Teatro Luna’s work, which explores Latinas’ inner lives and the outer social pressures on them, keeps getting deeper and more engaging. This probadita–taste–of the ensemble’s views on sex, presented in monologues and short scenes, is original and occasionally shattering, especially an abortion monologue performed without sentimentality by Dana Cruz. Miranda Gonzalez is bitterly wry as a phone sex operator in bits threaded throughout the evening: she tries to convince herself she’s only acting as she handles increasingly creepy clients....

On August 17, 2000, Piero Procaccini flopped. He had scored a slot in Improv-Olympic’s Slugfest series of solo performances, and he was excited about his piece–a serious and, he felt, moving exploration of life after death. Because he figured that everything goes black when you die, he decided to perform the show with the lights off. He stood still in the dark while prerecorded monologues he’d performed in the character of various people speaking from beyond the grave played....

Marsha Norman’s powerful Pulitzer-winning 1983 drama focuses on a final conversation between Thelma, an elderly small-town widow, and her middle-aged daughter Jessie, who’s decided to kill herself. As Thelma tries to convince Jessie that even an unfulfilled life is worth living, they find themselves speaking openly for the first time about their own experiences, including their unhappy marriages and their relationship with each other. Norman’s stark, candid, yet sometimes oddly humorous dialogue keeps the audience in suspense–will Jessie shoot herself?...

Riding the zeitgeist like Slim Pickens on his nuclear steed, Striding Lion InterArts Workshop remounts its hit mini rock opera, inspired by the eponymous Frank Zappa operetta on 1972’s Just Another Band From L.A. The group-conceived script expands the narrative–about an anthropomorphic mountain and his cross-country trek–expertly introducing echoes of WWII boosterism, duck-and-cover 50s propaganda, and today’s color-coded fearmongering to Zappa’s Nixon-era satire, suggesting that some methods of red-white-and-blue social control never change....

Soul and blues fans know Bobby “Slim” James best for “I Really Love You,” recorded for the Karol label in 1968 and then covered by Jimmy Burns–both versions are collector’s items. Since then James has worked steadily, mostly on the south and west sides of Chicago, but he didn’t record again until 2000’s Beyond the Blues (Annie G) and hasn’t recorded since. On that record James sings like a true house-wrecker, especially on ballads like “Keeper of My Flame” and “Low Down,” where his breathy vibrato, constricted gargles, and falsetto moans suggest both vulnerability and desire....

On his early visits to Chicago, Swedish acoustic guitarist David Stackenas was equally persuasive strumming suave Fred Katz tunes with Fred Lonberg-Holm and plucking spidery Derek Bailey-style interval leaps with the Pipeline ensemble. But he’s really blown me away with the range of ideas and techniques on the albums he’s released in the past couple years. On Blues (Atavistic), an explosive and intimate duo with saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and Gubbrora (Psi), a stormy but marvelously nuanced concert recording with pianist Sten Sandell and the Parker-Guy-Lytton trio, Stackenas plays everything from atomized fingerpicked splatter to resonant hums and glassy swells generated with EBows and small electric fans....

Emil Beaulieau–aka Ron Lessard of the RRRecords label in Lowell, Massachusetts–is a noise nerd so excited about his record collection that he’s worked it into his hyperactive performances. Beaulieau’s version of active listening involves playing his favorite noise albums (his “children,” some of which he rubs with sandpaper or dirt, covers with paint, or nicks with razor blades) on a four-armed turntable called the Minutoli. Every arm is a different grade, from child’s toy to hi-fi; some he’s fixed in place to play locked grooves, so that something like a beat emerges from the hurricane, while another he uses like a wand to tap on the vinyl....

TinFish Theatre offers a dull rendition of Neil Simon’s silly comic fable about a village cursed for 200 years with stupidity. Only a few performers go beyond mere competence to provide a few laughs: Dustin Ayers as the eager schoolmaster who can break the curse, Joan McClive as the simpleminded girl whose love keeps him from leaving despite the risk he’ll turn into a dunderhead, and Lucas Schuneman as the schoolmaster’s rival in love....

Public Transportation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite having lived in Chicago for nearly a decade, I find myself engaging in decidedly non-native activities during the holidays, like venturing downtown on Sundays, waiting in line for Garrett’s caramel corn, and riding the trolley. It’ll take you to Navy Pier all year, but between Thanksgiving and New Year’s the city adds routes to schlep people from Ogilvie and Union stations to the Mag Mile and the museum campus as well....

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a Yorkshire miner (John Lynch) and his wife (Samantha Morton) regretfully sell their beautiful collie to a local duke (Peter O’Toole) who takes it to northern Scotland. This turn of events grieves their young son (Jonathan Mason), but the dog escapes and makes its way home. Like the MGM classic Lassie Come Home, this handsome 2005 English feature was adapted from the novel by Eric Knight, and it’s a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Weather.com is telling me that Sunday will be yet another fine-ass Indian Summer day, which means there is little reason to miss the big outdoor party at the MCA that afternoon. It’s our last real chance this year to stand around outside watching bands while drinking at an irresponsibly early hour. I’m sure it’ll spark some reminiscing among friends about all the other times this summer that they’ve stood around watching bands and drinking....

An Inconvenient Truth The film intercuts this gripping scientific argument with episodes from Gore’s life that explain his commitment to the issue: in college he learned that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere trap infrared rays, as a young congressman he tried to call attention to the growing threat, he nearly lost his young son in a traffic accident and realized how precarious life could be, the death from lung cancer of his older sister, a heavy smoker, taught him that self-destructive behavior has to be changed as early as possible....

Dorado Restaurant Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At DORADO RESTAURANT in Albany Park, chef Luis Perez applies the French bistro cooking techniques he learned under Jack Jones (as chef de cuisine at Jack’s American Blend and Bistro Marbuzet and sous-chef at Daniel J’s) to the Mexican food his mother cooked when he was growing up. Perez says he’s been “experimenting with different ways to combine ingredients....

Laura Letinsky: Hardly More Than Ever Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shot between 1997 and 2004, her series of 31 untitled C-prints makes no show of documenting turn-of-the-century revelry: Letinsky is not telling us that she loves to entertain and hates to clean up. Yet “Hardly More Than Ever” seems to savor ruins graced by morning window light in the interval between her guests’ departure and her housekeeper’s arrival....

Dear Readers: A few weeks back, Laughing at Myself Now suggested that I ask my readers to send in letters detailing their childhood misconceptions about sex. It sounded like a good way to lighten my workload, allowing me to get out of the office and enjoy some of this global warming stuff I’ve been hearing about, so I invited readers to send in stories. When I was seven, one of my friends tenaciously held to the theory that babies were made when a man urinated into a woman’s mouth....

Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinema Godard’s eight-part, 264-minute video Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), conceived and made over 20 years, has fared better, but it’s still pretty hard to come by. The only version ever sold in France is a lousy mono video transfer; a package of CDs and books in several languages transcribing major portions of the stereo sound track came out here years ago. The only decent copy of the entire work that’s available is a set of subtitled Japanese DVDs....

Friday 11 THE MAE SHI, THE SHOW IS THE RAINBOW A review in the Austinist called LA band The Mae Shi a bunch of “dilettantes” and meant it as a compliment. It’s as fair a summation as any: their latest hit-and-run album, Heartbeeps (5 Rue Christine), is as short (ten songs in just under 16 minutes) as their attention span, but almost every note they hit is golden, or at least glittery....

Choreographer Sara Wookey has had a foot in two worlds for a while. An American, she moved to Amsterdam in the mid-90s and moved back to the United States a decade later–Los Angeles, in fact, so the U.S. in spades. Long interested in the effect physical spaces have on an individual’s kinesthetic sense, she started thinking about being a pedestrian in a city where everyone drives: bombarded with imagery, especially the giant billboards, she felt small and undefined and looked for places that mirrored her own loss of identity....

The booklet for One and Many (Sub Rosa), the most recent album by Polish-born, Japan-based sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski, doesn’t include any information on the source material he used, but where he winds up is ultimately more important than where he started. In the past he’s pulled sounds from a Kyoto temple, digital data transmissions, and a traditional symphony, but he rarely leaves them intact: his electronic processing transforms everything into a deeply physical experience, with noises and rumbles attacking the body like an aggressive masseur....

Set in Port Elizabeth during the advent of apartheid, Athol Fugard’s 1982 drama depicts a horrible coming-of-age: a teenage Afrikaner turns on two black servants, better fathers to him than his drunken dad, and insists they call him Master Harold instead of Hally. A parable without preaching, the script exposes the fears and frailties that spawn racism and reveals the bigot’s isolation, cut off from his best nature–and here from his best friends....