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Liz Lauren The latest from Deanna Dunagan’s collection of matriarchs: Polly Wyeth in Other Desert Cities In 2007, Chicago-based actress Deanna Dunagan appeared in the original Steppenwolf Theatre production of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, stunning everybody with her performance as Violet Weston—the foul-mouthed (“Why don’t you go fuck a fucking sow’s ass?”), savage (“I’ll eat you alive, girl!”), drug-addled (“Gizza cig . . . some cigezze? Cig-zezz, cig-zizz, cig-zuhzzz”) matriarch of a monumentally dysfunctional Oklahoma family....

Since debuting with the self-released 2009 EP We Are the Men, the Men have been bound by an oath to subvert the punk status quo. Even within a single album, these Brooklyn dudes leapfrog from genre to genre with relentless, caustic energy—and on the brand-new Open Your Heart (Sacred Bones) they make their biggest jump yet, bringing a little bit of country into the mix. Before the Men left for their current monthlong tour in support of the new album, guitarist and vocalist Mark Perro was interviewed by guitarist Ryan Lowry of local hardcore group Raw Nerve, who opened for the Men when they came to town in August....

Simeon Wright is a retired pipe fitter living in west suburban Summit Argo. He’s a church deacon and a happily married man. He also has a place in history, though he’s not proud of the reason. Simeon was 12 then. Now he’s 67. For years he tried to stifle the memory and flat-out refused to talk about it, even to his wife, Annie. But it wouldn’t go away, and it has finally come out in the form of a book: Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till, cowritten with New York journalist Herb Boyd and published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press....

Watching Joakim Noah lumber up and down the court—fingers flared out in his peculiar overexaggerated running motion, snarl affixed just below tufts of wilded-out and sweaty curls—doesn’t bring to mind elegance. More like guts. The 28-year-old Bulls center was your favorite player on this season’s beaten-up play-off team. He had to have been. Noah averaged 34 minutes in the play-offs (38 in the Miami Heat series), ten points per game, and nearly ten rebounds—and he did it all on a bum foot stricken with plantar fasciitis....

The Reader’s Choice: Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Reed formed this quartet, which also includes saxophonists Greg Ward and Tim Haldeman and bassist Jason Roebke, to interpret lost postbop classics written in Chicago in the late 50s. The rapport within the band is electric, particularly between Ward and Haldeman, who alternate sharp contrapuntal lines, cajoling ad libs, and inspired solos—and neither ever simply lays out while the other takes the spotlight....

This new play by J. Nicole Brooks draws on the real story of female rebels in Liberia during its recent civil war. Colonel “Black Diamond” (an electrifying Alana Arenas) leads her warriors not just against the repressive government but also men on either side of the struggle who abuse women, while an idealistic African-American journalist working for the BBC tries to capture the women’s stories. Directed by Brooks and David Catlin with a gutsy physicality removed from Lookingglass’s usual pretty tableaux, it’s a piece that feels truly dangerous in all the ways that matter....

The 12th annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival arrives in Chicago next week, bring poets and spoken-word artists aged 13 to 19 from around the world. Presented by Youth Speaks Inc. in association with Columbia College Chicago and Young Chicago Authors, Brave New Voices 2009 runs July 14-19, featuring more than 500 teen poetry slam champions from around the country as well as the United Kingdom, Trinidad, Tobago, and St....

Good times at the Xcel Center. (Here’s an early reaction from my colleague Whet Moser to the GOP hijinks.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times got to the point in an editorial: “Republicans insist that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Communities should take care of their own and not depend on big government to do the job. And the folks who do make it should give back....

Dancing at Lughnasa Oak Park Festival Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But sometime in the 19th century, with the rise of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov (and not coincidentally the advent of electric lighting) artists began creating theater that could only be successfully viewed indoors. Its gaze was no longer comprehensive but linear and bifurcated: the audience watched actors who watched only each other....

This is supposed to be a season for expansiveness. For conciliation and transcendence. Easter comes to show us we can all conquer death. On Passover we’re all slaves crossing over to freedom. Nobody wants to be a Pilate or a pharaoh. Not just now. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And Drury has found a great historical meat hook on which to hang her case: the little-remembered genocide against indigenous peoples in what’s now Namibia, carried out by imperial Germany during the first years of the 20th century....

Upon its release, it was immediately damned by critics as “The Worst Commercial Ever Made.” It was broadcast only once—all three minutes and 35 seconds of it—on October 7, 1979, during an episode of Vega$. It bankrupted the carpet outlet store that paid to have it made. People, property, and kittens were injured during its production. Careers were ruined; lunches were uneaten . Until now. Indeed, “Algonquin Roundtable Superstore” is unquestionably a masterpiece—a dizzyingly mesmerizing tour de force in which a commercial beginning with the spinning shimmers of a disco ball concludes with astronauts on the moon playing backgammon on a round table, with the vast scope of Western civilization seamlessly woven in between—from the Last Supper to the Continental Congress, from King Arthur to Douglas MacArthur, the Parthenon to Machu Picchu....

Ever since former Karate front man Geoff Farina (also of Secret Stars and Glory­tellers) arrived in Chicago in 2010, the dude has had a full dance card—right now his regular gigs include acoustic duo the Last Kind Words, weekly Friday sets of steel-string guitar at the Whistler (solo or with friends), and a job teaching classes on American roots music at DePaul. Gossip Wolf is particularly excited for his new power trio, Exit Verse, who released their self-titled debut via Ernest Jenning Record Co....

When “Duke” Wellington Reiter rode into town last August, to take the reins at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, some of the locals got a little nervous. A Harvard-trained architect, and also an artist, Reiter had spent five years as dean of Arizona State University’s college of design, in Phoenix, where he’d made a name for himself by lassoing a big pile of money and clearing away a speck of history to build an urban campus (or what passes for urban in those parts)....

RICHARD NIXON: “What is the situation on Daley, ah, and his people—Kerner. Are you gonna do anything out there, or not?” St. Eve told me afterward she wasn’t the first judge who ever showed up to hear the Supreme Court review his or her handiwork, not that it’s routine. That was all she could tell me: the case might be remanded to her, so she wouldn’t discuss any of the legal issues the court raised or even say whether she enjoyed her busman’s holiday....

House Theatre of Chicago comes down off its recent wild ride on Hype River with this problematic show scripted by Ben Lobpries. Directed and choreographed by Tommy Rapley, the muddled, cartoonish story involves two mortal lovers, Deucalion and Pyrrha, caught in the struggle between the Olympian Titans and the world of mankind, which is bent on demanding r-e-s-p-e-c-t from the gods. Lobpries’s script is peppered with faux profundities such as “the future will reveal itself,” and Rapley’s movement interludes are generic....

For me, the Daley era began in December of 1982. I was a young writer for the Chicago Reporter covering Richard M. Daley’s first mayoral campaign. I told him I’d like to schedule an interview— photo shoot included—and he told me to talk to his press secretary. I have a problem with the hundreds and hundreds of millions of property tax dollars intended for the poor that he showers on the rich (yes, I’m talking about tax increment financing again)....

Daley had some reason to feel copacetic. Minutes before he started the press conference, the City Council had concluded a fiery debate over whether to endorse his plan to save the city $14 million by making nonunionized city workers take 15 unpaid days off over the next six months. Some aldermen bitched, saying they wouldn’t sign off on the plan because Daley’s budget staff had kept information from them, but others countered that they’d all had plenty of time to get whatever information they needed....

It reminded me of something the late west-side politico Jerald Wilson used to tell me all the time: People in Chicago will let Mayor Daley do whatever he wants, so long as he doesn’t do it to them. Plow over whole CHA communities, divert millions of property tax dollars from the schools to rich downtown developers, cover up investigations into police torture, that’s one thing. But threaten our ability to throw a really good party–my God, the outrage!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On its Web site WTTW describes American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver as a biographical documentary about “an all but forgotten American.” Surely that can’t be true. Though stricken by Alzheimer’s, Shriver isn’t even dead yet, and I’d like to believe that Americans who can’t place the name in any other way know him at least as the Democratic, Kennedy-clan father of Maria Shriver, husband of the Republican governor of California — and explain that marriage please!...

Q So I have been in a relationship with the same guy since I was about 16. It’s been a little over four years now, but I came out to him a year ago about the fact that I’m bisexual, which he has no problem with. So since then, I have had wild fantasies about a threesome with a really hot girl. But it’s a lot harder to arrange that than it seems....