Chicago Reader print issue of March 20, 2024 (Vol. 54, No. 24) by Chicago Reader

Spring Theater & Arts

Book drag kings. Period, by Charli Renken

Revolution until victory: the 24th Chicago Palestine Film Festival, by Kat Sachs

Inside the joy-ﬁlled world of Arts of Life, by Kerry Cardoza p. 10

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THIS WEEK

FRONT

06 Editor’s Note Spring theater and arts FOOD & DRINK

07 Feature | Sula New Chicago food and beverage books you should read

& POLITICS

09 Make It Make Sense | Mulcahy Trump continues his attacks on higher education, the City Council signs oﬀ on four police misconduct settlements, and more.

ARTS & CULTURE

10 Cover Story | Cardoza Celebrating 25 years of Arts of Life

12 Art of Note Melissa Leandro at Andrew Rafacz

THEATER

14 Cover Story | Renken Book drag kings. Period.

16 Feature | Reid What the Reader means for the past and future of theater journalism

18 Performance Picks Helluva Cabaret gives a drag makeover to Helluva Boss; Giordano Dance Chicago returns to the Harris; Céline Dion crashes a maritime tour in the jukebox musical Titanique

20 Shows of Note A bilingual musical of Go Dog Go!; Hamlet as imagined by actors with Down syndrome; Concrete Content’s The Pillowman

FILM

22 Feature Revolution until victory: the 24th Chicago Palestine Film Festival

26 Movies of Note The Alto Knights plays more like a History Channel special than a pulsepounding mob movie; Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a nimble spy thriller; and more.

27 Moviegoer Drawn and quatered MUSIC

28 Secret History of Chicago Music Soul singer Bobby McClure tried to evolve with the times.

30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including BbyMutha, Quest Master, Refused, and Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly

33 Jobs 33 Services

34 Savage Love Advice for when sex hurts; a chance to talk to Dan Savage

Drag king Monsieur Bombastic GREG INDA

ON THE COVER

Le : Drag performers Po’Chop (le ) and Switch the Boi Wonder of Notes on Masculinity. Photo by Greg Inda. More from Inda can be found at greginda.com or instagram.com/greg_inda. Story on page 14.

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PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

PRODUCTION MANAGER AND STAFF

PHOTOGRAPHER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA

FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD AND DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

PROJECTS EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

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Right: Empire State Building Model , a 2024 sculpture by artist Myat Moondog Haggart, on display at Arts of Life. Photo by Kirk Williamson. More about Arts of Life’s 25th anniversary on page 10.

ATTENTION

EDITOR’S NOTE

If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.

& HCV PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS: PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD FOR FY2025 MTW ANNUAL PLAN AMENDMENT

The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is scheduling a 30-day public comment period for a proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment related to the ground lease or sale of land at Altgeld Gardens for the future rehabilitation and expansion of the Up Top building by the non-profit By The Hand Club for Kids to expand their after-school programming.

The 30-day public comment period begins March 20 and ends April 18, 2025. All CHA residents and the community-at-large are invited to review the proposed Plan Amendment, attend the public hearings and submit written comments. You are not required to view or attend the public comment hearings to submit comments. Your presence or absence at the hearing does not affect your housing.

The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP) and Lease for Ogden Commons, a mixed-income community is available for review. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has worked with its development partner to develop a Draft TSP and Lease for use at the private development known as Ogden Commons (previous site of the Lawndale Complex). The units within this development will be used as replacement public housing units for Lawndale Complex and the Lawndale Community area. If you listed Lawndale Complex/Lawndale Community area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you want to live or maintain a right to return to new CHA replacement housing per the Relocation Rights Contract (RRC), you can comment on the Draft TSP and Lease during the 30-day public comment period.

The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.

CHA will host two public comment hearings—one livestream and one in-person:

Though snow is again on the forecast for Chicago this week, spring was deﬁnitely in the air the day I visited Arts of Life (AoL) for my Spring Theater and Arts feature story. Birds were chirping, plenty of people were out in T-shirts and shorts, and the colorful artwork being made in the studio was positively buzzing.

• In-person: Wed, March 26, at 6:00 pm Altgeld Gardens 951 E 132nd Pl (Sign and Spanish interpreters will be present.) Comments can be submitted in person.

Due to COVID-19, CHA has suspended all in person public meetings and instead, CHA will livestream one public comment hearing. The date and time of the public comment livestream hearing is as follows:

• Livestream: Mon, March 31, at 11:00 am www.thecha.org Live Comment Hearing (Sign interpreter will be present.) Comments can be submitted in the Livestream chat.

Tue, April 20, 10:00am: https://youtu.be/QBGG47BHXMg

A recording of the livestream session will be available following the hearing. If you require translation services, check with your property manager for more details or call the number below.

We ask that comments pertaining to the TSP & Lease be submitted electronically to commentontheplan@thecha.org at least 48-hours prior to the comment hearing. Comments will be read live during the time outlined above. Comments received after the hearing will be added to the comment grid.

The Summary and Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment will be available on CHA’s website at www. thecha.org on March 20, 2025. You may also mail or fax comments for the Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment All comments must be received by April 18, 2025.

If you require translation services, please read the attached notice or check with your property manager for more details. Do not mail comments to CHA.

Chicago Housing Authority

E-mail or Fax comments to: commentontheplan@thecha.org Fax 312. 913.7837

Attention: Proposed FY2025 MTW Annual Plan Amendment 60 E. Van Buren St, 12th Floor Chicago, IL 60605

Email: commentontheplan@thecha.org | Fax: 312-913-7837

Ifyouhaveaquestionaboutthisnotice,pleasecalltheCHAat312.913-7300. Torequestareasonableaccommodation,pleasecall312.913.7062. TTY 866.331.3603

If you have a question about this notice, please call 312-913-7300. To request a reasonable accommodation, please call 312-913-7062. TTY 866-331-3603

The organization, which provides artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities space to expand their practice, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with programming all year long. Opening March 28 is a group exhibition, “What they said,” co-organized by Bob Faust and Nick Cave of Facility at AoL’s Circle Contemporary gallery. Like all exhibitions there, works by AoL artists will be on view beside artists from the greater community. “We wanted to ﬁ nd artists, Arts of Life artists, as well as younger, emerging artists from our network that we can put in conversation with one another visually,” Faust told me. He and Cave were delighted to learn that when they approached artists in their networks, presenting the AoL artist they wanted to pair them with, the artists immediately understood the connection.

“We’re connecting folks through primarily a formal lens of choice, with the hope that when they’re in the same room together, this opportunity during the opening just allows folks to get to know one another a little better and maybe be fueled by each other,” Faust said. Works on view will vary wildly in medium, from colored pencil and marker to hair extensions and beads. “It’s not a great commercial project, it’s a great social project at the end of the day.”

The rest of our Spring Arts section is also bursting with dynamism, from Reader staer Charli Renken’s celebration of Chicago’s drag kings to theater and dance editor Kerry Reid’s piece on the vital role of our performing arts coverage to Kat Sachs’ feature on the 24th annual Chicago Palestine Film Festival. By the time you pick up this issue, spring will have o cially sprung (hopefully Mother Nature gets the memo soon). With the dawning of the new season—and its promise of warmer weather, brighter days, and new life—there’s no better time to get out into the city and explore our cultural o erings. v

—Kerry Cardoza, culture editor m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

Rocco DiCaro with his book Emily! (and Jerry and Lucy): Emily’s Family Fun Tales KIRK WILLIAMSON

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

Spring Theater & Arts

New Chicago food and beverage books you should read

Enjoy them before paper is tariﬀed out of existence.

By MIKE SULA

There is a relatively small crop of Chicago food and drink books this spring (unlike last year). And only two of these new titles are available through the usual retail corridors. If they strike a fancy, please don’t reward the sniveling anticipatory obedience of the oligarchy by shopping online. Visit your local brick-and-mortar bookstore. For victory.

Bon Vivant Issue 7: Southwest Road Trip, Hugh Amano, editor (A Sterling Bay Production), winter 2025

It’s the end of the road for Amano’s biannual(ish) culinary travel journal. This one is a semisolo project of sorts: a 101-page essay tracking a road trip from Palm Springs to El Paso with photographer-designer (and his soon-to-be-spouse) Alexis Teichman.

I’ve been writing about the former Fat

Rice-Sterling Bay chef’s literary projects for 16 years, and as ever, they’re never just about the food (though a seed of inspiration for this ﬁnal chapter came out of the Bobby Flay tribute at Next).

Amano’s words paint the sun-washed deserts, mountains, date farms, and diners of the southwest as vividly as Teichman’s photographs, and while the foods they encounter are certainly portrayed compellingly, just as often it’s about the brief encounters with the locals within. Eight recipes inspired by these joints bring up the rear (carne adovada, stacked enchiladas, ﬂautas), but it’s not a guidebook— you’ll have to Google the addresses yourself.

Instead, like all the issues of Bon Vivant past, food is the natural vehicle for understanding and empathizing with the culture that created it.

So why stop now? This road trip is to be suc-

ceeded by another, to Bozeman, Montana, where Amano and Teichman are moving this spring.

“It takes some of the pressure o turning 50,” he told me. “I don’t want my body breaking down in any kind of food service job. I’m always pursuing that fantasy of just writing books.”

To that end, you can look for the next one in the spring of 2026 when his cookbook collaboration with Atlanta chef Ron Hsu rolls o the presses.

Unfortunately, if you haven’t scored a copy yet, you can’t get your hands on Bon Vivant Issue 7 anymore. Just like Amano, come April, it’s gone.

The Balls (Le Polpette), Alfredo Ramos

Perhaps the roughest of the crop is this self-published memoir/cookbook by the chef of Andersonville’s rustic Italian Bar Roma—and

that’s a good thing. Unpolished but earnest, it recounts in 49 pages Ramos’s rise from pot-smoking southwest suburban skid, to pot-smoking Kendall College overachiever, to peripatetic kitchen journeyman, to opening chef—and for the past nine years, head chef—at Bar Roma, which is where you can buy the book.

The title refers to the restaurant’s signature meatball repertoire. Six of them are represented, along with a fetching collection of classic and innovative Italian recipes, plus a few curveballs, like weed-infused dark chocolates that suggest Ramos still has a bit of the skid left in him. Ramos is also old-school without coming o like a goon, and frequently hilarious in a way not often encountered in restaurant lifers anymore. In his intro, the chef admits his inspiration for writing was to keep his daughter out of the industry (it didn’t work), and in his acknowledgments, he thanks his editor for eighty-sixing “some of the dumb, sick, childish, words and stories I told.” I wish that editor would have paid more attention to sentence structure and less on preventing Ramos from being Ramos.

Birrias, Jesse Valenciana, the Quarto Group

Now based in Nashville, where he caters under the name Secret Bodega, Chicago-born Valenciana previously published two cookbooks

Spring Theater & Arts

continued from p. 7

with Crust Fund Pizza’s John Carruthers while working as the national events manager for Goose Island. He admits he was turned o by the traditional Jalisciense goat stew as a kid and didn’t develop a passion for it until the pandemic. That was well into the crispy birria/ melted cheese taco craze that, via 80s Tijuana, erupted out of Los Angeles four years earlier. For better or worse, that trend has led most Americans to believe that birria is strictly made from beef. In fact, Mesoamericans made something like it from wild game, according to Texas Monthly taco editor José R. Ralat. Further, birria is not an ingredient, but a technique, employed in various Mexican regions with chicken, fish, and pork, in addition to goat and beef. Valenciana understands all of this without getting too bogged down in the details, o ering variations on all ﬁve proteins in every possible execution, from birria tacos, burritos, and ramen, to sausages, smashburgers, Chicago-style pu s, and crunchwraps.

Chicago Cocktails: An Elegant Collection of Over 100 Recipes Inspired by the Windy City, Nicole Schnitzler, Cider Mill Press

Part of a series of hardcover cocktail collections from around the globe, the Chicago entry very loosely organizes its recipes in neighborhood clusters. On its face, that promises a varied representation of the creative diversity that has evolved behind the city’s sticks ever since the Violet Hour ushered in the modern cocktail renaissance in 2007. And sure, there’s

a fair mix of old and new, like Q&As with OGs like the VH’s Toby Maloney and Crafthouse Cocktails’s Charles Joly, and relatively newer players like Julia Momosé of Kumiko and Bronzeville Winery’s Cecilia Cu . And yet, I’m not sure how many home barkeeps are clamoring for four separate espresso martini builds, or ﬁve old-fashioneds, especially when there are only five south-side cocktails represented (two of them from one bar) and only one Malört recipe, which is especially weird when the intro devotes a whole page to acknowledging its inﬂuence on the city’s cocktail maturity.

Bridging the Gap: Ethiopian Fusion Cooking: Recipes from the Kitchen of Wilhelmine Stordiau, by Wilhelmine Stordiau and Harry Kloman

I wouldn’t typically include a free download from a retired University of Pittsburgh journalism professor in this roundup (even if I hadn’t taken his class as a freshman), but there is a Chicago connection: a recipe for tefach injera, or “injera bread pudding” from Zenash Beyene, owner of Edgewater’s Ras Dashen, which closed in 2022. It was on the menu, but it’s unusual, given there’s no Amharic word for “pudding,” nor are there any desserts native to Ethiopian cuisine.

The text itself is singular, given that Armenian Ethiopian entrepreneur Stordiau, who

lives in Germany, has developed her own repertoire of hybrid dishes, applying Ethiopian ﬂavor proﬁles and techniques to European foods, like berbere deviled eggs, penne with minchet abish wot (spicy chopped beef), or cracked wheat and sa ower milk risotto. There’s even a chapter devoted to desserts, in defiance of Ethiopia’s lack of a “sweets culture.”

Kloman is, of course, the author of Mesob

Across America , a survey of Ethiopian food across the U.S., and probably knows more about the subject than any other nonEthiopian. As the tipster who alerted me to Uptown’s terriﬁc Oromo Michuu Restaurant, he often knows more about Chicago’s East African restaurant doings than I do. v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

January 25 - July 13, 2025

Image: Andrea Carlson, The Indifference

COURTESY HARPERCOLLINS; COURTESY HARRY KLOMAN

NEWS & POLITICS

Trump’s assault on higher ed

Donald Trump and his cronies are continuing their fascist assault on higher education. In recent weeks, the federal government has announced multiple probes into Chicago-area universities intended to stifle dissent and expel immigrants and other marginalized students.

The Department of Justice, under former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, notiﬁed the mayors of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York on March 13 that it was escalating retaliation against pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses. Justice department agents, under the guise of the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, plan to visit each city and meet with local leaders, students, law enforcement, and residents to determine “whether federal intervention is warranted,” according to a press release.

Northwestern, already under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for a pro-Palestine encampment that cropped up at the school last April, appears to be copying Columbia’s strategy of appeasement in the face of Trump’s attacks. Northwestern has scrubbed mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from nearly all its webpages and assigned students a mandatory “anti-bias” training, according to WBEZ, that at one point equates criticism of Israel with comments made by the Ku Klux Klan’s David Duke. Separately, the education department on

March 14 announced civil rights investigations into more than 50 colleges for their supposed antiwhite admissions practices. Most of the schools, including the University of Chicago, are under ﬁre for their partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonproﬁt that recruits students from underrepresented backgrounds into graduate business degree programs.

City Council OKs misconduct payouts

On March 12, the City Council voted to approve $3 million to settle four separate lawsuits related to police misconduct. In recent years, alderpeople have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to resolve allegations of wrongdoing by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

The most expensive settlement, $1.5 million, stems from a fatal car crash in February 2020. The family of Ezell Ricky Island sued the city after he was thrown from the back seat of a car and killed when he was hit during a chase by police in an unmarked car.

A second settlement, for $1 million, will be paid to the family of Mignonne Robinson, who was struck and killed in February 2020 by a car ﬂeeing the CPD.

Alders also approved $400,000 for Eyraechel Meiang. In 2020, a Chicago cop drove through a red light and hit Meiang with his cruiser. WGN reports the officer driving the vehicle, Charles Gavin, is no longer on the

owned by First Trinity Community Church, according to a petition calling on the building owner to stop the eviction. The church voted in 2023 to close the Orphanage and sell the property. But groups, including Midwest Books to Prisoners, Commodore Comunitario, a free store, and a pop-up community clinic, have continued to operate. They’re now hoping to pressure the new owner, identified as Howard Mui, to keep the space open.

PETITION: DEFEND THE ORPHANAGE, DROP THE EVICTION openpetition.org/!txmgl

The Orphanage has been open for more than two decades and has hosted hundreds of events, from punk shows to ﬁlm screenings to skill-shares. “If we lose The Orphanage, we not only lose our one of a kind space, we also lose a piece of Chicago organizing history,” the petition reads.

city’s payroll.

A fourth payment, for $280,000, settles a lawsuit from Miracle Boyd, whose tooth was knocked out by CPD officer Nicholas Jovanovich during a fraught protest at the since removed Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park. With the settlement in Boyd’s case, the city has spent nearly $8.7 million on misconduct lawsuits stemming from 2020’s protests against police violence, according to WTTW.

In 2024, Chicago spent at least $107 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits, WTTW reported, far exceeding the $82 million officials set aside last year for CPD litigation.

Save the Orphanage

Supporters of the Orphanage, a longtime Bridgeport community space and DIY venue, are ﬁghting to save the building from demolition.

Midwest Books to Prisoners, an organization that mails books to incarcerated people across the country, said in an Instagram post on March 16 that the venue is “under imminent threat of eviction.” The group has operated from the Orphanage since the 2010s, but they—and Comedor Comunitario, which serves weekly meals to recent migrants—are looking for a new space in case the owner follows through with plans to demolish the property.

The community center was previously

CTA to install AI-powered cameras

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is moving forward with plans to install artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cameras aboard buses as part of a pilot to automatically ticket drivers for parking in bike and bus lanes. On March 12, the Chicago Transit Board approved a contract with Hayden AI to deploy the company’s automated bus lane enforcement (ABLE) system on six buses. The system uses onboard cameras with “computer vision” to gather photos, video, license plate information, and more from cars illegally parked or standing in bus or bike lanes. The cost for the ﬁrst six buses is $315,852, according to a CTA press release, though the contract allows the agency to purchase up to 94 additional cameras.

The city launched the pilot project, called Safe Streets, in November through the Chicago Department of Transportation. The two-year test run is limited to violations within the downtown business district. According to the CTA, the city issued more than 11,000 warnings and nearly 1,400 violations through the end of February. (Drivers are first given a warning; subsequent violations result in ﬁnes.) —SHAWN MULCAHY v

Make It Make Sense is a weekly column about what’s happening and why it matters.

m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

Spring Theater & Arts

ANNIVERSARY

Inside the joy-ﬁlled world of Arts of Life

Helping artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities expand their practice

By KERRY CARDOZA

An artist in paint-splattered black clothes puts the finishing touches on a busy, vibrant acrylic scene on an oversize canvas. Nearby another artist—a face mask tucked beneath her chin—leans over a comic-like illustration, carefully coloring in the black outlined drawing with green marker. At another group of tables, an artist is cutting up pieces of cardboard for use in a sculpture while a colleague to his right ﬁnishes up a pristine marker illustration featuring saturated blocks of green, yellow, orange, and gray. Other artists mill about the studio; some are wrapping up pieces or preserving the day’s work on their storage shelves.

It’s a typical Monday afternoon at the West Town location of Arts of Life (AoL), a progressive art studio founded 25 years ago. The bustling space exempliﬁes Arts of Life’s simple yet visionary mission: to provide artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities “a collective space to expand their practice and strengthen their leadership.” Here, artists have the autonomy to make the work they want to make, to develop their artistic voices and creative practices alongside their peers, and to further their careers through a number of professional opportunities. All decisions are made collectively, and the program is open to all applicants, whether or not they have previous artmaking experience.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do is to help the artists just have conﬁdence in their own ideas,” said Tim Ortiz, AoL’s program director. “They’re not taught that in other places. And people in this population—they don’t learn to spend time on things that are their own. That’s what’s di erent here. . . . A lot of what we do is just encourage people to try. We try to notice what their interests are creatively and help them to take those things further.”

Founded in 2000, AoL is a beacon of joy in the largely underfunded, and at times abusive, landscape of disability services in Illinois—a state that consistently receives low marks for its efforts to serve people with disabilities. AoL is the ﬁrst, and still the only, state-licensed community day program in Illinois with a focus on artistic career opportunities for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The organization is celebrating its 25th anniversary through a yearlong series of programming, which kicked o February 22 with a party and a book launch for 2wenty-5ive, a beautifully designed hardcover that tells the history of AoL and highlights the practices of 25 of its artists.

As Nik Heusman, a longtime AoL artist, says about the importance of the organization in 2wenty-5ive: “I can come here and let my hair down and just go to town on art. I want to get my art out there into the world. I want people to see me as a person instead as a person with a disability. I want them to see that a person who has vision problems can accomplish anything in the world.”

Artist David Krueger signs his latest work. KIRK WILLIAMSON

Works by Veronica Cuculich (top) and Brian Reed KIRK WILLIAMSON

Spring Theater & Arts

Arts of Life’s collaborative, artistcentric model dates back to its very beginning. In the late 90s, cofounder and executive director Denise Fisher was working in residential services for adults with developmental disabilities in Chicago’s north suburbs. Through that work, Fisher became friends with her neighbor Veronica “Ronnie” Cuculich, one of the residents and a lifelong maker. Cuculich and other residents had found relief working on art projects at home. When the agency Fisher was working for was slated to be absorbed by a bigger one, it felt like the perfect time to pitch a new project: a day program devoted to making art. “I went and talked to families that I knew in the organization, and found other people that were interested,” Fisher said.

They began working on the project in 1999 and, in 2000, opened the first location, on West Grand. (It was founded by Cuculich, Fisher, and a colleague along with nine additional artists; Cuculich died in 2010.) “In the early

R“ What they said”

3/28-5/9: by appointment Mon–Fri, 10 AM–3 PM, circlecontemporary@artsoflife. org, Circle Contemporary, 2010 W. Carroll, artsoflife.org/event/what-they-said

R“Arts of Life: 25th Anniversary Retrospective”

8/ 11-9/30: open daily 10 AM– 5 PM, Design Museum of Chicago, 72 E. Randolph, designchicago.org/arts-of-life-25thanniversary, free

RA rts of Life annual benefit auction

10/3 Epiphany Center for the Arts, 210 S. Ashland, more info at artsoflife. org/25th

Founded in 2000, Arts of Life is a beacon of joy in the largely underfunded, and at times abusive, landscape of disability services in Illinois.

days, we were just kind of putting it together,” Fisher said. “We were small enough that I would meet with all the artists weekly and kind of just ask open-ended questions about what they wanted.”

This is how AoL’s four core values—inspiring artistic expression, building community, promoting self-respect, and developing independence—were formed. After a year, the sta looked at the data from those conversations and realized these were the things people were consistently bringing to their attention.

“A lot of the people early on had institutional backgrounds,” Fisher said. The artists often didn’t feel like their peers were that helpful “because they had come from institutional settings where really the staff had all the power.” So in the early years, the organization worked to undo those dynamics, getting artists to collaborate.

“Once that was set, we started to realize that what we were talking about more often was integrating the broader arts community, that our artists were in the kind of ‘outsider’ label that’s inappropriate and really dated,” Fisher said. (The term “outsider artist” typically refers to someone with no formal art training and little to no influence from the mainstream art world, but it has fallen out of use in recent years as a needless and outdated categorization.) The organization reenvisioned its mission statement to build in leadership and development in the art sector. From serving ten artists in one studio space, AoL has grown to serve over 60 artists across three studios (in West Town, Woodlawn, and Glenview), alongside integrated community classes at Evanston Art Center and the Art Center Highland Park and an in-home support program. (Approximately 150 artists have

worked at AoL since its inception.) In 2017, the organization launched the Artist Enterprise Program, a professional development arc that allows artists to opt in to the vocational tracks of maker, curator, educator, or career, and also works to expand professional opportunities to exhibit and sell work. While artists at AoL do pay a fee—most pay through a Medicaid waiver program though some pay out of pocket—they also receive a monthly stipend based on their attendance and 60 percent of revenue from any works sold.

In the past several years, AoL has begun bringing artwork to art fairs around the world, from EXPO Chicago to New York’s Outsider Art Fair to Art Fair Tokyo. Around seven exhibitions per year are held in AoL’s Circle Contemporary gallery, housed inside its West Town location. Featuring both AoL artists and artists from the greater art world, the exhibitions are put together by guest curators and artists from the organization’s curatorial committee. (The next big event for AoL’s anniversary programming is a group art exhibition, called “What they said,” opening Friday, March 28, at AoL’s Circle Contemporary gallery and cocurated by Nick Cave and Bob Faust.)

2019 Circle Contemporary show called “All Well and Good” with her and fellow AoL artist Tim Stone. The title stems from a conversation Ruschman had about the show with Pasowicz, where she asked him (a fervent admirer of bright colors, or “my wheelhouse,” as he describes it): “Well, color is all well and good, but what about a gray show? With a disco ball in the middle?” Though that ultimately wasn’t the exhibition Ruschman put together, he was struck by Pasowicz’s energy and talent.

“I just am really drawn to—and this is deeply embedded in her work, as well as her personality—that she is capable of holding all of this like candy-coated joy, Hello Kitty sunshine-like stu alongside something that’s darker, something that’s a bit more mysteri-

“I can come here and let my hair down and just go to town on art.”

ous,” Ruschman said. This shows up in Pasowicz’s gorgeous, time-intensive colored pencil drawings, made by making layers upon layers of marks. The result is often a subtle gradient of pastel colors, sometimes with a black ﬂoating orb in their midst.

AoL artists are often invited to show at other galleries or institutions, such as the 2023 Intuit Art Museum exhibition, “Hand Drawn Circle: Arts of Life studio past and present.” That same year, Ruschman gallery hosted a solo exhibition of work by AoL artist Susan Pasowicz, who has been a studio member since 2013. Eric Ruschman ﬁ rst got to know Pasowicz when he was organizing a

Some of those marks are made by tracing a Slinky over and over again, an ingenious technique that Pasowicz told me was “just an idea.” “You could do it with other things, like a square. . . . Doesn’t really have to be a Slinky. Just an idea in my head that I made.” Ruschman has sold some of Pasowicz’s work to collectors and praises AoL for working to get her art seen outside of the city, a “necessary next step for Sue’s practice.”

KIRK WILLIAMSON

Spring Theater & Arts

continued from p. 11

When I visited Arts of Life, it was the ﬁrst appreciably nice day of late winter, and the weather made the mood feel extra buoyant. Many of the artists were eager to share their work with me. Rocco DiCaro, who joined AoL in 2023, showed me Emily! (and Jerry and Lucy): Emily’s Family Fun Tales, a book of hand-drawn comics that he laid out himself and self-published through Amazon. It features 15 stories about a little girl named Emily and her family and friends. “It’s kind of in the style of Peanuts,” DiCaro told me, adding that he’s at work on a second volume.

While we were chatting, his tablemate Stefan Harhaj chimed in to boast about DiCaro’s YouTube channel, which shows how he makes his comics. I was familiar with Harhaj’s work from 2wenty-5ive ; his drawings and paintings have a folk art aesthetic, often depicting the natural world or simple, repetitive abstractions. Now he mostly makes sculptures.

the top of the diorama-like piece, a sign reads, “Arts of Life come do your artwork here.” Her latest work was in honor of the organization’s recent trip to New York City, where they had a booth at Outsider Art Fair and a book launch party at Soho House. The sculpture had a background of apples, printed from the Internet, with a rectangular block mounted on a waterlike base featuring the Statue of Liberty. Overlaid over the water were the words: Arts of Life takes New York.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do is to help the artists just have confidence in their own ideas.”

Also working at their table was William Lilly, who works primarily in marker, so as to not mar his impeccable clothing. The charming artist—also known as “Shotgun Lilly” due to his preference for the front seat—is a devotee of metal; he implored me to check out the song “Carrie” by the band Europe, as well as the ballad “Truth” by Godsmack. Music inspires his artwork—many pieces feature the names of his favorite bands—as do tornadoes.

Tatiana Adams brought me around the studio to view her cardboard sculptures, including one featuring all the Arts of Life artists. At

ARTS & CULTURE

EXHIBITIONS

RA quiet, dissonant oasis

Melissa Leandro creates an intricate, intimate textile world at Andrew Rafacz.

Viewing Melissa Leandro’s “Auto Alejaimento” is like stepping into a dissonant oasis. Her third solo exhibition at Andrew Rafacz, the show weaves detachment through layered textile landscapes. Pieces combine woven cloth, hand and machine stitching, yarn, embroidery, couching, and foil to create textured scenes of ﬂowers, grasses, and waters. From a technical standpoint alone, the work is striking: using only textiles, Leandro conveys scribbling, dripping, glowing, and decomposing. Bright threads pour down from ﬂowers’ centers and out the sides of gray leaves. Yarn delineates air trails, then falls before reaching the canvas’s end. It’s all so elaborately burnt out.

The room–garden is completed by two inverted, functional art benches that face the most colorful of the works—Let Me Stay Here (Déjame Quedarme Aquí) and See Me (Verme), leaving darker pieces such as the diptych Blemished (Manchada) / Rip to Pieces (Romper en Pedazos) looming on the periphery of the bench-sitter. And yet, sitting long enough to become acquainted with these bright landscapes reveals their unease:

plants stuck in the second dimension while identical counterparts break through; broken ﬂoral pieces messily threading into one another; forms that reach beyond the canvas but do not make it far. Regardless of the color palette, there is no winning here.

Nonetheless, while immersive in its (titular) selfestrangement, the exhibition is not overstimulating. The space is still a warm and quiet respite, particularly during your typical Chicago winter-spring snowy-rainy day. It’s a welcome opportunity to sit and soak in Leandro’s intricate, intimate textile world. —SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS “Auto Alejaimento” Through 4/12: Tue–Fri 10 AM–5 PM, Sat 11 AM–5 PM, Andrew Rafacz, 1749 W. Chicago, andrewrafacz.com/exhibitions/18489-2 v

What was clear after talking to these artists was that they take their practice seriously and that they value the time they spend at Arts of Life. “It’s a way to express yourself, and I like drawing, I like painting,” artist Alysha Kostelny said about coming to Arts of Life. Lilly told me he likes “the people and the art.” Adams used to draw before coming to AoL, but said, about her cardboard works, “This is better art.” In a written statement, North Shore studio artist Ariée Carter wrote, “I love being part of AoL because they are my third family.”

“When our artists deﬁne the nature of their work, including its success, they will have just as much to o er as any other person, and just as much chance of doing great things,” Ortiz writes in 2wenty-5ive , an apt summation of the organization’s overriding ethos. “This is validated in our studios every day.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

Arts of Life program director Tim Ortiz and executive director Denise Fisher KIRK WILLIAMSON

Melissa Leandro, See Me (Verme) COURTESY ANDREW RAFACZ

Spring Theater & Arts

When I debuted as my drag persona Vicious Mockery in the variety show Glamorama at My Buddy’s earlier this year, I was lucky to be on a bill of mostly other drag kings. Celebrated kings Switch the Boi Wonder and Bubba Boom made up the bill, as well as my drag brother Jest Kidding. Partially due to my brother and I debuting, my drag mother, Zenon TeaVee, wanted to bring together some of the best kings in the city for us to learn from. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason she booked them; she also knew they were great performers and would make for an awesome show. It was a wonderful experience being backstage with mostly kings.

I say I was lucky because, unfortunately, a show of mostly kings isn’t really the norm. But that is starting to change, thanks to several kings working to increase our visibility locally and internationally.

Drag kings are often token performers on a bill, something that gets real lonely, real fast. If we’re in a show at all (and we struggle to get booked compared to queens), we’re usually the only performers of our kind, and audiences don’t always know what to do with us. When it comes to drag, the general public thinks of RuPaul’s glitzy, pageant-ready queens strutting down the runway. They don’t usually think of masculinity, and that’s partially because, in 16 seasons, RuPaul’s Drag Race has never featured a drag king. To many viewers, drag means cis men dressed as women because that’s primarily what’s on television, though the show has showcased openly trans performers in recent years (but not without a ﬁght from RuPaul).

It’s not all RuPaul’s fault drag kings aren’t booked as often as queens, though. There are a lot of factors that go into the pay disparity and lack of opportunities for drag kings. Every king I spoke to for this article had different ideas about why that is. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of research on the economics of drag (the one paper I did ﬁnd on the subject likened drag to blackface, so I wasn’t inclined to believe the researcher understood our community), so you’ll have to take kings at our word that our bag is less full.

“I think there’s a disparity in booking fees in nightlife in general, but when it comes to kings, I just assume that most likely the payment is going to be less based on what people ask me to perform for,” says Po’Chop, drag king, performance artist, and cofounder of Black feminist art space House of the Lorde. “I think it’s also hard to gauge because there’s not a lot of transparency about the overall

learned to swallow over time.”

Switch, who has been a drag performer for 20 years and coproduces and cohosts the king-centric show Notes on Masculinity at the California Clipper, says sometimes show hosts fail to get crowds excited about kings.

“If you’re not gassing [kings] up on the mike, if you’re not telling audiences what to expect and getting them excited, like, ‘Get those dollars ready! This is gonna be a hot one!’ you’re not setting those kings up for success,” Switch says. “You’re basically just checking a box like, ‘Well, I put them on a stage. I did my part.’ That’s just not good producing.”

Book drag kings. Period.

Chicago performance artists are creating community and advocating for more opportunities.

By CHARLI RENKEN

budget producers have and how it’s being broken up.”

Other drag kings I spoke to said they felt they were paid the same booking fee but that when it came to tips, queens deﬁnitely made more.

“I just had this experience recently at one of the bigger venues I’ve performed at. The lineup was mostly femme presenting, and when I

got onstage, people were like, ‘Huh?’” Chicago king Monsieur Bombastic says. “There was this one woman in a red dress who was just tossing away money [for the other performers], and when it came to me she literally ﬂashed her cash at me and then tucked it away. I get that treatment quite a lot as the weirdo alternative drag king and it’s something I’ve

Making audiences more excited about drag kings is just one part of the puzzle of ﬁxing the disparity between kings and queens. Greater visibility is needed to get more kings onstage and paid better.

“I still get people coming up to me being like, ‘Oh my god! You’re the ﬁrst drag king I’ve ever seen!’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah, thanks . . . been doing it a while,’” SKIM, Vancouver drag king and creator of the original Book Drag Kings project, tells me. Experiences like that are part of why he created the photo and video project, which aims to bring more visibility to the drag king community.

The Book Drag Kings project started, as art often does, out of grief. SKIM had just performed at Burnaby Pride with prominent drag artist King Fisher. Not long after, Fisher passed away at the age of 25.

“I realized that we had only ever done that one performance together because kings just never get booked together,” SKIM says. “After he passed, I just felt such despair and loneliness, and I realized that in our community we weren’t really talking to each other.”

SKIM was moved to change that. He organized community social gatherings as well as skills workshops on subjects like contouring. Later, with the help of the Long Live Kings collective, Tinydog Studio and Gallery, photographers Ray McEachern and Dayna Finkelstein, and videographer Chris Reed of Queer Based Media, SKIM organized photo and video shoots, and the Book Drag Kings project was born.

Back in Chicago, SKIM’s collage of photos from the project came across Switch’s Instagram feed and inspired them to bring the project to our city. They immediately messaged SKIM to ask for permission and, once granted, started pulling the project together with Po’Chop, their collaborator and cohost of Notes on Masculinity. They decided that the photo shoot would take place at the California Clipper–hosted show, and kings across the

Po’Chop (L) and Switch the Boi Wonder of Notes on Masculinity GREG INDA

Spring Theater & Arts

King-centric Shows in Chicago

Note: Not every show is kings-only, but each heavily features drag kings. This is also not an exhaustive list.

Notes on Masculinity

Second Tuesday of every other month at the California Clipper, hosted by Po’Chop and Switch the Boi Wonder

Brewz with the Boyz

Second Saturday of every month at Uptown Taproom, hosted by Annx

Hunks: A King Show

Periodically at the Newport Theater, hosted by Harley Go’Lightly and Harry Ola

Open Cabaret: Kings-Only Edition

Usually during the summer at the Newport Theater, this year’s host TBA

city were encouraged to show up to have their photo taken with a sign bearing the simple instruction: “Book Drag Kings.”

The Chicago project, which has now had two shoots at Notes on Masculinity, was photographed by Greg Inda, who is also the cabaret’s resident photographer. Normally, he takes photos of performers both on- and backstage, something Switch and Po’Chop organize because kings often struggle to get professional photos taken.

“I don’t know that it’s necessarily that photographers don’t want to photograph kings, but there’s definitely some kind of barrier there that kings don’t get asked to do photo shoots as much as queens do,” Inda says.

That’s just one part of what makes Notes on Masculinity, which next month celebrates its third anniversary, such a special show. Every detail Switch and Po’Chop put into the cabaret creates a space where kings and other artists exploring masculinity (the show features all kinds of performance, not just drag) can thrive.

“It’s amazing that kings are deciding not to wait to get booked but creating shows and spaces themselves,” Switch says. “That’s what Po and I have done with Notes—create a space we would want to perform in.”

Most of the kings I spoke to said that the number of bookings they received has gone up since being part of the project. Producers across the city are starting to take notice of the many kings here and put them in shows.

“I’ve actually had to turn down opportunities. I’m not able to take all the gigs that are o ered to me, and that’s a nice place to be in,” Bubba tells me. He’s been seriously busy lately, with a ton of bookings this month. He’s actually taking a break in April, going on vacation with his spouse, Ms. Je , to relax after a busy ﬁrst few months of the year. “I think a lot of

producers woke up and were like, ‘Oh yeah, we need to start booking drag kings and we need to book more than one and do it consistently and not just as an all-kings show.’”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a long way to go for equality in drag. I still often see tokenism and lack of diversity at drag shows, and not just in terms of kings versus queens. It’s not uncommon to see a show with either all-white performers or a singular cast member of color. It’s also rare to see disability represented in drag shows, though there are plenty of disabled performers out there: Bubba, Marí Nero, Collin Advance, and myself come to mind. Some producers may think drag kings or other diverse performers don’t fit their “aesthetic,” but that feels like a cop-out to me.

“I wish producers knew or considered that drag kings come in a wide range of aesthetics. Whatever vibe they’re trying to curate, there’s absolutely a drag king to ﬁt that. Not only is there one, there’s probably multiple,” Po’Chop says. “Just consider the audience’s experience and that audiences want to be challenged . . . they’ll ride discomfort, they want to be pushed or surprised by something that perhaps they didn’t consider. Drag kings help do that. Drag kings help start conversations and create a well-rounded evening.”

While RuPaul might not decide to book a king on Drag Race any time soon, there is a new drag competition show coming to airwaves this year that could help king visibility nationally. King of Drag—hosted by comedian Murray Hill, who performs as drag persona Busby Murray Gallagher and costarred in HBO’s Peabody Award–winning Somebody Somewhere—is set to debut on Revry sometime this spring.

The kings I spoke to ranged from excited to cautiously optimistic about the show. While most kings look forward to the visibility the show will bring, they are also concerned about how Hollywood might exploit their community for views, something not at all uncommon in reality television.

“I thought about applying but I decided to wait it out and see how the show treats people ﬁrst,” Bubba says, especially considering his place as a fat and disabled performer.

“I can’t wait!” Switch says. “I hope it gets as much national attention as RuPaul’s show and that it’s curated a little di erently. . . . I know Murray and he’s really great. I also know a couple of the folks who are going to be judges too, and I think it’s going to be pretty cool.” v

m crenken@chicagoreader.com

Photo

Spring Theater & Arts

Singing from the last ditch

What the Reader means for the past and future of theater journalism

By KERRY REID

Editor’s Note: This essay originally ran February 25, 2025, as part of the Theatre Futures series published by American Theatre magazine and Theatre Communications Group (TCG). It is reprinted here with permission from TCG.

As I write this essay, the Chicago Reader, the venerable alt-weekly where I have been theater and dance editor for over five years (after freelancing for many more), is in a fight for its life. The reasons for our current predicament aren’t too di erent from the circumstances we’ve seen play out at so many nonprofit theaters in the post-COVID-lockdown era (the Reader became a nonprofit organization, the Reader Institute for Community Journalism, in 2022), including a shortfall in expected gifts from major donors and rising costs.

So forgive me if these notes on the impact of arts coverage seem raw and personal. They are straight from the center of a heart that’s breaking at the thought of losing the career I’ve loved at a paper that, ever since I began reading it regularly nearly 40 years ago, has deﬁned for me what the role of a critic and arts journalist could be for the community, and that also introduced me to the most exciting theatrical experiences of my formative years and beyond. They are also from a brain that is exhausted from trying to ﬁgure out how to cover as much as possible as we (temporarily, I hope) cut down on the freelancers who have always been so vital to the breadth and depth and diversity of our work. Last year, the Reader published 311 theater reviews. None of that happens without the many freelancers who bring their special knowledge, passion, and grit to covering work from all over the Chicago area.

This workplace crisis is happening at the same time that independent media and grassroots artists (the ones we’ve covered at the Reader since its birth in 1971) are more needed than ever. I don’t know that art or scrappy independent journalism can actually save us from fascism, but I do know that we need both to tell the stories that will, at a minimum,

remind us that we’re not out of our minds to feel existential doom descending. (In terms of timing, Chicago’s Blank Theatre Company was right on the nose with their revival of Tony Kushner’s drama about the Weimar Republic, A Bright Room Called Day, in December.)

As Samuel Beckett once said, by way of explaining why there are so many great Irish poets, “When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.”

So here are some verses, if you will, to sing the song of the Reader and other alt-weeklies and the irreplaceable role they’ve played in fostering theater communities across the nation. I hope they won’t be a swan song.

As I wrote in an essay for our 50th anniversary, “If a show fell, er, opened in Chicago and a Reader critic didn’t cover it, did it actually happen?” Our archives are a repository that helps keep alive this most ephemeral of art forms. By covering as much as possible, without regard to whether or not a company was “the next big thing” (we’ve never been big on the star-maker/ star-breaker role of critics), we laid groundwork that, even if we don’t survive as a publication, should certainly serve as a blueprint for keeping the conversations among audiences, artists, and critics/journalists alive in whatever the times to come will look like.

The Reader freelancers are often practitioners as well as critics. The late Jack Helbig, who died suddenly in January (another reason for my raw heart, as I knew him for nearly 35 years), wrote librettos, including a collaboration with Urinetown composer Mark Hollmann. Many current Reader contributors, including Sheri Flanders and Wanjiku Kairu, perform sketch and improv around town. Our longtime, award-winning dance writer, Irene Hsiao, also creates dance. I think having that background gives their writing warmth and insight (not to mention an inside track on breaking stories).

Practitioners or not, the best Reader critics aren’t writing from the perspective of the “objective outsider” whose aim is to tell au-

diences what they should or should not see (boring!). They’re trying to help us all see how a piece comes together (or perhaps doesn’t) and where it ﬁts in the cultural and civic landscape. Do that well, and audiences can make up their own damn minds about what’s worth their time and money.

The Reader has always covered the homegrown theatrical forms and events that helped define Chicago as a performance capital, whether by covering sketch and improv at iO, Second City, and Annoyance (Helbig was particularly good at it); “close-up” Chicago magic; the growth of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival; or the groundbreaking Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival. (We covered a dozen shows from the latter this past year—far more than any other outlet, per their publicist.)

I can only hope that we’ve helped audiences gain a deeper appreciation of the role the city has played in fostering work beyond the next Broadway-bound playwright or Oscar-nominated actor. Every city has something unique in its theatrical landscape that should be celebrated and contextualized for its own time and the times to come. We’re not all sitting around waiting for the touring Broadway hit (though there’s nothing wrong with that!). Local, local, local should be the mantra for any theater coverage that truly wants to reﬂect its community. And discovering that community means that neither audiences nor artists can rely solely on the four-star review from the daily paper to deﬁne the value of the work being created.

in the last 15 or so years, where, as Dr. Jen Benoit-Bryan wrote for the Theatre Futures series, they are recognizing a need to “meet audiences where they are.”

Something I’ve dipped my toe into is the idea that theater coverage doesn’t need to come from theater journalists. I recognize that so many shows reﬂect issues that can only beneﬁt from reporters with subject-matter expertise writing about them. Dilpreet Raju, who specializes in writing on health, environment, and underserved communities, has written features for the Reader on theater by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and also covered plays on climate change, medical racism, and harm reduction via Narcan. Just as theaters bring in community activists and specialists in various subjects for both rehearsals and postshow panels, so too should

arts coverage tap into the knowledge and insights of journalists who cover the issues that deﬁne our times.

As former Reader theater editor (and George Jean Nathan prizewinner) Albert Williams noted in a 2002 address to the American Theatre Critics Association, later reprinted in the Reader: “We don’t set up any artiﬁcial distinction between the ‘readers’ and the ‘artists,’ because we recognize that many of our readers are artists.” At the Reader, we trust our audiences, even if they hate what we write. (Believe me, I hear about it when they do.) I think that dovetails with what I’ve seen happening in theaters across the country

I don’t know what will happen with the Reader (or our country) in the days to come. I do know that we need storytellers who aren’t afraid to be messy, raw, urgent, and immediate. We don’t need gatekeepers right now. We need people who will join together to crash the gates that maintain false systems of hierarchy, whether in media or theater. I hope I’m around to share in that from my side of the aisle. Even if not, I hope that what the Reader has done over the past 50-plus years will still be a beacon for what comes next. v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

“We need storytellers who aren’t afraid to be messy, raw, urgent, and immediate.” SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

Spring Theater & Arts

PREVIEW

Spring awakening

Ten onstage options for the season

By KERRY REID

As we adjust to daylight saving time and deal with the fire hose of news and anxiety pointed at us every day, it can be hard to get the energy to get up and about sometimes. (Or maybe that’s just me.) But warmer weather also brings more reasons to break out of the gray Chicago doldrums. And if you have a hankering to enjoy live performances surrounded by community, the upcoming months are blooming with possibilities. Here are just a few of our suggestions for the best in theater, dance, comedy, and opera.

COMEDY AND VARIETY

Helluva Cabaret

If you think you’re living in hell, then maybe a visit to Helluva Cabaret will either fan the flames or soothe you. The brainchild of Reader social media maven Charli Renken (known as Vicious Mockery in their drag persona), this parodic drag and variety show draws on the animated musical universe created by Vivienne Medrano’s Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel , in which the underworld provides opportunities for both assassination and redemption. Fri 4/11, 9:30 PM, Newport Theater, 956 W. Newport, 773-2703440, newporttheater.com, $25-$35, 18+

W. Kamau Bell

The producer and host of CNN’s United Shades of America and creator of Showtime’s We Need to Talk About Cosby drops truth bombs regularly with his blog Who’s With Me?, which also provides the name for his current stand-up tour. As an activist, writer, podcaster, and performer, Bell, as he describes himself, “cares too much and sleeps too little,” but he’s bringing his message of meaningful resistance to the Den for two nights. Longtime Bell friend and collaborator

Dwayne Kennedy opens. 4/25-4/26, Fri–Sat 7:15 and 9:30 PM, Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, thedentheatre.com, $28-$60

DANCE

Material Conditions: Two works on autonomy & reproductive justice

Two artists collaborate on a split bill of movement and multimedia performances looking at liberation and reproductive health and justice. In Praise Music Sonogram, Houston-based visual and performing artist Julia Barbosa Landois uses spoken word, video, and experimental sound to “tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders,” contrasting European health care with the crisis in reproductive health unleashed in the U.S. with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Chicago artist KIKI King’s ABORT is a choreographic work that addresses physical liberation as embodied in club culture, while also paying tribute to the many contributions of Black women to rock music. Thu 3/27–Sat 3/29 7 PM, Links Hall, 3111 N. Western, 773-2810824, linkshall.org, $16-$42 sliding scale

Breakthrough!

With the rising attacks on science and education, it seems timely for Evanston Dance Ensemble to celebrate the spirit of exploration

and discovery. In Breakthrough!, seven di erent choreographers created world premieres that all focus in some way on scientiﬁc themes, including the Fibonacci sequence and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine. Company artistic director Enid Smith created two new pieces—one set to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and exploring eclipses, and another exploring extreme weather events and how communities rebuild in the aftermath of disasters. The ﬁnale, created by Ryan Galloway, is a musical theater dance number set to Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science.” 4/3-4/6, Thu–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 10 AM (relaxed performance “for all ages and abilities”), Sun 1 and 4 PM, Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University, 20 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-7282, evanstondanceensemble.org, $28 adults, $18 for children and seniors (4/5 show $12 per person or $30 for a family of three or more)

Soaring: Life, Light, and Legacy Giordano Dance Chicago celebrates 40 years of the leadership of Nan Giordano (daughter of the late founder Gus Giordano) and also pays tribute to her son, Keenan Giordano Casey, who died suddenly in October 2024 at age 29. Nan created Soaring about her son in collaboration with Cesar G. Salinas and the company dancers. The evening also includes the world premieres of Giordano and Sali-

nas’s 333 , a solo for company member Erina Ueda, and resident choreographer Al Blackstone’s Sana , alongside repertory favorites Taal (also by Nan Giordano), Red & Black (by Ray Leeper), and Pyrokinesis (by Christopher Huggins). 4/4-4/5, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 6 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $36-$106

OPERA

Ester

Haymarket Opera Company launches its 15th season with the Chicago premiere of Alessandro Stradella’s 1673 oratorio (libretto by Lelio Orsini), based on the biblical story of Queen Esther and her foiling of her husband’s plans to kill the Jews in Persia. Soprano Kimberly McCord sings the title role and bass-baritone Christian Pursell is Haman (the villain whose name inspires noisemakers during Purim services, though Haymarket will probably use their usual array of period instrumentation here). Fri 3/28, 7:30 PM (preconcert lecture 6:45 PM), Gannon Concert Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center at DePaul University, 2330 N. Halsted, 773-325-5200, haymarketopera.org, $55-$95 ($7 students)

THEATER

Splash Hatch on the E Going Down In Kia Corthron’s drama, a 15-year-old pregnant

From L: Erina Ueda of Giordano Dance Chicago; Zainab Jah (L) and Namir Smallwood in rehearsal for The Book of Grace TODD ROSENBERG; MICHAEL BROSILOW

MAR 23

girl in Harlem balances impending motherhood with research into environmental injustice in her community. When a tragedy happens, she confronts her fears and plans for the future. Definition Theatre presents the Chicago premiere, directed by local legend Cheryl Lynn Bruce. The south-side company also recently announced they’ve received a $500,000 grant from the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation in support of their planned new home in Woodlawn. Through 4/13, Deﬁnition Theatre, 1160 E. 55th St., deﬁnitiontheatre.org, $25-$35

Titanique

Broadway in Chicago and Porchlight Music Theatre team up for the Chicago premiere of the o -Broadway hit jukebox musical parody of James Cameron’s 1997 romantic shipwreck epic, featuring the songs of Céline Dion and book by Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle, and Constantine Rousouli. Dion hijacks a museum tour about the Titanic , claiming to have actually survived the 1912 disaster, and then launches into her own loopy version of the events around Jack, Rose, and the other ﬁctional and

real characters from the ﬁlm. The partially improvised show (directed by Blue) draws upon other pop cultural references—we’ll have to see how the material changes for a Chicago audience. (I’d personally love to see someone from the 1915 SS Eastland disaster show up to remind everyone that the Titanic doesn’t have a monopoly on maritime tragedies.) 3/25-5/18, Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut, broadwayinchicago.com, $45-$100

The Book of Grace

Tense family reunions have provided the backdrop for many great shows at Steppenwolf over the years, including Tracy Letts’s 2007 August: Osage County and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2024 Purpose (now running on Broadway). Now they’re presenting the Chicago premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2010 play, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, in which Grace, who tries to see the good in everyone, is caught between her husband, Vet (a domineering border patrol agent), and her stepson, Buddy, who carries a grenade and a chip on his shoulder about his father. Zainab Jah, Jerome Preston Bates, and

Namir Smallwood star. 3/27-5/18, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$102

Prayer for the French Republic

Northlight Theatre and Theater Wit coproduce the local premiere of Joshua Harmon’s 2022 drama about a Jewish American student in 2016 who tries to reconnect with her family’s French roots by visiting a distant cousin. In the ﬁrst act, the rise of radical right-winger Marine Le Pen and an anti-Semitic attack lead the French family to consider a move to Israel. This mirrors the story of the cousins’ great-grandparents in 1944 Paris, awaiting news of what happened to their missing family. Theater Wit artistic director Jeremy Wechsler directs a cast that includes longtime Chicago favorites Janet Ulrich Brooks, Rae Gray, Lawrence Grimm, Kathy Scambiatterra, and others. 4/10-5/11, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $35-$91 v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

Jimmy López: Inner Dialogues

MAR 27-29

Bruch & Schumann Rhenish

MAR 30

Julia Fischer & Jan Lisiecki

APR 3-5

Canellakis Conducts Rachmaninov

APR 4

Hiromi’s Sonicwonder

Brandee Younger Trio

APR 10-13

CSO x The Joffrey Ballet

APR 12

Boleros de Noche featuring Tres Souls & Trío Remembranza

APR 15

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain: 40th Anniversary Tour

THEATER

OPENING

Dystopia with cupcakes

Funny, Like an Abortion struggles to ﬁnd the right tone.

There is something inherently freeing about performing a dark comedy play about abortion in a church hall in the middle of a hostile government takeover. Lingering in our minds is the omnipresent realization that we are entering the dystopian reality in which the play takes place—but at least the characters have cupcakes! They may not be able to say the word “abortion” or legally access birth control, but they have cupcakes (and each other).

These cupcakes (particularly the frosting in several scenes) are a source of comfort for Monroe (Bianca Thompson) and Jade (Saniafaith) throughout the show, especially a er Monroe surprises Jade by throwing an abortion party. The trouble is, in Rachel Bublitz’s Funny, Like an Abortion, everything is frosting. We’re missing the actual cupcake.

Bublitz’s play, directed by Eileen Tull for Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and Fat Theater Project, oscillates wildly between dead serious reproductive rights conversations to off-the-wall banter between these two friends. Tonally, this play struggles to find a place to land, which becomes a problem when it doesn’t find a satisfactory way to bring the story to a close. A series of fourth-wall breaks turns the show into the trope of an a er-school special. I was entirely unsurprised when one of those wall breaks turned into the actors reading note cards of reproductive rights factoids to the audience. As important as these conversations are, a compelling script is even more so to get the point across. —AMANDA FINN FUNNY, LIKE AN ABORTION Through 3/30: Fri–Sun 7:30 PM; Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, 1650 W. Foster, danztheatre.org, pay what you can ($30 suggested donation)

RPerro party

A bilingual musical Go Dog Go! delights at Chicago Children’s Theatre.

What beats a Spanish-English children’s matinee about a bunch of dogs? One with clowning, bubbles, and accordion music, for starters. In the world premiere of Go Dog Go! Ve Perro ¡Ve!, six dogs of varying size, skill, and temperament deliver a universe that enchants children, leaving them slack-jawed and in stitches. Kids point, clap, and exclaim, but mostly sit in rapt attention as the dogs strut across the stage, creating an hour of pure bilingual fun.

The play was originally adapted by Steven Dietz and Allison Gregory in 2003 from the beloved 1961 children’s book by P.D. Eastman. Chicago Children’s Theatre reached out to Dietz and Gregory to rework it as a bilingual musical, directed by Dietz, with Spanish translations by Ana Maria Campoy.

Dietz’s production is cleverly staged with vibrant costumes, playful props, and compelling music composed by Michael Koerner—especially the interactive accordion playing of music director Rob Witmer, who also appears as a dog. The action features familiar cutout characters from the book and a cast full of dogs with silly antics. (Many adults will probably recall the colorful book’s lessons on color, position, size, and polite interactions, like the recurring question, “Do you like my hat?”) Chicago clown Jean Carlos Claudio as MC Dog

balances the energy with his parental guidance and playful spirit, while Shawn Pfautsch (Yellow Dog), Maria Clara Ospina (Blue Dog), Jalbelly Guzmán (Green Dog), and Tony Carter (Red Dog) bring the chaos. Melanie Brezill (Hattie) dazzles with increasingly wild hats and catchy jazz riﬀs.

Watching clown dogs navigate streets in dog cars or sort out sandwiches is a revelation and a precious moment away from stress. It’s a chance to sit with your child, laugh together, and revel in simple joys and manageable conﬂicts. Dogs roller-skating? Trees turning blue? Hasta la ﬁesta de la perrera! —KIMZYN CAMPBELL GO DOG GO! VE PERRO ¡VE! Through 5/18: Sat–Sun 9:30 and 11:30 AM; Sat 4/19 11:30 AM and 2 PM; no shows 9:30 AM Sun 4/20 and 5/4; sensory-friendly performances Sat 4/12 and 5/3 9:30 AM, audio description and touch tour Sat 4/19 2 PM (tickets must be purchased two weeks earlier), ASL and open captions Sat 5/10 11:30 AM; Chicago Children’s Theatre, 100 S. Racine, 312-374-8835, chicagochildrenstheatre.org, $42.25, recommended for all ages

R Reclaiming Shakespeare

Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet goes beyond disability narratives with its cast of actors with Down syndrome.

This year’s unoﬃcial mini-festival of nontraditional takes on Hamlet continues at Chicago Shakespeare, which brought us Eddie Izzard’s one-woman version a year ago. (We’ve also seen Robert Lepage and Guillaume Côté’s dance version, Teatro Tariakuri’s El Piélago de las Calamidades, and Goodman’s Fat Ham.)

The short run of Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet through Sunday at Chicago Shakes’s upstairs studio marks the U.S. premiere for this Peruvian company. (The show is copresented by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance.) And it should not be missed if you can snag a ticket.

The cast features adults with Down syndrome who draw on their own anecdotes and experiences to reimagine Shakespeare’s story of vengeance, grief, and doubt. The result is a compelling and fresh 95-minute collage of scenes reﬂecting on the isolation and misunderstanding they face in their lives.

Writer-director Chela De Ferrari’s eight-member ensemble refracts the existential profundity of the brooding Dane’s “to be or not to be” in personal terms. In particular, the love of Ophelia and Hamlet feels quite poignant as it reﬂects the barriers to romantic relationships people with Down syndrome face from parents and other forces in society who tell them, “We only want what is best for you” (and also not so secretly want to make sure no more people like them exist).

Olivier’s masterful ﬁlm performance also shows up. But this cast isn’t leaning on anyone else to make the story their own, and the exhilarating dance party that ends the show reveals the power of choosing to be yourself in the face of limitations and prejudices. —KERRY REID

HAMLET Through 3/23: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $35-$40, in Spanish with English titles

RLife lessons from animals

Lifeline’s Leaf instructs without preachiness.

Crow is growing up, which means she has to start attending Wildwood Community Council meetings. Though she’s clever and empathetic, it’s hard to speak up sometimes when you doubt yourself. But when a strange creature appears in the woods, gathering leaves and taking over an abandoned cave, the other animals, including Fox, Squirrel, and Hare, wonder if they should take aggressive action against it. A er all, they don’t know anything about it, and it’s acting in a suspicious way. Also, their own resources are growing scarce as ﬂoods encroach upon the woods.

Sandra Dieckmann’s 2017 children’s book, Leaf, adapted for Lifeline by Amanda Link (Nathaniel Niemi directs) works at multiple levels without ever becoming preachy. It’s about overcoming fear to speak up for what’s right. It’s about becoming aware of how climate change endangers others. And it’s about seeing strang-

moment of anxiety as she struggles to ﬁnd her voice, which makes her growth into an advocate even more compelling. Jake Busse’s Squirrel and Ariya Hawkins’s Fox provide cunning and witty support, and Alan Donahue’s set and Diane Fairchild’s lighting design capture the look of Dieckmann’s book with colorful and imaginative ﬂourishes. “A story can change everything,” Crow tells us early on, and at least in the case of this delightful and timely family show, that’s absolutely true. —KERRY REID LEAF Through 4/20: Fri 7 PM, Sat–Sun 11 AM and 1 PM; touch tour and audio description Sat 3/22 1 PM (touch tour at noon), open captions Sun 3/23 1 PM, sensory-friendly performance Sat 3/29 1 PM; Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $20, recommended for ages 4-11

RThe Pillowman gets a local

makeover

Concrete Content fuses Martin McDonagh’s authoritarian tale with Chicago’s history of police violence.

ers as fellow living beings ﬁrst, instead of threats to your own way of life.

The actors, all of whom have impressive credits both on- and oﬀstage in areas including sports, dance, and activism, take turns playing the multiple roles in Shakespeare’s original. At one point, Ian McKellen appears via video to answer seven questions from Jaime Cruz about how to play Hamlet, and a snippet of Laurence

Leaf, you see, is a young polar bear who floated down to the north woods when the ice floe he was on broke away from his family. He’s gathering the leaves because he hopes to make wings to fly home. As embodied in Caitlin McLeod’s breathtaking puppet (voiced and handled by Bradley Halverson), he wins our hearts. But so does every other character in this sure-handed and sweet tale. Shea Lee’s Crow makes us feel every little

Watch out, Chicago, there’s a giant pillowman out there somewhere! Let’s just say director Ricardo Gamboa, a longtime activist and artist, has brought him to life in Chicago with Concrete Content’s rendition of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. The show draws strong parallels between the play’s themes and the city’s history of police violence. Gamboa went deep with their research, interviewing two local brothers tortured into false confessions by Chicago police (and wrongly imprisoned for decades), and embedding McDonagh’s original story (first produced in 2003) about child murder in a totalitarian state in the local context of the deeply entrenched institutionalized racism many in the U.S. experience today. The cast features Omari Ferrell as Katurian, delivering a truly visceral performance, and Tyran Freeman as his brother, Michal, whose devotion reveals a tragic, disturbing backstory. With gritty, brilliant acting by Sean James William Parris as Tupolski (who thinks he’s the good cop) and Roy Gonzalez as Ariel, the interrogating officers add hair-raising realism to the narrative. EG Canzano’s set and Amina Gilbert’s lighting design reflect Chicago’s no-nonsense and graffitied aesthetic (graffiti art by Chris Silva, Roman Caballero, and Evan Phillips), while surprising interludes with animation and puppets by Agnotti Cowie, Jordan Paine, and Rocio “Chio” Cabrera enhance the storytelling. Set against Chicago’s backdrop of systemic oppression, The Pillowman becomes a powerful critique of current societal woes, all while exploring the story’s nuances of fear, flaws, and (mercifully) humor. The show program, a zine-like resource, includes interviews and a director’s note, offering context and a call to action. This production is a must-see for its emotional depth and social relevance—a moving gut punch of a show. —KIMZYN CAMPBELL THE PILLOWMAN Through 4/12: Fri–Sat 7 PM; AfriCaribe Cultural Center, 2547 W. Division, tickettailor.com/events/thepillowman/1549791, sliding scale donation $10-$60

Hamlet COURTESY TEATRO LA PLAZA

THEATER

RThe Real Housewives of 1777

The School for Scandal remains fresh and funny in Idle Muse’s production.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 18th-century comedies of manners, with their stiletto-sharp portraits of backbiting socialites and moneygrubbing scoundrels, still resonate today. Idle Muse Theatre Company’s revival of 1777’s The School for Scandal, adapted and directed by Evan Jackson, adds some contemporary ﬂair with reworked versions of hits by David Bowie and Queen, but while they make for fun interludes to listen to during scene changes, you don’t really need to do much to update this material, which feels like a Real Housewives spin-oﬀ for the Georgian era.

As someone who hadn’t read the play in a while, it did take me a few minutes to sort out the various intrigues and backstories as delivered in the ﬁrst scene by Elise Soeder’s catty and aptly named Lady Sneerwell. It’s folly to try to synopsize the dizzying story, but it basically boils down to which of the two brothers will win the hand of the virtuous Maria (Cat Evans)—posturing hypocrite Joseph Surface (Eric Duhon), or Charles (Brian Healy), who’s an unapologetic party animal. Along the way, we meet Lady Teazle (a delicious Caty Gordon), the newly arrived much younger wife to Maria’s guardian, Sir Peter (Erik Schnitger), who aspires to join Lady Sneerwell’s band of Mean Girls and Boys. The unexpected arrival of Joseph and Charles’s wealthy uncle Sir Oliver (Ross Compton), who has been pursuing his fortunes in the North American colonies, unspools an increasingly complicated series of assignations.

The cast commits to the caricatures without becoming too big for the small space. There’s a particularly delightful interlude where they assume the postures of Sir Oliver’s ancestors, posing behind empty picture frames to embody all the musty forebears one sees hanging in manor houses in every ﬁlm about British aristocracy. Some moments perhaps milk the comedy a beat or two longer than necessary, but even then, the eye-candy costumes and wigs by Victoria Jablonski give you plenty to look at. —KERRY REID THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL Through 4/12: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 4/9 8 PM; the Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, 773-340-9438, idlemuse.org, $30 ($20 students/seniors)

R Solo Webber

Tell Me on a Sunday is a showcase for Dani Pike.

If you find Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals overstuffed and bombastic, you might be surprised by Tell Me on a Sunday. This one-woman piece, first produced in 1979, lasts only 75 minutes and has minimum staging requirements, which stands in contrast to the crashing-chandelier aesthetic and nearly three-hour runtime of The Phantom of the Opera It’s a terrific choice for an intimate venue like Theo’s Howard Street Theatre. Particularly if you have Dani Pike on hand to play Emma, the bruised romantic whose ups and downs in love form the basis for the story.

Perhaps ironically, the story was originally conceived by Webber’s onetime collaborator Tim Rice, but allegedly Webber, disapproving of Rice’s extramarital aﬀair with musical theater star Elaine Paige, turned to lyricist Don Black (who wrote some of the songs for the James Bond franchise). Emma’s aﬀair with a married man is one of four anatomized in the 75-minute piece. So sure, it’s a

fair cop to point out that her story seems to be all about her aﬀairs (which also include an older movie producer who whisks her oﬀ on a fool’s errand to Hollywood and a younger man she meets back in New York). On the other hand, given that she’s struggling to land a green card, it’s not as if a glittering career in the States is central to her life. And for lots of twentysomething people, not just young women, romance is still a major factor in life decisions, for good or ill.

Directed with a sure and sensitive hand by Keely Vasquez, this piece feels very much like an artifact of the 1980s, expressed in Pike’s denim skirt and oﬀ-theshoulder Flashdance tops. (The note-perfect period costumes are by Marquecia Jordan.) Eleanor Kahn’s set, with its pink tones and stacked platforms like the tier of a cake, also has a clever but functional MTV-meetsBarbie appeal.

But the show’s weight is on Pike’s shoulders, and boy howdy, does she ever deliver. There aren’t a lot of insta-classics in the score (though the title number feels like something that the late Kirsty MacColl could have come up with, and that’s no small compliment, and “Come Back With the Same Look in Your Eyes” feels like something Burt Bacharach might have written, which is a great instance of “steal from the best”). Music director Evelyn Ryan and her four musicians modulate the volume well for the small space, and Pike knows how to make nearly every moment count in this charming and touching, if slight, story of one woman’s struggles to ﬁnd herself—in and out of love. —KERRY REID TELL ME ON A SUNDAY Through 4/20: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6 PM; Howard Street Theatre, 721 Howard, 773-939-4101, theo-u.com, $45-$60

A long Winter’s Tale

Invictus’s take on one of Shakespeare’s odder works runs out of steam.

Among Shakespeare’s fans, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” is one of those lines that delights. Yet, unlike “to be, or not to be,” it isn’t spoken—it’s a stage direction. It’s likely one of the only things most people know of The Winter’s Tale. A bear shows up and chases someone off the stage, which is honestly my favorite Shakespearean death. One of the Bard’s final works, it’s also one that, like Pericles and Cymbeline, isn’t done very o en. With two diametrically opposed acts, it is also definitely one of his more experimental plays.

The Winter’s Tale is a tragicomedy of King Leontes (Michael Stejskal), who suddenly believes his pregnant wife Hermione (Andrea Uppling) had an aﬀair with his friend King Polixenes (Raúl Alonso). From there, the story devolves into tragic chaos throughout act one, only to be met with a jarring 16-year time skip and genre hop to comedy in act two. Invictus Theatre’s ensemble, directed by Charles Askenaizer, does their utmost to make sense of this content whiplash, and melodramatics made too melodramatic at times, but those nearly three hours feel mighty long by the end.

The respite for weary winter travelers comes in this show’s charming use of music throughout (original score by Petter Wahlbäck), which is performed by several of the multifaceted actors, as well as in its trio of rustic bringers of joy—Chuck Munro, Kyle Quinlivan, and Sam Nachison. The standout is deﬁnitely Nachison as Autolycus, the con man who could give Harold Hill a run for his money. —AMANDA FINN THE WINTER’S TALE Through 4/20: Mon and Fri 7 PM, Sat 1 and 7 PM, Sun 1 PM; Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park, invictustheatreco.com, $25-$38 v

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Spring Theater & Arts

RCHICAGO PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL

Sat 4/ 12–Sat 4/26, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $13 general admission, $ 8 students and youth, $ 6 Film Center members, $ 5 SAIC students and faculty, and staff of the Art Institute, palestinefilmfest.com

Revolution until victory: the 24th Chicago Palestine Film Festival

Amid Israel’s continued genocide of Palestinian people and the arrest of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil by ICE, ﬁnd knowledge and hope through ﬁlm.

By KAT SACHS

On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student of Palestinian descent, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and taken, as we now know, to a detention center in Louisiana. A lawful permanent resident, Khalil nevertheless faces deportation for what the Department of Homeland Security posted on X (formerly Twitter) were “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”

It’d be impossible to write about the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, now in its 24th year, and not reckon with the current moment. (As of publication, Israel has again launched aerial attacks across the Gaza strip, killing more than 400 Palestinians.) Taking place between April 12–26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the

festival’s lineup spans the past and the present in such a way that they seem sadly indistinguishable, though awareness and education around both is crucial to what hopefully could be a peaceful future.

Especially prescient in the festival’s slate considering Khalil’s arrest is Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth’s documentary The Palestine Exception (2024), screening Saturday, April 19, at 1 PM, preceded like all the feature screenings by a few short ﬁlms and followed by a Q&A. It’s a ﬁlm about the ways in which criticism of Israel is still verboten on many college campuses, spaces where free speech and political activism are often promulgated as ideological tenets. At just over an hour, it’s an impressively concise overview of what began after October 7, 2023, when a new

McCarthyism emerged in response to robust protests on college campuses across the United States.

“Even though we can bash [the] countries of China and Russia, Saudi Arabia, not being accused of being anti-Buddhist or antiOrthodox, anti-Muslim,” says Theodore Khoury, a professor of management and strategy at Portland State University (one among 60 academic institutions recently warned by the U.S. Department of Education that they could face repercussions for “failing to protect Jewish students on campus”), “you have this exception of anything you say in favor of Palestine is construed as being anti-Semitic,” getting at the reason for the title of Haaken and Ruth’s ﬁlm.

One deﬁnition of exception has it as being “a

person or thing that is excluded from a general statement or does not follow a rule.” There’s the Palestine exception as mentioned previously, and also the use of it in Spaces of Exception (2023), the end result of a yearslong multimedia project by ﬁlmmakers Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny. Their documentary examines two such spaces, Native reservations and Palestinian refugee camps, several of which they visit in the ﬁlm. It’s a natural comparison, the struggle of these two Indigenous groups (as an activist talking point, it’s raised also in The Palestine Exception ). “An important link in the project is how territory frames the ideas of sovereignty in both struggles,” the filmmakers said in an interview on the blog for PM Press (with whom they published the book The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival). “For most of the indigenous nations located territorially inside the borders of the United States, a land base is an essential component of their articulation of sovereignty—being politically, socially, economically, and spiritually outside the American system of governance—and the reservation is often the official articulation or potential starting point of such a landbase. . . . The Palestinian camps, on the other hand, are the spatial embodiment of a form of sovereignty rooted in refugeehood. It is refugeehood itself that is the threat, because it upends the sanctity of the State of Israel by

From L: Revolution Until Victory AKA We are the Palestinian People (1972); To a Land Unknown (2024) COURTESY GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER; COURTESY CHICAGO PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL

Twyla Tharp Dance

Thursday, April 10 / 7:30 PM

Friday, April 11 / 7:30 PM —

Saturday, April 12 / 2:00 PM

Photo

Mark Seliger

Spring Theater & Arts

continued from p. 22

calling attention to the ethnic cleansing that made that state possible in the ﬁrst place.”

Many of the documentaries I watched that are playing in the festival, including The Palestine Exception, provide accessible overviews of the ongoing conflict; my favorite is Revolution Until Victory AKA We are the Palestinian People (1972), screening Thursday, April 17, at 6:15 PM, made by Pacific Newsreel, described as a breakaway faction of the Newsreel, a radical New York City filmmaking collective. A mix of archival footage and on-the-ground reportage, the film covers the founding of Zionism, the impact of British imperialism, the proclamation of the Jewish state, the Nakba in 1948, and the establishment of the Palestinian liberation movement, among other key points in this ongoing contention. It resounds now as it must have then as being an especially radical document of a neglected history; it’s also symbolic as a consequential token of resistance from a bygone era, spurring hope that such momentum can be maintained.

The opening-night film screening on Saturday, April 12, Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi’s A State of Passion (2024), is sold out. I hope it might find its way back to the big screen here in Chicago, as it’s an achingly beautiful portrait of British Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who’s been providing medical aid during conﬂicts in Palestine since the First Intifada in 1987 and has emerged during the recent war as a face of both resilience and revolution. At the start of the most recent war, he worked tirelessly for 43 days, not just tending to victims but also making the world aware of the atrocities being committed against the Palestinian people. (He later went on to provide evidence to the international criminal court in the Hague.) Some images and footage within the film are the deﬁnition of “hard to watch,” but perhaps necessary to understanding the direness for those being attacked. Conflicts abroad can sometimes feel abstract—shocking as the numbers may be, they are just that, symbols rather than flesh (absolutely a privilege for those of us not experiencing the terror)—and this helps to realize the recondite. Also interesting are the insights into Abu-Sittah’s homelife as a plastic surgeon with his wife and three kids back in London.

Where the above-mentioned documentaries provide clarity in their straightforwardness, Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film (2024) is more experimental, giving new meaning and gravitas to the concept of found footage. With

footage culled from a Palestine Liberation Organization archive that was stolen by the Israel Defense Forces during the First Lebanon War in 1982 and inspired by the writings of Palestinian writer and politician Ghassan Kanafani, Aljafari makes slight “interventions,” as he calls them, in the way of additive swaths of color and motifs, such as flames being appended to certain sequences. In an interview with Filmmaker magazine, Aljafari noted that “[t]he dangerous thing about using already-existing material is that it has its own narrative, its own gaze and power. What I do is basically turn the image against itself. And so, the interventions were a necessary thing to do,” explaining his own appropriation of already appropriated material, a new intimacy born of creative distancing.

Other documentaries playing include Leonardo Antonio Avezzano’s The Promise (2022), about a man, who, after his Palestinian father dies, fulfills his promise to him to scale Mount Everest, and Areeb Zuaiter’s documentary Yalla Parkour (2024), in which the filmmaker returns to Gaza to seek out a group of men she saw practicing parkour in a video on the Internet, the sport becoming an expression of freedom. They screen on Sunday, April 13, at 4 PM and Saturday, April 19, at 6 PM, respectively. There are also two programs of short films, Solidarity & Promise on Sunday, April 13, at 1 PM and Chicago to Palestine on Wednesday, April 16, at 6 PM.

There’s one narrative film, Danish Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown (2024), described as a loose adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella Men in the Sun —the same writer who inspired A Fidai Film—and an extension of Fleifel’s 2012 documentary A World Not Ours , which ends with its subjects in Greece, where To a Land Unknown picks up. The protagonists, refugee cousins who went to Athens from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, carry out petty crimes in order to save for fake passports so that they can get to Germany; one of the cousins blows their money on his drug addiction, resulting in them undertaking a risky heist in which they must pose as smugglers. It was the only Palestinian ﬁlm to be screened across all sections of last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The closing night film on Saturday, April 26 at 7 PM, Mohammad Bakri’s Janin, Jenin (2024), spans the past and the present more literally, as it’s the Palestinian actor and ﬁlmmaker’s follow-up to his 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin , about the Battle of Jenin that took place during the Second Intifada.

The film was initially banned in Israel, and though that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel, it was later banned again after an Israeli soldier featured therein sued for defamation. Janin, Jenin covers this controversy and then revisits, in light of the latest war, the subjects 20-plus years later, older but no less resolved in their unwavering

desire for liberation. This ﬁlm reminds us that it’s not necessarily about past or present, but the continuum of catastrophe (the meaning of the word nakba) that befalls the Palestinian people and the resilience they exude in spite of it. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

From top: The Palestine Exception (2024); Janin, Jenin (2024) COURTESY GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

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