August Strindberg’s early exercise in naturalism gets a muscular new voice in Christopher Grobe’s adaptation for the Organic Theater. Aside from a few locutions that are too modern, Grobe makes Strindberg’s occasionally overwrought passages hum. Ina Marlowe’s spare, elegant staging for Organic’s intimate space allows us to hear the unspoken tensions between the neurasthenic title character and her father’s groom, Jean. Ryan Kitley is particularly fine, capturing this complicated, vicious, foppish servant who justifiably believes that he deserves more than his current lot in life....

Red Scare Seeing a Second City show during the troupe’s first 15 years was a little like joining Alice on a trip through the looking glass. Founded in December 1959 in reaction to the Eisenhower era, when a false complacency masked social divisions, the Old Town-based comedy cabaret reflected a clear-cut line between mainstream and alternative cultures. Later its comic sensibility evolved from hip drollness to rowdy rebellion. In the years of civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, Second City’s running theme seemed to be: Things are fucked up....

Downstate near the Mississippi River there’s an old house that used to belong to my family. It’s a small clapboard house built in the classic heartland style, with a big yard, lush gardens, and the inevitable white picket fence out front. It stood on the outskirts of Edwardsville, right where the last streets gave way to open countryside. It is–or at least it used to be–a beautiful place. When you looked out from the porch on a summer’s day, you had an unbroken view of meadows and fields and remote blue hills shimmering in the golden heat....

“The Republicans’ secret weapon is your credit card bill” [“What Does the GOP Know About You?” October 27]. Nothing gets a news story off on the wrong foot better than a bald-faced lie. Visa does not sell credit card bills to anyone, as I’m sure you know. It sells names, addresses, and phone numbers of customers who fit specified purchasing and other demographic criteria, at worst. The important distinction should be obvious....

I know this is a little late, but I want to complain about watching Brokeback Mountain in a theater full of gay people. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or maybe, ASIF, Jack and Ennis’s predicament seems faintly ridiculous to liberated gay men who, naturally enough, regard the Tortured Homo Routine–from Giovanni’s Room to Fame to Brokeback Mountain–as more laughable than tragic. Or maybe you had the misfortune of seeing Brokeback in a room full of vapid LA faggots who wouldn’t know an honest emotion if it blew a three-day load down their throats....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ruben Beltran, who worked for years with Rick Bayless at Frontera Grill, has opened Maya del Sol, his own spot in Oak Park, in the space once occupied by the late and not-at-all lamented Slaton’s Supper Club. A more complete review is forthcoming, but on our first visit, we concluded: it rocks! Though I was ready for missteps in what superficially seems a trendy scene (by Oak Park standards), the food struck me as authentic and delicious....

At age 14 Sharrie Williams appeared on an album by the Soul Choir; a few years later, in the late 80s, she toured as a featured soloist with the Greater Williams Temple Inspirational Voices, a choir based at her church in Saginaw, Michigan. She even cut a record with that group that was produced by fabled gospel singer Mattie Moss Clark. But in the mid-90s, after she’d drifted away from the church and stopped singing (she was “having problems in [her] life,” she explains), she turned to the blues to start over....

She Fought the RIAA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baker stressed two points as he argued the case in October. First, he argued that the summary judgment was improper because Gonzalez has a constitutional right to have a jury determine what damages, if any, are due. Judge Frank Easterbrook, who wrote the court’s opinion, disagreed. “Where there are no disputes of material fact the court may enter summary judgment without transgressing the Constitution,” he wrote....

FRANK’S HOME | GOODMAN THEATRE INFO 312-443-3800 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nelson is clearly interested in the dichotomy between Wright’s dysfunctional personality and his towering cultural legacy. How could such magnificent achievements as Chicago’s Robie House, Oak Park’s Unity Temple, and New York’s Guggenheim Museum have come from such a bitter, closed mind? Despite Peter Weller’s charismatic lead performance, the answer to Nelson’s question remains elusive in his generic, sometimes contrived “Portrait of the Artist as an Aging SOB....

I am wondering if it’s true that there are, or were, inbred families or communities that live(d) in the Ozark Mountains. Was it just the movie Deliverance that led people to believe that? –Josh from Montreal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What you’re thinking of is the Appalachian Mountains, which extend nearly 2,000 miles from Alabama to Newfoundland and encompass the Chattooga watershed. Northerners, evidently including Canadians, figure the southern end of the range is crammed with mental defectives, an assumption worth examining....

Chris Eigeman, a key actor in the movies of Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach, finally gets to show his range in this romantic comedy, adapted from Daniel Menaker’s first novel. The tone is set in the opening scene, when Eigeman’s character, who teaches English and coaches basketball at a Manhattan prep school, runs into an ex-girlfriend. “Are you seeing anybody?” she asks. “I mean therapy. Are you seeing a shrink?” In fact he’s engaged in Freudian psychoanalysis with a comically punitive Argentinean (Ian Holm), and when he gets involved with a wealthy widow (Famke Janssen), both the shrink sessions and the movie shift into high gear....

On a hot July afternoon in 1998 the mostly naked body of 11-year-old Ryan Harris was found in an isolated backyard in Englewood. She’d been missing for a day. Her face was battered and covered with blood, her mouth stuffed with a pair of underpants. A folded leaf was in each nostril. After detectives and prosecutors interrogated Durr they wrote in their reports that he denied killing Ryan but admitted masturbating near her corpse and said he’d been drawn to the backyard when he saw two “shorties” leaving it....

White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan (Third Man/V2) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most obvious drawback, as Sasha Frere-Jones noted in the New Yorker, is that the sound of the record is “muddy and obscured, as if recorded in a room covered with wet felt.” What’s more (or less), Jack White has matched that muffle by putting a damper on his talents. On the Stripes’ last album, 2003’s Elephant, his loud and wild electric guitar helped advance the group past their backwoods amateur shtick, but here he relegates his ax to only three cuts, trading it in for acoustic guitar, piano, and marimba, all of which he plays competently–but no more....

Sara Gruen’s fascination with Depression-era traveling circuses began in early 2003, when she came across a photo by Edward J. Kelty in the Chicago Tribune of a bearded lady, the world’s tiniest man, and a host of other circus regulars. In the 20s and 30s, the article said, Kelty had built his own cameras to take panoramic shots of circuses. Gruen immediately ordered a book of his images and soon was working out the narrative for a novel about a ragtag “mud show,” an old term for a circus–the wheels of the wagons that carried the animals once they were off the train often got stuck in the mud....

Poor David Rakoff–his name is forever hopelessly twinned with that of his gayer, more famous, France-dwelling friend David Sedaris. It’s a fair comparison, to some degree: both traffic in wry, self-deprecating essays that twist meaning from minutiae; both made names for themselves contributing to This American Life; both are mildly, unashamedly self-absorbed. But where Sedaris famously mined a stint as a Macy’s elf for all manner of misanthropic shtick, Rakoff manages to turn the tale of a Christmas gig as Sigmund Freud in a Barney’s window into a meditation on the importance of companionship, communication, and the quest for love....

NDrag | Two “straight-ish” male cross-dressers, one confirmed drag queen, one drag king, and a gorgeous male-to-female transsexual strut up and down a runway, usually in gender-inappropriate clothing, in this 90-minute collaborative show conceived by Dean Evans. Wildly uneven, it can be amusing (a militaristic 80s-style aerobics session devolves into a cartoonish orgy) and moving (Gabrielle Schaffer tells killer stories). But much of it feels unfocused and undigested: the Neo-Futurists’ trademark short scenes end up suggesting unfinished stabs at therapy and incomplete intellectual analyses....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and French Cultural Services in Chicago, this festival runs Friday, December 1, through Sunday, December 10, at Facets Cinematheque. For more information call 773-281-4114; a complete schedule is available online at www.facets.org. All films are in French with subtitles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fissures A sound recordist (Emilie Dequenne of Rosetta) investigates the murder of her mother, a clairvoyant in a farming community, and discovers she can record the past as well as the present....

Steven Dietz’s 1988 docudrama about the racist Christian terrorist sect the Order, which was responsible for the 1984 slaying of Denver radio host Alan Berg, feels mighty stodgy compared to more hard-hitting documentary plays like Emily Mann’s Greensboro: A Requiem and Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project. Dietz dutifully provides the documentary portion through a barrage of exposition and courtroom testimony that makes cartoon clear just how scary the Order and other like-minded organizations are....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just about everything I’ve read about Bettie Serveert’s new album, Bare Stripped Naked (on local label Minty Fresh), argues that the veteran Dutch band, now entering its 15th year together, is little more than a group of indie-rock survivors. Supposedly they’re trudging forward in a style that went out of fashion in the late 90s, and moreover they’re constantly failing to reach the levels of their apex, 1992’s Palomine....

Montreal’s Land of Talk showcases the fine songwriting of singer-guitarist Elizabeth Powell, a former violinist from the small town of Moonstone, Ontario. She studied music for a while at Concordia University in Quebec but dropped out to play in bands, culminating in her current trio, which has opened for Montreal nabobs like the Stills and the Dears. Land of Talk’s recent debut, the seven-song EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss (Dependent Music), is one of the most solid indie releases I’ve heard all year: Powell’s voice is rough-edged but nimble and chirpy, suggesting a more naif Polly Jean Harvey, and fantastically catchy songs like “All My Friends” and “Sea Foam” are a bit reminiscent of Scrawl, with gritty guitar riffs and go-for-the-throat pop hooks....