighted cartoon mopper at the end of The Carol Burnett Show, doesn’t tie up loose ends with her punch lines–she tangles them. “I ate at a family restaurant tonight. Apparently not a family known for its cooking.” “I dated a musician for three years. He would play his songs for me on the phone. Or maybe he was putting me on hold....

T.U.T.A. (The Utopian Theatre Ensemble) performs Philip Dawkins’s new play about a love triangle set in a town inundated by rain for nine years. Dawkins’s ability to both incorporate and mock the conventions of classical Japanese theater (and briefly, Samuel Beckett’s Play) is initially promising. The cast assembled by director Zeljko Djukich is skillful, particularly Jeremy Glickstein as a self-absorbed prince buffeted by his passions and Jacqueline Stone as a woman whose unrequited love leads her to acts both selfless and monstrous....

Brothers Frank and John Navin have always adulterated their breezy pop with a dose of black humor, but on the Aluminum Group’s new Morehappyness (Wishing Tree) they make the search for love sound not just futile but outright destructive. On “Little Boy” John plays the part of an obsessed ex-boyfriend, singing, “Love is a switch you turn on then off / When I broke the door in, you called the cops....

Bertolt Brecht’s fable about a wise fool of a judge who must decide whether a child belongs to the nasty aristocrat who bore him or the sweet but plucky maid who raised him certainly calls for an inventive production. But Jennifer Leavitt’s staging for Speaking Ring Theatre Company is more busy than imaginative. An air of frenzied desperation hangs about this eager-to-please show, virtually stuffed with devices of one sort or another: choreography, stylized acting, masks, metatheatrical clowning....

Most writers would have given the well-known Hatfield-McCoy feud a light treatment, but House Theatre playwright Shawn Pfautsch uses it as a jumping-off point for a full-fledged Shakespearean tragedy. Others might have traded in hillbilly stereotypes, but he produces a nuanced portrait of Appalachians that would have made James Agee proud. Though Pfautsch fiddles with the facts to make a better story, its bare bones are true: a McCoy girl and Hatfield boy fall in love, which adds fuel to the fire of a long, bloody battle between the families....

Guitarist Jeff Parker is both a key contributor to Tortoise’s shape-shifting, coloristic avant-rock and a thoughtful jazz improviser, most notably in the Chicago Underground collective. The Relatives (Thrill Jockey), his second solo album, marks the first time he’s truly merged those two approaches. For his 2003 solo debut, Like-Coping, Parker led a trio, but here he’s added New York keyboardist Sam Barsheshet, whose Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric piano give the music some springy depth and more harmonic refractions....

Music Box booker Brian Andreotti says that of all the classic comedians, the Marx Brothers are the theater’s biggest draw. From Sunday, December 25, through Saturday, December 31, the venue (3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604) will screen six features tracing the brothers’ brilliant career from 1931, when they arrived in Hollywood after two successful film adaptations of their Broadway shows, through 1938, when they lost their way. One ticket lets you watch any two movies that are screening back-to-back, so if you need to get away from your crazy family, you can kill several hours with theirs....

The local duo NUMBER NONE refer to their albums as “annual retorts,” echoing the title of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report, and like that group they’ve recorded plenty of doomy soundscapes. Compared to TG’s cruelly analytical provocations, though, Number None’s sharp-edged feedback formations, layered field recordings, and melancholy acoustic ruminations have been naive and insular, happily absorbed in themselves; Chris Miller and Jeremy Bushnell have plunged into their varied sound worlds like kids who’ve just learned how to jump off the diving board....

When she was about 12, painter Margot Bergman learned a valuable lesson for an artist: “I could be whole without other people.” She grew up in the only Jewish family in Paxton, Illinois (a town of about 3,500), in the late 1930s and 1940s. Her father started manufacturing brooms there in 1937, when she was three, and though she remembers her ten years in Paxton as mostly happy, in eighth grade something terrible happened....

Drummer Paul Lytton and violinist Philipp Wachsmann are two of the most important and singular figures to emerge from England’s free-improv scene. Lytton, a key collaborator with Evan Parker since the late 60s and a longtime member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra, was one of the first European percussionists to ignore time, but thanks to his early experiences in big bands there’s still a propulsive quality to his playing–a dry, often frenetic clatter that ranges across a broad palette of textures....

Aleksandra Hodowany was finishing up a film degree at Columbia College when she landed a job as a photographer for a small local modeling agency. But after just three weeks she started thinking there was something strange about the operation. “We were taking pictures of people who were overweight, gangbangers, older people,” she says, and charging them around $300 for the privilege. “The owner would have these fake fashion shows with the models at nightclubs....