For a brief moment in the early 1960s the world stood dangerously close to the brink of peace. But as President Kennedy negotiated limits on nuclear weapons testing in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, contractors like the Rand Corporation started to get nervous. Military planning was their bread and butter, and the cold war thaw was bad for business. Eyes on the bottom line, they decided to find new customers for their services just as city planners, having botched urban renewal, were looking for help....

Before the Patriot Act, there was Executive Order 9066. Signed into law by FDR on February 19, 1942, the order forcibly relocated 120,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps scattered across the western United States. Singapore-born playwright Chay Yew’s documentary play Question 27, Question 28 (a reference to the loyalty oath that nisei were required to sign) draws on interviews, diaries, and transcripts of oral history projects to illuminate the life of women in the camps....

What happens when the parents are the ones who run away from home? In Jessica Goldberg’s play, a young woman becomes resigned to caring for her ill-tempered invalid brother and thrill-seeking little sister, though their household is chaotic. Then she meets a likewise rootless boarder who awakens the possibility of nuclear-family stability. The story, told in a bare 80 minutes, relies heavily on the actors’ interpretation to lend its abrupt resolution credibility, and the opening-night performances fell slightly short of the necessary subtextual amplification....

Renegade Handmade Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Old friends Kathleen Habbley and Sue Blatt used to talk about opening a vintage store–but instead they ended up starting the Renegade Craft Fair, which in the past four years has become a late-summer must-hit for anyone remotely associated with the DIY revolution. Last weekend they opened Renegade Handmade, their first permanent location, and they’ve folded their interest in vintage duds back into the equation....

Secretly Canadian recently issued The Novelist, the 2003 album by Angeleno Richard Swift, together with a disc of new material, Walking Without Effort, as the two-CD set The Collection Vol. 1. The title’s a bit presumptuous (Richard who?), and the liner notes don’t offer much insight into the man’s background. But after listening to the set half a dozen times I’m not terribly offended. Swift is an elegant, earthy pop songwriter a la 70s art-pop mavens like Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, and Harry Nilsson, couching sophisticated melodies in sublime arrangements....

I’m working with Wikipedia, where we’re currently debating the “Donkey Punch,” i.e., fucking someone in the ass, then punching them hard in the back of the head or neck so that the sudden pain and/or unconsciousness causes the asshole to constrict spasmodically. Some editors have said the article should specify just how risky and possibly even criminal it is. A statement about the physical and legal risks of the Donkey Punch should come from a reputable source....

Although we have just marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 75th birthday, Will Kelley’s encounter at Stroger Hospital [“Bad Medicine,” January 16] is a sad reminder that inequities, in this case health care inequities, still endure. While the administrator on duty expressed frustration over patients having to wait days for the hospital to fill their prescriptions, a practice that she recognized has occurred in the past, sentiments alone will not help the Hispanic man described by Mr....

You go to most art fairs for the fair, not the art. It’s fun to be out in the street on a sunny day, committing trans fat suicide and watching the people. But who needs a five-by-five-foot faux-pointillist portrait of Marilyn Monroe? The Around the Coyote Fall Arts Festival can’t entirely eliminate the ugly, the stupid, the incompetent, the dull, and the sofa-sized. It can, however, maximize your chances of avoiding them....

As in Wilford Leach’s acclaimed 1981 production, later a film, director William Osetek soft-pedals Gilbert and Sullivan’s operatic score. But if you neutralize the music, you must dial up the comedy–and Osetek’s uninspired staging offers merely a bland story about silly, inept pirates sniffing around maidens in Victorian England. Die-hard G & S fans will note with frustration how distant modern productions are from the rich vocals of classic renditions. Even Jamie Dawn Gangi, lovely and comically sharp as ingenue Mabel, twitters coloratura passages instead of letting them soar....

What exactly was the Reader’s intention in publishing “Whatever Happened to Patsy Desmond?” [January 28] Was it outrage, compassion, or sheer fatigue Tori Marlan hoped to evoke? The story she tells of Patsy Desmond is meant to be inspiring, I suppose, based on the life’s-simple-pleasures conclusion, but I do not find myself moved. Instead, I wonder why, exactly, I am being asked from the beginning of the piece to be especially interested in the fate of Ms....

Nicholas Wright’s reenvisioning of Vincent van Gogh’s life has broad shoulders and a bigger heart, but all subtleties get washed out in Frank Pullen’s puzzling staging for the Journeymen. The opening scene, which features a flurry of kitchen activity, becomes a 20-minute cooking tutorial, complete with two characters stirring gravy. The energy devoted to superficial concerns keeps the actors from fully inhabiting their roles, and what should be a gravitational pull between Vincent and his landlady (a frigid Caroline Dodge Latta) gets lost....

In Arthur Miller’s proletarian tragedy, Eddie’s a longshoreman with a profound case of the hots for his niece, Catherine, whom he raised from childhood to her current state of ripeness. When she falls for a young immigrant, Eddie doesn’t take it well. At all. Miller’s attempt to apply Aristotelian conventions to 1950s Brooklyn backfires at times: a lawyer serving as chorus recalls no one so much as the criminologist from The Rocky Horror Picture Show....

In Triplette’s third scripted show, directed by Joe Janes, the all-female trio’s comic sensibility blossoms. This is an entertaining hour of sketches, slam poetry, shadow puppetry, and songs–it’s hard to decide which is more hilarious, an Anna Karenina ode to the tune of “Welcome to the Jungle” or foppish aristocratic rapping. There’s even haiku. The physically expressive Laura Grey still stands out, but Heather Simms and Rebecca Fox now make bigger impressions than they did: Simms’s gerbil impersonation and her bit with Fox in which they play an elderly couple taking a personality quiz are some of the evening’s highlights....

With his latest album, Modern Times (Columbia), Bob Dylan continues a trend he started with 1997’s Time Out of Mind–taking blues, country, and early-20th-century pop tunes and reshaping them to fit his own cranky, oblique, and deeply personal mold. Like Time Out of Mind and 2001’s Love and Theft, the new album is an unfussy affair that translates the loose, improvisational vibe of his live shows to the studio, and he continues to liberally draw from others for inspiration....

I feel sorry for Will Ferrell. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last Saturday I got a chance to act like a celebrity, without the prerequisite suffering. I was a guest on ImprovOlympic’s Late Night Late Show, a weekly parody of late-night talk shows. I wanted to show up in style, so I called a limo. After the show, a spiky-haired man approached me and asked, “So, you guys have a different show every week?...

Chicago Heights native Johnny Pate turned 80 in 2003, and the concert celebrating that milestone–documented on a two-CD set released in 2004 on the TNC label–tells the story of his career through the artists who took part in it. The guest list included vocalist Shirley Horn, bassist Ron Carter, pianist Monty Alexander, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and saxists James Moody and Phil Woods. All of them (and dozens more) worked with Pate during his career as a bassist, arranger, sound track composer (1973’s Shaft in Africa most notably), and producer (for ABC-Paramount in the 60s, bringing horns to Curtis Mayfield’s music)....

Gabert Farrar’s seven densely layered, labyrinthine paintings at Monique Meloche are inspired by his feelings about cities. “Anybody walking down the city street sees a jumble of cars and buildings and street lamps,” he says. “The spatial relationships in this jumble can become unclear, and you don’t know if you’re looking at backgrounds or foregrounds.” Jagged, brightly colored shapes are intended to approximate this confusion–augmented by barely legible text fragments that also encourage you to try to resolve the image....

With its focus on homophobia, anti-Muslim attacks, and the lingering ghosts of Vietnam, Naomi Wallace’s 1994 play seems the perfect candidate for revival as we’re confronted by Gulf War II and a second Bush administration. The performances are mostly excellent, yet this production directed by Dana Friedman and John Kahara (as part of Prop Thtr’s Emerging Directors Series) largely fails to ignite at either the emotional or the intellectual level. In part I suspect Wallace’s beautifully crafted but elliptical turns of phrase and dreamscape settings have been rendered quaint by the stark reality of what happened at Abu Ghraib and by the escalating body counts in Iraq....

TORTOISE | A Lazarus Taxon Tortoise’s new four-disc box set–which collects remixes by and of the band, bonus tracks, compilation appearances, and other rarities–might not seem like the best lens through which to view their accomplishments. But in some ways it’s the ideal one. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bands that have been around as long as Tortoise, especially when they’re local, are easy to take for granted....

The Bruised Orange Theater Company expects too much, asking audiences to show up three times to see all of Clint Sheffer’s episodic play–especially when the first installment is so uninspiring. The characters in this work about people forming a theater company all have their distinctive tics. But as directed by Mark Spence, the opening hour is vague and drawn out, merely introducing an egotistical playwright and his many love interests, among them a high-strung new helpmate (Caren Evers, delivering much-needed energy) and two old flames: the cofounder financing the venture (a charismatic Alison Connelly) and an anxious actress who instantly draws the attention of a kind, awkward actor....