Aline Lathrop’s messy new domestic drama feeds on overworked formulas, symbols, and shock effects: a tense Thanksgiving family reunion, a festering dark secret, a sluttish teenager’s seduction of her mother’s middle-aged boyfriend, a faded rose memorializing a father who died under questionable circumstances. Unforgivable things get said without observable consequences, and after a lie is exposed the family repairs itself with alarming ease and swiftness. Yet Lathrop lets petty discussions go on forever–you want to shout “Drop it already!...

Already the author of a pictorial history of the Chicago el and a look at the city’s “hidden treasures,” Greg Borzo turns his attention to cycling in the useful new guide Where to Bike Chicago. The first U.S. offering in the Where to Bike series—which started in Australia and covers places from Canberra to London—Borzo’s spiral-bound book features 72 rides in and around Chicago, 27 of them geared especially for kids....

Growing up girl these days means sometimes you’re up, and sometimes you’re crying alone eating hot chocolate mix. We’re taught to shatter glass ceilings, but there are daily struggles that can feel more pressing. Leggings versus tights: Are either of them considered pants? Or: Were your multiple sexual partners “questionable,” warranting an HIV test? The Neo-Futurists’ latest, a thoughtful and wildly entertaining pageant parody created by Megan Mercier and directed by Stephanie Shaw, features five “grown-up” women on a baffled quest for the respect they think comes with being a “full-realized member of society....

Goya “This Is the Truth” While bedbound for a couple of days, I watched chunks of movies I’d never heard of. One was a quickie 2005 version of War of the Worlds that resolves the crisis in humanity’s favor when the aliens all die of rabies. The others had big Hollywood budgets and plots ripped from the headlines, which is to say they were paranoid Washington thrillers. Safe House finds a senior CIA official played by Sam Shepard hinting to his idealistic young minion (Ryan Reynolds) that the missing File That Would Reveal Everything should just stay missing: “People don’t want the truth anymore, Matt....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tuesday night the JIC presents an odd but intriguing benefit concert at the UIC Forum. Led by saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and trombonist Fred Wesley, both veterans of the Famous Flames, it’s an homage to their old boss called The Soul of Jazz: The African Tribute to James Brown. I’m not sure how much sense the “African” part makes–Malian singer-guitarist Vieux Farka Toure and Senegalese singer-percussionist Cheikh Lo are both participating, but I can’t hear much of a connection between their music and Brown’s....

Before I was eight years old my family had lived in seven different apartments and houses in four cities in two countries. Still to come was the 15-month stretch in which I attended five schools. The most wrenching part of a move is the sorting and tossing, a process that turns a person into an archaeologist digging up the lost civilization of his own life. Beneath the heaps of books and papers in my Reader office emerged a dozen or so No....

“That’s Alison” The Reader in its current iteration is a superb publication, keeping its traditional long-form stories and in-depth reporting side-by-side with an easy-to-use website and solid, reliable listings—and very good tweets and Facebook updates. I don’t know what else the money-people can expect than what you guys already turn out. —Marc Geelhoed Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My professional association with Alison goes back almost 20 years now, and I would have to call it one of the great experiences of my life....

Michael Bradford’s play is set in 1876, when two former slaves separated on their wedding night are reunited, and 12 years earlier, when the slave owner tormented the couple and their friends and family. Director Runako Jahi’s production opens with a man hanging from a tree, but this striking early image is the play’s only example of showing rather than telling. The rest of Bradford’s tale of slavery and its aftermath is delivered in highly dramatic monologues interspersed with hints of the supernatural, sexual innuendo, and romance....

CURRENCY But then Robin discovers that her credit cards are maxed out. Her first move is to ask her dad for a ticket home, and Piv’s instinct is also to cut his losses. He solves the money problem, though, by convincing an acquaintance to involve them in an international smuggling operation. Their work becomes progressively more dangerous, but the real tension in the story is always rooted in whether Robin and Piv can trust each other....

As one who has long followed the career of the late radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, I was disappointed by her obituary in the New York Times a couple weeks ago. As a summation of Daly’s outsize life and work, it was inexplicably drab. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though Times obituarist Margalit Fox acknowledged that “Daly’s ideology placed her outside mainstream academic and religious life,” her profile definitely knocked a lot of bark off of its proudly gnarly subject....

Lead Story After becoming South America’s chess champion with a win at a January tournament in Argentina, 15-year-old Emilio Cordova of Peru told his family he was traveling on to Brazil for more competitions. According to a March dispatch in the Times of London, when months went by and he hadn’t returned, the Peruvian press tracked him to Sao Paulo, where they found he’d gotten involved with a 29-year-old woman who worked as a dancer at a well-known after-hours nightclub....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Studio Ghibli’s 2010 adaptation of the British children’s book The Borrowers pulses with Hayao Miyazaki’s feeling for childhood and nature (as usual, the intricate backgrounds invite you to marvel at every tree and flower), and it develops a surprising amount of suspense considering it all takes place around a single suburban home. The title character is a tiny girl who lives in secret behind the walls of said home with her doting parents, making do for food and goods by “borrowing” items from people....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never believe a politician who says, “I can get you this tax cut, Olympics, or war without your having to pay for it.” Some folks locally and nationally have got the message — no free lunch. With referendums approaching April 17 in these three Chicago collar counties the open-space movement is telling taxpayers what they’ll get and what they’ll pay for it....

I’m very happy to be assigned to this area because I know the streets. I grew up in Austin, and my parents still live there, just off Chicago Avenue. Now when I go to CAPS meetings and people talk about their concerns, they’re the same things I was growing up with: you’ve got to go through the gangs, you have to watch when you’re coming back from school. In fact, it’s only gotten worse....

Joan Bennett (left) with a pack of backwoods ragamuffins On Friday at 7 PM, Block Cinema at Northwestern University will screen Wild Girl, a recently restored comic western directed by Raoul Walsh. Released in 1932, the film comes from a fascinating period of Hollywood cinema—the years following the introduction of sound and prior to the implementation of the Hays Code, the system of self-censorship that would govern mainstream movies for another three decades....

In My Fellow Americans, queer performance artist Peter Carpenter blows apart the cliches of Ronald Reagan’s presidency by bringing out their surreality, tying them to unexpected emotions, or both. But the piece ultimately runs aground on the personal. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Crammed with music, texts, movement, cultural allusions, and ideas, My Fellow Americans addresses heroism, weakness, violence, theatricality, spectatorship, memory, and the slipperiness of identity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He told me all about the semitraditional postpartum treatment mother and child were undergoing at the hands of a woman he’d hired to cook and care for them. In Chinese culture this confinement period, sometimes known as “doing the month,” is usually managed by the grandparents, but as both sets live out of town, he had to advertise for help....

thursday10 Thursday10 CylinderJason Marsalis QuartetAndy Moor & DJ/Rupture, Hanne Hukkelberg friday11 Jason Marsalis Quartet saturday12 Cave SingersCylinderDJ SegaA Hawk and a HacksawJason Marsalis QuartetMoonshine WillySubarachnoid Space sunday13 CylinderJason Marsalis QuartetPhantom Orchard, Subarachnoid Space, Woods monday14 Felix da HousecatKevin O’Donnell’s September Spectacular tuesday15 Paul Burch JASON MARSALIS QUARTET On Music Update (ELM), his first album in eight years, Jason Marsalis takes an all-or-nothing approach to the drums. Five of the 13 tracks consist of nothing but stacked overdubs of Marsalis on the kit, layered into concise workouts that reference everything from disco to Japanese taiko drumming....

A prolific food writer, cookbook author, blogger, friend of Bourdain, and accomplished cook to boot, Michael Ruhlman is an elegant and passionate stylist with the tenacity and research chops required of the best narrative journalists. His 2000 book, The Soul of a Chef, was a meditative inquiry into the ideal of culinary excellence, and in one section he introduced readers to a serious young chef of preternatural drive and focus: 23-year-old Grant Achatz, then working the fish station at Thomas Keller’s famed French Laundry....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The tagline is that it’s a dance show for kids of all ages. I open the show; I introduce every song. It’s kid wrangling, too: ‘Kids, can you be polite, please? They’re talking.” And I interview the band. Sometimes I have to really perk them up....