Peggy Ward’s one-woman show, directed by John Patrick, is targeted toward mothers with young children. Her collection of anecdotes, short scenes (she plays 14 characters, from her husband to a La Leche League lactation specialist), and zinging one-liners will likely resonate with other housebound moms learning how to cope with a baby. Ward doesn’t sugarcoat motherhood: there are stories here about postbirth sex (or lack thereof) and the exhaustion and uncertainty of parenthood....

See this show for the fine performances and inventive production design, not for its plodding, incredible plot. Director Barbara Gaines leaves the ending of Shakespeare’s “comedy” open–will the virtuous Isabella take vows as a novitiate or a wife?–offering modern audiences some hope that at least one woman will find happiness outside marriage. But Gaines’s decision can’t overshadow the frustration of seeing the spurned Mariana beg to wed the villainous Angelo, a pious hypocrite who attempts to assault Isabella’s honor....

This is the kind of place where you sit back and relax, and everybody tells stories. Here’s the one I’ve been telling recently: I was on vacation in Belize, where they have a primate reserve. I had broken away from the group and gone off by myself when I accidentally disturbed a colony of howler monkeys–babies and mothers–on the ground. The babies started screaming, the male came charging through the trees, and all the monkeys started throwing fruit and twigs and monkey doo-doo at me....

Fifteen years ago Loyola University communications instructor Craig Kois helped lead a groundbreaking effort to change WLUW, the school’s standard-issue music station, into community radio. As Kois explained the concept to the Reader in 1995: “We decided that somehow we should be serving the community that was receiving our signal. Our ultimate goal is to engage the community and train them to produce their own work. Students then become not reporters but facilitators....

My boyfriend let me experiment on him with a strap-on. At first he didn’t like it, but now he loves it. Now I want to have sex with another guy and watch him suck a real cock. How can I get him to try this? –Pretty Eager Gal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can’t bring myself to answer any more letters this week....

On Friday, August 5, almost a month after the deadly tube and bus bombings in London, someone left a green suitcase on the el platform at North and Damen. An officer at the scene radioed in a request for a supervisor and described the unattended piece of luggage, answering the dispatcher’s specific questions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The big deal, according to this cop, a combat veteran, was that the officer clearly had been looking at the suitcase while describing it; if the suitcase had contained a bomb, he says, the officer at the scene and everything around him could have been blown to smithereens: “When you’re standing near an explosive, a radio transmission can produce an electrical current that could set off the blasting cap....

Since the first reports of Chicago police torture surfaced a quarter century ago the list has swelled to nearly 200 cases involving dozens of public employees—and still no one has been prosecuted. Now, with the results of a four-year, multimillion dollar investigation due any day, here’s a guide by staff reporter John Conroy to the key figures in the scandal. Some of them may look familiar. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Mannerist film antiquarian Guy Maddin takes a bold step forward with this 2003 feature, a comic/melodramatic musical enhanced by his flair for expressionist studio shooting (in grainy black and white, with selected scenes in two-strip Technicolor). The project originated as a script by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro; revising extensively, Maddin and George Toles, his usual collaborator, turn it into an allegory about Canada’s colonial relationship with the U.S. In the depths of the Depression, a Winnipeg beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini) launches an international contest to come up with “the saddest music in the world....

I keep hearing about the Armenian genocide that happened early in the 20th century. The Turkish have done a good job of denial, and there doesn’t seem to be that much public recognition of the deed. So, what’s the real scoop–genocide or not? –monkeykarma, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It tells you something about human nature and the century just past that the typical response to this question is: What Armenian genocide?...

Geoff Ryman’s exquisite 1992 novel Was, which purports to tell the “real story” behind The Wizard of Oz, has been sensitively adapted for the stage by composer Joseph Thalken and librettist Barry Kleinbort as the inaugural production of Northwestern University’s American Music Theatre Project. Ryman’s tricky narrative charts the intersecting journeys of two lost souls: Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gael, a sexually abused orphan whose chance encounters with L. Frank Baum inspire his classic fantasy, and Jonathan Wood, a Hollywood actor dying of AIDS whose fascination with the Oz myth leads him on a quest to comprehend Dorothy’s troubled life–and his own....

Better Propaganda Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s a visual record of what it felt like to be there,” Orland says of the largely wordless collection of scenes, which begins with a juxtaposition of the center and the nation’s capitol and includes a massive procession and a string of dances; the music’s by Peter Buffett (who scored portions of Dances With Wolves) and the group AO....

Documentarian Tod Lending has crossed the line between observer and participant a few times in his career, most recently a year and a half ago. He was in the middle of shooting his latest film, about two men who’d been in and out of prison, and one of his subjects, Leon Omar Mason, told him he was $85 short on rent. “I thought, well, if I don’t do anything I’m going to want to go and film him getting kicked out of his house and show that this is part of the struggle of reentering the community, trying to make it, blah blah blah,” Lending says....

Easing the Inevitable Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With a new license, Halperin says, fees might be a little lower (currently they start at $385 and can be waived for nonprofits). Zoning interpretations are still under discussion, but anyone hoping for a break on the building code can forget it. “The mission in this round was not to change the code requirements,” she says....

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn but discovered his quintessentially American open and spacious sound in Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger. He wrote everything from art songs to ballet scores to symphonic works, among them the infrequently performed but magnificent Quiet City, the first work on this program. Only 11 minutes long, it originally served as incidental music for an experimental 1939 Irwin Shaw play about a city at night and a musician whose trumpet expresses for him what his voice cannot....

Irvine Welsh presents a pretty bleak view of human nature in his latest novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (Norton). Young and handsome Danny Skinner is a drinking, brawling, womanizing Edinburgh restaurant inspector consumed by the need to find the father he’s never known. His nemesis is his polar opposite, coworker Brian Kibby, a skinny, shy, awkward misfit who loses himself in video games and model trains. Skinner hates Kibby....

This is the Bears’ town, and a baseball fan might as well tell the sun not to rise as argue otherwise. From the moment their training camp opens in July the Bears tend to dominate the city’s sports coverage, which this summer has been especially galling for White Sox fans, whose team seems playoff bound and entered this week with the American League’s best record. Sox fans fully expect the Cubs to dominate normal baseball coverage, but when the Sox play as they have this season they take an ascendant position in the daily sports sections–ascendant except for the Bears, that is....

Has architecture been made the scapegoat for the failures of public housing in Chicago? Not exactly, says Roberta Feldman. “It’s more serious than that. It’s been used to mask failed government policy. And now it’s being used to conduct another grand experiment on the poor.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Feldman, who teaches architecture at UIC and codirects its City Design Center, has been involved in public housing issues since 1987, when Northeastern Illinois University sociologist Susan Stall invited her to participate in a conference on women and housing....

Little Arthur Duncan is a throwback to a time before blues was elevated to the status of folk art–when it was still mainstream entertainment in working-class black communities. Born in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1934, Duncan migrated to Chicago when he was 16. He cites harp maestro Little Walter as a mentor, but his unburnished style is about as far from Walter’s jazz-influenced progressivism as can be: his tone cuts like a blast of winter wind, and his improvisations tear a swath through the middle of a melody rather than embellishing it or prodding it in new directions....

Steppenwolf mounted this play in 1985, and I’m still not over it. Honestly. As directed by Gary Sinise, Lyle Kessler’s unassuming tale of two nearly feral brothers and the mysterious businessman who befriends them was and remains among the most devastating things I’ve seen onstage. Now, only 21 years later, the RiMeChi Theatre Company dares debut with Orphans. And? The problem isn’t just that RiMeChi’s version doesn’t measure up to Steppenwolf’s....

Much of the outside attention paid to Minneapolis’s burgeoning hip-hop scene has been focused on the success of Atmosphere, which has been both a help and a hindrance to Stef Alexander, better known as rapper P.O.S. He spent several years quite literally in the group’s shadow, doing stints as their hype man and frequently opening shows to huge crowds, but P.O.S. didn’t want to just be the guy doing props ‘n’ drops....