In these two one-acts, promising young playwright Matt Fotis delivers smart, funny dialogue and honest observation of diverse characters. The weak Shantz Theatre cast, however, undermines the zaniness of The Zebra Baby, in which newlyweds take an odd route to decide to have a baby, and the intricacy of The Van Gogh Exhibit, a nonlinear work introducing interrelated characters in various settings. Here each actor plays at least two or three people, but only Fotis, Scott Danielson, and Sadieh Rifai fully differentiate them; the costuming also makes it difficult to distinguish the shifts in character....

Marquee Moon, Television’s 1977 debut, has a well-deserved reputation as one of the all-time great rock ‘n’ roll albums: it’s a perfect mix of killer hooks, poetically gritty lyrics, and incendiary, gorgeous guitar interplay. That made it a tough act to follow, and though most of Tom Verlaine’s solo releases contain songs that match Television’s best, his career away from the band has been a commercial bust. He hasn’t played Chicago on his own since 1988, and until a month ago he hadn’t put out a new record since 1992....

Even if the postapocalyptic world of the future runs out of more than just oil and freshwater–if, for instance, there’s somehow a shortage of musical notes–this Seattle robot-punk band will be all set. Using only a few basic materials–simple, almost affectless vocal melodies, squared-off guitar and bass lines that repeat in blocks of two or four, and methodical, brutally minimal tom-heavy drum patterns–the A Frames assemble bleak, ugly, perversely catchy songs with an economy of gesture and inflection that’d make the guys on Iron Chef absolutely green....

The main thing Jeff Griggs remembers from his first visit to Del Close’s apartment is the overpowering stench. “Cat feces and rotting food permeated the air,” Griggs writes in his new memoir, Guru: My Days With Del Close. “The odor of garbage that had been piling up in and around the trash receptacle became the dominating fragrance.” And underneath it all was a funkier smell he couldn’t quite identify at first....

Guy Benson is the kind of 19-year-old who has contacts at the Pentagon and refers to himself as being “on the record” in support of Social Security privatization. He’s operations manager of Northwestern’s radio station, WNUR, where he’s also one of the conservative hosts of the political debate show Feedback, and for the past three summers he’s interned at Fox News. Eventually Guy identified the station as WNUR, and himself as a college student....

Peter Krinke and Michael McKeown’s “comedic play” begins with a motley assortment of characters crammed into an old-fashioned bomb shelter. The tale of how they got there gets told in flashback and involves naive scientists, corporate greedheads, unscrupulous government officials, beautiful women, and the “cosmetic imperative” to all be as good-looking as possible. The story is embellished with funny faces, unfunny dialects, and both canned and original music. Shrill silliness might have been the result, but it’s not....

dB’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kicking off with a tune like this is exactly the sort of eager overreaching that made the dB’s the most exciting power-pop band of the early 80s. Even now the group’s first two albums–Stands for Decibels (1981) and Repercussion (1982)–explode with ambition, delivering impeccably crafted songs and adventurous production. Stamey and Holsapple, childhood friends in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, divided the songwriting in half and played a stunning game of musical one-upmanship, Holsapple leaning toward upbeat pop and Stamey toward eerily experimental sounds....

In 2000, shortly before he left Chicago for New York University’s MFA program, poet Quraysh Ali Lansana was chatting with his friend Zahra Baker about Harriet Tubman. They knew that the abolitionist had suffered from narcolepsy due to a childhood blow to the head, and wondered whether God had talked to the deeply religious Tubman whenever she passed out. “Zahra and I theorized,” says Lansana, “that that’s how Harriet received the guidance to do what she needed to do....

Forget the argument about how keeping up with the news is a civic duty. If you live in Chicago and don’t read the papers you’re missing out on one of the joys of life. Most cities have one daily paper, and it probably thinks of itself as a utility like the water works, bland and inoffensive. In Chicago there are two metropolitan dailies (and others in the suburbs). Reporters here compete by one-upping each other....

Ronald K. Brown’s Come Ye is a celebratory work on a sorrowful subject: slavery. Inspired by artist-activists, his suite of dances is set to music by Nina Simone and Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti; it ends with a video montage of American civil rights demonstrations and early figureheads of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali. In the final section the eight dancers make a gradual passage from one side of the stage to the other that suggests a return to Africa–especially given Kuti’s propulsive rhythms and the choreography’s African moves....

Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica) His new book, Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica), is an ambitious thing, at once memoir, search for identity, and bitch fest about the society that makes that search both imperative and damn near impossible. The speaker of these poems is, like Coval, a Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs. More suburban than Jewish, he wandered that desert alone until, in the 1980s, he discovered KRS-One and Jam Master Jay and, he writes, putting a Jewish spin on Afrika Bambaataa, “breakbeats let my g-dSelf loose....

Bill Gross: Monochrome Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Born in Omaha in 1955, Gross was hooked by reproductions of Cezanne in high school and has since painted in a variety of modes, from Stuart Davis-inspired abstractions to the Hairy Who style to still lifes to abstractions “leaning toward surrealism.” But since 1993, inspired by the Chicago skyline seen from the roof of his building, he’s painted cityscapes....

Sepia Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Opening hype can strain any restaurant, but Emmanuel Nony’s month-old Sepia, just around the corner from Blackbird, is holding up quite well. Creative chef Kendal Duque (Everest, Tru, NoMi) is running the kitchen, and out front savvy servers seem happy to be there. The total redo of an 1890 print shop–in shades of black and sepia with sage and burgundy accents–gives vintage furnishings new life, among them reupholstered Knoll chairs by Bill Stephens and ornate chandeliers encircled by sheets of Mylar....

Do you remember the hostage crisis in Iran? Could you explain it to somebody who didn’t? The teenagers of the Free Street ensemble found that their teachers couldn’t when they began searching for the reasons behind the hostility that led to the World Trade Center bombing. So they started looking at Iranian-American relations from 1953 to the present day. The resulting jointly devised script, directed by Robert Karimi, is a compact mosaic of gritty facts and satirical impressions, didactic reports and lyrical images, augmented by videotaped interviews with the hostages and personal accounts by the performers themselves....

Robert M. Katzman first showed up in the pages of the Reader back in 1977. He was the 27-year-old owner of three newsstands and an upstart periodicals-distribution company who had taken on the giant Charles Levy Circulating Company in a David-and-Goliath antitrust suit that lasted four years and ended with Levy buying him out. Katzman’s next business was the Grand Tour World Travel Bookstore on North Clark, which he acquired just before the national chains came to town....

Last night Iranian kemence (spike fiddle) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and the Turkish baglama player Erdal Erzincan delivered an astonishing performance at the Old Town School of Folk Music, improvising on the loose themes of their recent album, The Wind. Though it’s not really fair to compare the two musicians–Erzincan’s instrument, a twangy, long-necked lute, is more limited than the kemence–but Kalhor was the more magnetic and dynamic participant. His ability to embroider simple melodic motifs and shadow his partner’s solos with ghostly harmonics was remarkable, as usual; whether he was plucking piquant little pizzicato licks or altering the tautness of his bow to change the tone of his lines, Kalhor’s technical mastery never upstaged his inventiveness....

Considering its age and overt educational and patriotic aims, Esther Forbes’s 1943 young-adult novel, about an apprentice silversmith who becomes swept up in the American Revolution, is remarkably subtle and effective. Adapter John Hildreth and director Katie McLean have improved on it, trimming the story to fit within two hours onstage without sacrificing either the carefully constructed plot or Forbes’s gift for making even the most familiar historical figures–John Hancock, Sam Adams–quirky and memorable....

For months I considered the Killers my arch-nemeses. Brandon Flowers, the front man of these adorably misnamed neo-new wavers, queasily voices both sexual repression and tawdry libertinism–hardly a surprising trait in a Mormon boy from Vegas. The almost dirty “rhyme” of “my stomach is sick” and “she’s touching his chest” that leads into the chorus of “Mr. Brightside” indicates the sort of attraction-repulsion attitude about naughtiness I outgrew at 16. But the silly video for the song, in which Eric Roberts plays the incarnation of lewd malevolence, softened me up: if Flowers’s lyrics reflect all the emotional development of a 15-year-old, well, 15-year-olds deserve some pop razzle-dazzle too....

The Major Stars have always had the power of a wrecking ball, but there’s no denying that on their last album, 4, they sounded like they’d hit a wall they couldn’t obliterate. Great as the record was, it stuck to a well-established formula: Wayne Rogers would sing a beautifully melancholy tune, which then gave way to a lengthy gale-force freak-out. No one complained about getting more of something so fine, but the time was ripe for change, and that’s just what their new Syntoptikon (Important/Twisted Village) delivers....

Zona Gale won a Pulitzer for this stage adaptation of her 1920 comic novel, about a thirtysomething woman living with her sister and domineering brother-in-law in a small town. The prize was a first for a woman, but historical curiosity is only the second-best reason to see Frank Merle’s revival for Keyhole Theatre Company, whose current season is devoted to Pulitzer winners. The best is Nicole Adelman’s performance as Lulu. The character’s insistence on being loved for herself after a lifetime of unappreciated service to others isn’t as dramatic as Nora slamming the door in A Doll’s House, but ultimately it carries genuine emotional heft....