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Plays about men staring down the fuck-you end of the golden 18-34 demographic seem to be cropping up everywhere. But Mark Young’s deceptively slight script goes further than many in what you might call the post-Neveu school of postmacho poetics. Constructed as a boy-talk dialogue in a bar, New Orleans complicates standard early-onset midlife issues by placing its characters in an urban bobo milieu. Two aspiring artists, stymied by the phoniness of both the mainstream and cultural-elite versions of late-capitalist America, try to negotiate the creeping sense that their fiery rebukes have devolved into ego-warding excuses for inaction....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Utah attorney general’s office announced on election day that it would investigate voting complaints in Daggett County, where the estimated 2005 population was 943 but 947 voters were registered this year. Meanwhile, balloting for the mayoral race in Waldenburg, Arkansas (population 80), finished in a two-way tie at 18 votes each; Randy Wooten, who came in third with zero votes, said he knew he had voted for himself and would decide whether to file a protest....

Field House Lab in its debut production, a world premiere, shows an admirable eagerness to embrace ambiguity: writer-director Gigi Buffington splinters the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a dozen stylized scenes, expanding its potential meanings. Orpheus, a singer who’s lost his voice after forsaking his true love, is in session with a saffron-garbed, chain-smoking therapist (read Hymen) who leads him on harrowing inner journeys to where the dead Eurydice–or perhaps merely Orpheus’s memory of her–awaits rescue....

Playwright David Ives is a miniaturist. Give him ten minutes or less and he’ll create a small but brilliant one-act, like some of the gems in his best-known collection of absurdist comic pieces, All in the Timing. But give him 90 minutes or more and he loses his way, as he does in this two-act semiautobiographical play about a Chicago-born Polish-American, Jasiu. Some of the scenes are ingenious, like one in which Jasiu discovers he’s invisible to a non-Polish shopkeeper....

I have been with my husband for four and a half years. I am currently very frustrated. My husband cannot maintain an erection while performing oral sex on me. He manually stimulates himself while giving me oral sex. I feel rejected, because shouldn’t the act of giving pleasure to someone you love and find attractive be pleasurable for you as well? OK, here we go: Do you have any idea how many women would kill to be in your position?...

Last year I began a sexual relationship with someone at my university. He was graduating, so we just kept it light and had fun. Even though he’s no longer here, we’ve kept in contact, and we get together whenever he’s in town. Recently he propositioned me, asking if I would have a threesome with him and one of his friends, a man I know and trust. I know they’d never do anything to hurt me, and based on how they’ve treated me in the past, I know they respect me, but they would have a definite power advantage–I’d be putting myself in a very vulnerable position....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April and again in June, a parent of two players on the baseball team at Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas, requested that the school provide him with the statistics it compiled for the team’s 2007 season, but the school district refused, arguing that the stats were protected under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act....

NBC promoted its coverage of the summer Olympics in Athens as a grand experiment. For the first time it would put all 28 Olympic sports out there for the U.S. television audience that claimed to want them all. The message, in effect, was “If you air it they will come,” though “Put up or shut up” was implied as well. Using its cable siblings in addition to its broadcast network affiliates, NBC squeezed 1,210 hours of coverage on seven channels into the 17 days from opening ceremony to closing ceremony....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » October’s a month that sounds like British folk music to me. A little melancholy, a little eerie, very melodic. So my earworm at the moment is Paul Giovanni’s entire sound track to The Wicker Man. The real one of 1973 vintage, that is, not that Neil LaBute thing I have no interest in seeing. (No cheesy songs, no Nekkid Booty-Slapping Dance, no snail porn, no cross-dressing Christopher Lee?...

Most people think Sundays are for sleeping and reading the papers, but a certain breed rises at dawn and drives tens if not hundreds of miles to go treasure hunting, looking for advertising memorabilia, leather-bound first editions, country pine armoires, chrome-trimmed dinette sets, Rumrill vases. That’s the joy of flea market shopping, where prices are almost always negotiable and finding what you want takes some patience, skill, and serendipity. At one end of the spectrum are upscale marts with troves of mint-condition McCoy pottery and mission oak; at the other are swap meets where you’re more likely to find tube socks and miracle arthritis cures....

The Right Brain Project, dedicated to “lesser known pieces whether modern or classic,” shows excellent taste by debuting with Boris Vian’s rarely produced absurdist gem. In this vicious 1959 satire of bourgeois self-delusion, an upstanding family flee up one floor in their tenement whenever they hear a menacing, unidentifiable noise. Once resettled, they quickly forget their ascent and revel in the imagined luxury of their increasingly cramped quarters, where a mysterious bandaged figure always lurks in the corner....

Imagine sitting through a student recital at a school your kids don’t attend. That’s what the new Scrap Mettle Soul production was like for me. There are moments of charm, oases of skill, and the occasional flash of not-badness here–but nowhere near enough of them. More a social service than a work of art, The Heart of Our Soul takes the testimonies, rants, and recollections of Uptown residents and turns them into vignettes and songs on subjects ranging from homelessness to INS raids....

Is it dangerous to eat magic mushrooms before they have dried out? Also, a little bird told me that ‘shrooms are not at all illegal until they are dried out. I live in England so I’m not really interested in America’s point of view on this. Finally I would like to know a little bit about how magic mushrooms affect you and their health hazards for a long-term user. –Sam, via email...

Much has been made of Aleksandar Hemon’s remarkable facility with the English language–which he was forced to learn just 12 years ago, after landing in Chicago as an accidental refugee of the war in Bosnia. And his 2002 novel, Nowhere Man, now out in a Vintage paperback edition, is full of the sort of inventive wordplay that got him compared to Nabokov after his 2000 story collection, The Question of Bruno....

A fat-camp failure continues to pack on the pounds in this sharp, sweet, serious show. Eventually Minerva (Diana Campos) is literally so puffed up she floats above her loving but ineffective husband (Tony Sancho) and concerned yet self-absorbed sister (Sandra Delgado). Minerva is relieved to be free, and they realize too late what she means to them. What makes Luis Alfaro’s play, directed by Sandra Marquez for Teatro Vista, so enjoyable is its balance of whimsy and weighty emotional issues: this 90-minute show is very funny yet soberly examines Minerva’s food lust and inner sadness, presenting deft observations on marriage, sisterhood, and dating....

This angry and persuasive piece of agitprop by writer-director Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, A Scanner Darkly) and writer Eric Schlosser, adapting the latter’s nonfiction book of the same title, isn’t simply an account of how shit gets into our hamburgers. It’s also about Mexican immigrants who sneak across the border and wind up enslaved (or literally ground up) by meat packers, teenagers who work for fast-food companies and want to fight the system but don’t know how, and many other social as well as environmental factors....

Scylla Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Open just over two weeks in the tiny two-story Bucktown house previously occupied by Glory, SCYLLA is full of promise. Chef Stephanie Izard, a vet of Spring and La Tache, executes the ambitious seafood-oriented menu with expertise. Crisp sauteed veal sweetbreads done Mediterranean style with braised greens, sweet currants, and toasted pine nuts made an impressive first course; the grilled baby octopus salad, full of arugula and mint leaves, tasted green and fresh, but the octopus was chewy and fatty, in need of a few more minutes in the pan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Belgian vibraphonist Els Vandeweyer began her musical career on the classical path, focusing on contemporary pieces while studying at a performing arts school in Antwerp, but when she noticed how many pieces simulated the feel of improvised music she yearned to play the real thing. She decided to study jazz at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, where she’s still enrolled, but for the last two years she’s had the best sort of musical lessons, playing in real life situations....

I was interested to see that Liz Armstrong made a recent appearance on the music page, previewing Bonde do Role at the Empty Bottle [The Treatment, September 21]. My interest soon turned to dismay. The write-up got off to an inauspicious start, warning against “the haters” of the Brazilian group. I’m not sure whether Liz is unaware or proud of the fact that the term “haters” was coined by terminally stupid gangsta rappers in order to defend their music against critics without actually, well, defending it....

Theatre Building Chicago hosts its 13th annual showcase of new musicals, offered here in concert readings (with the actors at music stands) and one fully staged production (see listing for Fairystories). The weekend-long festival gives audiences and aspiring writers a chance to discuss the art, craft, and commerce of musical theater as they rub elbows between shows. Stages 2006 runs Friday 8/11 through Sunday 8/13 in the north and south theaters of Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W....