Chicago Reader print issue of September 11, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 49)

THIS WEEK

CITY LIFE

04 Editor’s Note | McFadden Fall theater and arts, and all that it implies

FOOD & DRINK

06 Feature | Sula In Albany Park, a “secret” Thai noodle pop-up thrives in plain sight.

NEWS & POLITICS

09 Make it Make Sense | Mulcahy & Hugueley Immigration and Customs Enforcement targets Chicago, city officials evict unhoused Legion Park residents, and more.

ARTS & CULTURE

10 Feature | Cardoza Artist Victoria Martinez responds to the poetry of Magda Portal at the Poetry Foundation.

12 Feature | Cardoza Richard Hunt’s life and work soar at LUMA.

14 Review | Friedman-Parks The Art Institute’s longoverdue Elizabeth Catlett retrospective

THEATER

16 Stages of Survival | Reid Raven Theatre continues flying high.

18 Performance Picks Ten shows for the season

20 Plays of Note Hot People Island at Corn Productions sends up reality competition shows, and Things With Friends at American Blues Theater mixes a dinner party with dystopia.

FILM

22 Feature Jay Villalobos’s Spectacular Optical Corporation film festival features experimental, microbudget digital shorts.

24 Feature Broaden your mind with the upcoming 32nd Chicago Underground Film Festival.

26 Review The Long Walk is a forceful call to fight fascism.

28 Moviegoer A bug’s strife

30 Movies of Note The Conjuring: Last Rites is a mostly fitting curtain call to the franchise; The History of Sound’s melancholy snuffs out a slow-burning queer love story.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

32 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Little Brother, Simon Joyner & the Nervous Stars, and Alex G with Nilüfer Yanya

38 Gossip Wolf Rising rapper Kaicrewsade throws his own festival at Beat Kitchen, the Englewood Jazz Festival celebrates 60 years of the AACM, and more.

BACK

39 Savage Love Sharing spicy videos, threesome readiness, shyness in bed, and more

37 Jobs

Services

Housing

CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 11, 2025 | VOLUME 54, NUMBER 49

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EDITOR’S NOTE

On page 14 of this issue, my colleague Shira Friedman-Parks writes about an Art Institute retrospective exhibition called “Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies.’” Catlett was an innovative printmaker, sculptor, and painter who made art from the 1940s until her death in 2012. She split her time between the U.S. and Mexico—partly by force, as the U.S. government revoked her citizenship in the 60s due to her leftist political leanings—and her body of work was largely influenced by and centered on African and Mexican cultures and resistance.

I visited the exhibition, coincidentally, on the same day as Shira; we both attended the August 29 artist talk presented by curator Sarah Kelly Oehler. Catlett’s whole life is fascinating—notably, she spent a formative stint in Chicago—but Oehler described a particular part of Catlett’s story that I keep thinking about: At one point in her career, Catlett lived in New York City and taught a class called How To Make a Dress at Harlem’s George Washington Carver School. Of course, a woman teaching art to other working-class women in the 1940s is radical in its own right, but the key idea here was that, while there was nothing inherently political in the syllabus of Catlett’s sewing class, the women would talk while they sewed. Catlett fostered

discussions about race, class, oppression, Marxism, and revolution while teaching this domestic skill.

There’s a timeless message in there about the power of art and community, especially in periods of upheaval. I considered it in my work as an editor while Reader sta put together this theater and arts special issue: What role does art play in our city while it’s being swarmed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement o cers? While our president is threatening a National Guard takeover and a violent “Chipocalypse”? While Palestinians in Chicago and beyond reckon with a blatant genocide at the hands of Israel?

Of course, it’s no revelatory idea that art can be revolutionary, or that it can play a key role in documenting, reflecting, and e ecting change amid turmoil. But Catlett’s art provides a welcome reminder that, along with taking to the streets to march against fascism, we can make art with our friends, see radical fi lms and plays, talk to and protect our neighbors, and educate ourselves and our communities. In the same way that our current government is leaving deep cuts, the art created to oppose it today will help form healing scars. v

—Taryn McFadden, culture editor m tmcfadden@chicagoreader.com

Elizabeth Catlett with her mother (le ) and husband, Francisco Mora (right), possibly at a protest SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

NOW THRU SEPT 28

OCT 3-19

OCT 14-19 OCT 21-NOV 2

OCT 31-NOV 1 NOV 19-30

DEC 2-14 NOV 11-30

FOOD & DRINK

Mother Aomjai wants to comfort your longing with noodles.

That is, if you grew up in Thailand. But even if you weren’t raised in Bangkok like she was, she wants to transport you there, as if you’re perched on a plastic chair in the street, hunched over a steaming bowl of blood-thickened boat noodles; or wontons bobbing in tom yam broth with crabmeat and slabs of roasted pork; or slippery rice noodles tangled around bobbing fish balls and snappy squid bits in a rosy-red sweet and sour soup.

“Let’s set up a noodle pot in front of the alley,” announces a typical weekly menu, posted each Saturday on Facebook with a single, classic-but-uncommon-for-Chicago noodle soup and its variable components and supplements. “Updated menu for Thai people who are far from home. Intense taste. It’s like eating in Thailand. Let’s get rid of homesickness.”

Pramereothai “Aomjai” Phumpardit, aka Mae (or “mother”) Aomjai, drops each week’s menu only in Thai, and she serves it only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The “alley” is an Albany Park storefront with a vintage greenand-orange pay phone hanging in the window. Inside, bright-blue Pepsi-branded vinylcovered tables sit before an open kitchen where she ladles nostalgia with orange, blue, and purple plastic flowers blooming from her cap like a beacon from home.

From the age of four, “Aom” began helping out at her mother’s noodle shop in the Bangkok Noi district of the capital. By 11, she was running it herself while her mother left to sell snacks at a factory.

“I [had] to act as a seller on behalf of my mother,” she wrote on Facebook. “I dressed beautifully. Sold by myself, carried my own stu , collected money by myself. Adults in the alley [felt] pity because they [saw] that I am very young. Gave me a lot of money for tips.”

When she came of age, she left the city to attend high school in Lamphun in northern Thailand—where her father grew up—and later studied philosophy at Chiang Mai University. She worked as a teacher until she immigrated here with her husband, Chawakorn, or “Ae,” in 2019.

She found work in the kitchen at Northalsted’s Krung Thep, but when the pandemic hit, she went into business for herself, joining the ranks of cottage cooks whose packaged grab-and-go foods appear in cold cases at the handful of Thai groceries around town. In May 2020, she introduced herself to a Thai community Facebook page with a menu of mushroom and pork spring rolls, taro dumplings in coco-

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

In Albany Park, a ‘secret’ Thai noodle pop-up thrives in plain sight

Mae Aomjai’s noodles are made “by Thais, for Thais”—and anyone who wants uncompromised Bangkok street food.

By MIKE SULA

nut milk, and steamed chicken with her own homemade chili paste for pickup or delivery.

“The vendor is friendly,” it read. “Not pushy, and very pretty, lol.”

She also began importing snacks, sauces, and chili dips from back home, adapting the brand name Aomjai Thailand when she began packaging her own chili paste for sale. Meanwhile, her weekly offerings became increasingly ambitious: boat noodles; stewed duck noodle soup; and yen ta fo, wide, flat rice noodles in fermented soybean broth, tinted pink with red fermented tofu and swimming with seafood and jiggly pork-blood cakes that she coagulated herself.

In the spring of 2022, she and Ae relocated to Lawrence Avenue in a space once occupied by Noodles Party, a pan-Asian concept that served everything from pad thai to Filipino pancit to pho to Malaysian Hokkien noodles. It

was a model that couldn’t be more opposed to the highly specialized, uncompromising food she was preparing for her fellow expatriates.

“I got pregnant, and I worked in this store selling only to-go,” she told me through a translator. “I gave birth, and my son had to stay in the ICU for 22 days. The doctor told me that my son had a brain hemorrhage, which resulted in cerebral palsy, and he would not be able to take care of himself. I had to keep my composure to take care of my child and the shop at the same time.”

The boy, Arthur, keeps weekly appointments with a neurologist, optometrist, otologist, neurosurgeon, and physical therapist, so she only opens the shop on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

She’s a resolutely scratch cook, down to the pickled chilies in vinegar, and ground chilies and peanuts in the condiment caddies at each

table. Her menus meticulously itemize original ingredients, such as yu choy, or green Chinese flowering mustard greens, in her wonton noodle soups, while other Thai restaurants sub in cheaper bean sprouts and call it a day.

“The menu feels ripped straight out of 1980s Bangkok street-cart noodle culture,” according to food writer Leela Punyaratabandhu, author of Bangkok and other cookbooks. “They even list all the little components of each noodle dish to drive home the if-you-knowyou-know point.”

Punyaratabandhu, a Bangkok-born linguist, identifies specific language on the menus meant to signal the food is “made by Thais, for Thais.” For example, instead of the central Thai word for “delicious,” or “aroi,” they use the Isan/Lao “saep.” “It’s more like ‘delicious’ in a way that kicks you in the teeth and hugs you at the same time,” says Punyaratabandhu.

Mae Aomjai prepares a bowl of kuai-tiao mu tun lamyai (braised pork noodles). KIRK WILLIAMSON

RMOTHER AOMJAI’S CHICAGO NOODLES, AKA NOODLES PARTY

4205 W. Lawrence, Tue and Wed, 11: 30 AM–11 PM, 773 -205 - 0505, facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063583628751

“The whole vibe screams: ‘We’re not holding back—let’s freaking go.’ They describe fried wontons as being ‘in the style of the vendors who gathered after school.’ Who’s supposed to get that other than people who went to Thai schools and had that exact after-class food memory? Pure nostalgia bait.”

Phumpardit usually o ers one or two supplemental dishes, like spicy basil pork with bamboo shoots on rice (“The kind of thing you’d inhale during a school lunch break,” according to Punyaratabandhu), or khao man gai, the Thai version of Hainanese chicken, served with blood cake, and rice cooked in the poached bird’s own rendered fat.

To drink, there’s sweet, cold chrysanthemum or longan tea, Thai iced tea or co ee, or water (no Pepsi). And for dessert, there’s usually steamed coconut milk custard or shaved ice sweetened with condensed milk and the classic, technicolor Hale’s Blue Boy syrups.

But the main event is always the week’s noodles, which might seem limiting except that there’s usually a choice—say, wide pad thaitype rice noodles, or delicate vermicelli-type

ones, or egg (aka wonton) noodles.

And there’s the option to order noodles “dry,” or without the soup broth at all—just a little garlic oil, fish sauce, and the proteins and vegetables. That leaves it up to you to customize your own bowl with fish sauce, chili vinegar, granulated sugar, or ground chilies or peanuts from the caddy on your table.

Accounting for all of these variables, a recent menu featuring kuai-tiao nuea tun (braised beef noodles) and kuai-tiao mu tun lamyai (braised pork noodles with the braising liquid infused with dried longan fruit) made it possible to create a dozen di erent variations from each.

Phumpardit keeps her prices low. A generous bowl goes for just $10 ($15 if you’re carrying out). “My goal is to provide Thai people who are far from home with the opportunity to eat food that is similar to what they would eat at home,” she says. “Like their mothers would make for them. This will help them to relieve their homesickness and be happy working here. I want to share. I want to give back to society, which has given me a career to support

my family. I’m not rich yet, but I can share. It makes me happy.”

She’s rewarded by a steady stream of Thai customers all day long, who sometimes line up outside the door waiting for tables.

Aomjai views part of her job as outreach. She reckons some 90 percent of her customers are Thai, but for those who aren’t, she wants them to experience the original dishes as they’re prepared on the street in Thailand, versus the compromised versions sold in most American restaurants. To certain folks, this may recall the once “secret” Thai language menus at spots such as the late Spoon, Rainbow Thai, and TAC Quick that, once translated, made the good stu accessible to non-Thais.

Earlier this spring, the restaurant closed for a few weeks for a renovation that evokes the street noodle shops of Aom’s youth. Across the dining room from a folding security gate that opens over a mock corrugated roll-up door hang beautifully illustrated descriptions of some of her greatest hits, meticulously scripted in Thai and some English. There’s the “legendary” braised duck noodle soup;

FOOD & DRINK

chicken soup with bitter melon; guay jub nam khon, or hand-rolled rice noodles with crispy pork and o al; or last week’s mu deng noodle soup, “bouncy” pork meatballs in tom yam broth. Usually there’s a laminated menu with photos of the week’s offerings too. Barring that, one can always get a rough idea of what she’s cooking by running her weekly menu updates through an online translator. (Meanwhile, ignore the obsolete, inaccurate Noodles Party website.)

Next Tuesday and Wednesday’s menu will feature her bestseller: beef or pork boat noodles with four di erent noodle options. And later this fall, Arthur’s improved condition will make it possible for his parents to extend their operation by three more days each week, which should at least temporarily relieve the occasional wait for a table.

“My son is fine,” she says. “Everything is fine. So I want to thank everyone who supported me. I would like people to know about the original Thai noodle.” v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

NEWS & POLITICS

Chipocalypse never

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday confirmed a large-scale deportation e ort is underway in Chicago.

The push (DHS is calling it “Operation Midway Blitz”) will likely see hundreds of agents from Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Bureau of Investigation , and other federal agencies flood the city and surrounding suburbs and is expected to last at least one month. In announcing the campaign, DHS slammed city and state sanctuary policies that prohibit law enforcement from cooperating on immigration enforcement efforts and referenced Katie Abraham, a 20-year-old who was killed in a car crash not in Chicago—but 150 miles away in Urbana.

ICE, which has a field o ce in Chicago and has already been arresting people in the city, invited far-right social media influencer Ben Bergquam and camera crews from Fox News to tag along for a handful of arrests Sunday and Monday. (Fox even blurred agents’ faces!) SUVs emblazoned with ICE’s logo and the slogan “defend the homeland” were parked outside the Cook County jail on Monday and Tuesday. Marcos Charles , a senior ICE official, took a swing at Sheri Tom Dart in an interview with ABC 7 Chicago for refusing to honor so-called detainers, or administrative warrants that ask local law enforcement to hold someone arrested for an additional 48

hours so ICE can take custody of them. Doing so would be a violation of city and state law.

On Saturday, I saw a heavy ICE presence and more than 15 SUVs and passenger vans parked at an ICE facility in suburban Broadview. The building will serve as a staging area and shortterm detention center for people arrested.

Illinois law prohibits state and local governments from contracting with ICE to detain people, so people facing deportation must be transported to other detention facilities out-of-state.

For 19 years, Catholic immigration advocates have hosted weekly prayer vigils outside the Broadview ICE facility. On September 5, they were joined by dozens of community members opposed to President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plan.

When a masked ICE agent arrived for work in a black SUV, a handful of protesters formed a chain blocking the building’s driveway. Broadview police tried in vain to clear a path. After a brief standoff, the agent relented, turned around, and left. All the while, demonstrators sang, “We shall not, we shall not be moved.”

—SHAWN MULCAHY

Legion Park evictions

On Tuesday morning, the City of Chicago and the Chicago Park District began moving in heavy equipment to destroy an encampment of unhoused residents in Legion Park on the city’s northwest side.

A small group of advocates gathered to protest the displacement, and at least a dozen police arrived, including 18th District police captain David Koenig, who issued a dispersal order, threatened protesters with arrest, and guarded the machines.

Unhoused residents, advocates, and neighbors gathered at the north section of the park on Monday to demand the city and 39th Ward alder Samantha Nugent halt their plans to destroy the encampment and displace residents along the North Shore Channel between Bryn Mawr and Peterson.

About 20–25 people live in the wooded area along the river in Legion Park, many of their homes tucked behind fencing and constructed out of wood and other materials.

The park district posted signs in early August saying the city would enforce its code banning people from the park after 11 PM beginning September 9 at 9 AM; the so-called encampment sweep was slated to continue through September 11. According to the signs and advocates, tent camping will continue to be allowed in other areas of the park.

Park resident Tracey Alcoser told press and neighbors the park district’s signs were posted to residents’ surprise.

The Legion Park eviction follows a trend of displacing people without shelter in Chicago.

The city cleared encampments at North Park and Humboldt Park last year and Gompers Park earlier this year. In doing so, city crews destroyed residents’ long-built homes, belong-

From L: Parks for All’s Peter Dorman speaks to reporters on September 8 ahead of a planned eviction at Legion Park; protesters block an ICE vehicle at 1930 Beach in Broadview on September 5 SAVANNAH HUGUELEY, PAUL GOYETTE/FLICKR VIA CC BY 4.0

ings, medications, and identification cards. More than that, Alcoser said, they severed relationships. “My safest place is with my community, because we are one.”

Peter Dorman , a representative of the budding group of both housed and unhoused neighbors Parks for All, called for permanent, a ordable housing for unhoused people, citing the roughly 100,000 vacant units across the city. “We are not saying that there is a blanket solution to homelessness. What we are saying is that sweeps do not help anybody; they continue the cycle of violence,” he said.

Aasim Khan with National Union of the Homeless echoed the voices of residents and neighbors, stating, “[Encampment sweeps] destroy what little stability people have. They tear apart communities, scatter belongings, and trample human dignity. Sweeps do not solve homelessness. They only hide it from public view.”

—SAVANNAH HUGUELEY

A family affair

It’s o cial: Walter Redmond Burnett III will succeed his father, Walter Burnett Jr. , as alder of the 27th Ward. Mayor Brandon Johnson made the announcement at 4:30 PM on Friday, as news swirled about an impending federal invasion— the perfect time to publicize a consequential and controversial decision.

The younger Burnett previously spent five years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and worked as a consultant on real estate projects, according to a press release that touts his “long-standing commitment to public service, equity, and young people.”

I wrote in July that the elder Burnett resigned from his post as City Council ’s longest-serving member. Johnson hopes to install Burnett as the leader of the embattled Chicago Housing Authority, but his plan is on hold as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development probes potential conflicts of interest. —SHAWN MULCAHY v

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

m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

R“ FRENTE A LA VIDA / FACING LIFE”

9/20 –2/21/26 : Wed and Fri–Sat 11 AM– 5 PM, Thu 11 AM– 6 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, poetryfoundation.org/exhibitions/ 1706555/victoria-martinez-frente-a-la-vida-facing-life, free

FEATURE

The language of abstraction

Victoria

Martinez matches the passion and complexity of Magda Portal at the Poetry Foundation.

By KERRY CARDOZA

“Iwas always drawn to books; I feel like my life is like a sketchbook or a journal,” says Victoria Martinez, a Chicago-born abstract artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations are filled with vivid colors that evoke the vibrancy of city life. “I feel, like, oftentimes, the different works of art that I create for the public and for shows, it’s like di erent chapters in my life.”

Works from Martinez’s latest chapter will be on view at the Poetry Foundation, in an exhibition opening September 20, in conversation with poetry from the late Peruvian poet Magda Portal. “Frente a la vida / Facing Life” is the result of a long relationship with the Poetry Foundation, dating to 2017 when the magazine featured work from Martinez on its cover—a bright work of primary colors and bits of language that resembles the layers of signage found on a city street.

“Her approach is so open and flexible,” says Fred Sasaki, the Poetry Foundation’s creative director and exhibitions cocurator. Martinez is “always kind of pushing the boundaries of her comfort zone to new realms, new mediums, new styles, and applications.” That openness will be on view in “Frente a la vida” in a series of wall-hung ceramic paintings, a first for the artist. “This is a newer area of exploration for her, and she was willing to kind of make it the central point of her show, and just go for it,” Sasaki says.

Martinez developed her eye growing up in Pilsen in the 90s when the neighborhood was rich with murals and graffiti. As a child, her mother frequently took her to the National Museum of Mexican Art and taught her to recite poetry. “All of those di erent experiences

helped me develop a sense of art and, like, a love for art. It taught me a lot about scale and color palettes, history, art history, Mexican art history. I just grew into loving art and making art,” Martinez says.

As an undergraduate, Martinez studied printmaking, textiles, and teaching at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, later receiving her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale. In between, she spent time teaching and traveling in Mexico, where she honed her interest in making works that are deeply responsive to place. She often sources materials from the area she is working in— textiles from thrift shops or local stores, clay from the Mexican desert, hibiscus flowers sourced from Arizona for a large-scale textile work.

Attending Yale was a formative experience—Martinez credits artist Torkwase Dyson with pushing her “to figure out ways to merge

in my head and color palettes,” she says. “The quickness of looking into someone’s eyes and rushing to the train—I love that energy of living in the city.”

For the Poetry Foundation show, some of Martinez’s instinctual interests—her love of color and vibrancy—have been scaled back to better complement Portal’s poetry, some of which will be on display. “Magda was a very soulful, kind of sad person,” Martinez explains. In addition to writing poetry, Portal was also a founding member of Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Party and was exiled and jailed for her political activity. Her personal life was no less turbulent: she was romantically attached to two brothers, having a daughter out of wedlock with one of them (that daughter eventually died by suicide).

The show will feature two site-specific murals, one on the gallery wall and another on a window that faces out to the foundation’s entryway. Both feature somber blues and grays, reflecting Portal’s sadness and the frequent reference to water and the sea in her work. “I always want to associate myself [with] di erent Latin American or Latinx women in history,” particularly those who have been overlooked, Martinez says.

The exhibition is just the latest example of what Sasaki calls Martinez’s openness and expansiveness. In a way, that boldness makes her pairing with Portal a perfect fit. For Martinez, it’s important for her work to honor Latinx women in all their complexity, a complexity that also manifests in her own practice.

the softness of textiles and the hardness of industrial materials.” But she found herself resisting the way the school described itself as a “closed-door community.” She started making oversize, double-sided paintings that hang from the ceiling, often with doorlike cutouts for visitors to walk through. “I wanted to invite people into my work.”

Access is something Martinez thinks about deeply. She requires that all materials for her exhibitions be available in English and Spanish, the artist’s first language. “You’re pushing people to kind of go outside of their boundaries and reach another majority in the country, another group of people who speak Spanish,” she says.

Like the Situationists, who advocated for wandering through urban space, Martinez takes great inspiration from a regular walking practice and life in the city. “Every time I walk in the street, I start to collect di erent images

“I love layering materials, because it creates new languages,” she says. “I feel like as people we have many meanings to who we are. We’re not just one type of person. Even

“I love layering materials, because it creates new languages.”

when it comes to identity, like, for example, my parents lived in Mexico. I learned how to speak Spanish. I grew up with the culture in Pilsen. But also, I’m American, right? I grew up in America. We have to engage in society because this is where we’re from, or this is where we live. So there’s that duality, being who we are.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

Victoria Martinez honors the poet Magda Portal with two murals at the Poetry Foundation. COURTESY THE POETRY FOUNDATION

R“ FREEDOM IN FORM: RICHARD HUNT”

Through 11/ 15 : Wed–Sat, 10 AM– 5 PM, Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, luc.edu/luma/currentexhibitions/freedominformrichardhunt, $15 admission, $12 alumni, military, seniors, students, free for Loyola students, staff, and faculty

RETROSPECTIVE

Freedom of thought

Richard Hunt showed that there are many ways to be a Black artist.

By KERRY CARDOZA

“In the name of Black Determination, Richard Hunt cannot have a retrospective at MOMA [sic].”

In 1970, Faith Ringgold was part of Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of artists organizing for political and economic reforms at museums. AWC had been agitating for the inclusion of more Black artists, and Ringgold had been in correspondence with John Hightower, then the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. When MoMA announced that it would be holding two solo exhibitions of Black artists—the painter Romare Bearden and the rising sculptor Richard Hunt—Ringgold was not pleased.

“Mr. Hunt disavows all connections with being black, having a black experience, or black problem of any kind,” continued Ringgold, in her 1970 letter to Hightower. “It was Black Determination which got a retrospective in the first place. Surely a man like Mr. Hunt, who dares deny the existence of such a force, should not be the one to first sample the fruits of it.”

Of course, Hunt didn’t disavow his Blackness, as Ringgold alleged. Instead, he said that he didn’t much concern himself with the “problem” of the “aesthetics of Black art.” “In terms of my work,” he said, “I have a certain kind of ideal that I want to attain and I find myself being able to do that as a Black man in America and living in a Black community.”

Hunt did have his MoMA exhibition, in 1971—the museum’s first retrospective of a Black sculptor in its then 42-year history. This debate over what makes a Black artist, or an artist Black, is alluded to in the commanding “Freedom in Form: Richard Hunt” exhibition now on view at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), following its 2024 debut at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum under Lance Tawzer, director of exhibits and shows. (You can find more detail on it in the phenomenal catalog.) But that debate is at

the heart of the show, concerned as it is with both the freedom evinced in so many of Hunt’s soaring metal sculptures and his freedom as an artist to buck external pressures and create what he wanted to create.

The show, curated by Jane Addams HullHouse Museum curatorial manager Ross Stanton Jordan, also takes pains to situate Hunt— who died in 2023, just as the planning for this exhibition began in earnest—in the context of the ongoing fight for racial equity. In 1960, he took part in a landmark e ort to desegregate lunch counters in San Antonio. In 1969, he was part of a group of artists who withdrew their work from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum to protest its failure to include Black cura-

Emmett Till, who was killed the year before. Till and Hunt—who grew up in Woodlawn and Englewood—were nearly the same age and lived just a few blocks from one another. As Jordan put it, “That was another violent death that transformed into immense positive energy, that led to the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts.”

Hunt’s biographer, Jon Ott, writes in the catalog that Hero’s Head was a turning point in Hunt’s work. It was one of his first welded steel sculptures. At the time, Hunt worked out of a basement studio below his father’s barbershop, teaching himself welding when the art form was so new they didn’t o er it in art school. (The black walls of the first gallery are meant to evoke the basement studio.) Prior to this work, Hunt had focused on sculpting figures from daily life, such as animals and circus performers. “From that moment forward in his practice, Hunt incorporated African American themes and heroes into his sculptures,” Ott writes.

As you move further into LUMA’s galleries, the show brightens, the walls now white. The work is installed chronologically, and these galleries echo Hunt’s 1971 purchase of a massive, defunct power substation in Lincoln Park, which was his studio for the remainder of his life. In an era of redlining and entrenched segregation, it was a powerful move.

tors or community members in a forthcoming exhibition as it had promised.

“The exhibition text begins with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” Jordan explained. That kick-started the radicalization of the Republican Party, leading to Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of Black men, among other e orts to equalize society. “I wanted to show, like, how do these violent deaths from racism—how are they transformed into positive energy?”

One of the first sculptures visitors encounter at LUMA is Hero’s Head , made in 1956, while Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The almost life-size piece references the mangled face of

Also included are ephemeral and historical items: Hunt’s workbench and some of his tools, photographs of him working, a selection of books from his vast library. A particularly delightful addition is a rare video, from 1967, showing Studs Terkel interviewing a young Hunt in his studio. “I wanted to teach people how to look at art, basically,” Jordan said of the video. In it, Terkel acts as an everyman, interpreting Hunt’s abstract works in an instinctual way. “The Studs video is meant to help people feel like, ‘Oh, what you do in front of an artwork is you look at it and what you see is what you get.’ . . . lt’s open to you, if you’re open to it.”

A series of maquettes depicts some of Hunt’s extant or proposed public sculptures, including the magnificent bronze Swing Low (2016), which hangs in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A cast bronze model for a monument to the Middle Passage stands on a plinth toward the rear of the show. The piece is dark, with a low profile. It shows a shiplike structure with a passage cutting through it, and a staircase over it. Around it is a floor with an uneven mass of layers, a reference to ocean waves or

Richard Hunt with John Jones , 1968-69 2025 THE RICHARD HUNT TRUST / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

perhaps the approximately 12 million Africans who were forced to cross over the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas during the slave trade. As the exhibition text notes, “No singular memorial exists to commemorate the lives lost to the horrors of the Triangle Slave Trade,” yet Hunt’s model remains unrealized.

The piece holds special meaning for Jordan, who came across the piece in high school. “It just stuck in my head,” he said. For years, he didn’t know who the artist was, until he was putting together this exhibition and saw the title on a checklist. “He creates work that stays with you.”

Though Hunt was one of the foremost sculptors of his time, he hasn’t had as many major exhibitions in Chicago as you might think. (He was also the most prolific sculptor of public art in the U.S.—with more than 160 pieces on view across the country, and more than 70 on view in Illinois.) So it certainly feels like a privilege to be able to take such a close, considered look at his life and work right here in Chicago—the city he lived in virtually all of his life. You’ll certainly come away with a deeper understanding of Hunt’s commitment to freedom.

“Hunt diverged from his contemporaries,” Jordan said. “He stuck with his artistic vision through immense pressure from peers to create work that was easily identifiable as Black and political. . . . At the time that hurt him in the art market, and [in an] art historical way. But now, looking back, I admire, and I think many people do admire the fact that it means many, many things to be a Black artist. They’re allowed to create what they want to when they want to because it’s an expression of their own sensibilities, own sense of creativity, and that cannot be curtailed, not even by someone’s peers. And that’s a powerful message, I think, for artists working today, too.”

It’s a sentiment voiced by Hunt himself, in a quote on display in the gallery: “I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

Southeast Spotlight: Tranquil Aesthetics Beauty Suites

A modern space for full-service self-care

Tranquility in a city is not easy to come by. Busy bodies bustling and hustling; intentionality with our time is essential. Rami Brown, the owner and founder of Tranquil Aesthetics Beauty Suites, uses her time to support other entrepreneurs and provide a place for respite and restoration for those who patronize.

Tranquil Aesthetics Beauty Suites was built to be a one-stop shop: it offers space to entrepreneurial estheticians and beauticians who offer all types of self-care services. From braiding to lash extensions to manicures and much more, Brown’s bold vision ensures their southeast side clientele and small business owners have easy, nearby access.

As a community-oriented entrepreneur, Brown continuously creates ways to sustain and nourish the neighborhood she has long called home. For her, owning the space is essential. In addition to Tranquil Aesthetics, Brown also founded Bright Smiles Daycare. Inspired by folks she knew who were training in beauty school, Brown wanted to open a peaceful, local storefront that allowed graduates to consistently host clients. With its peaceful, sharp yet modern design, Brown’s business reflects how she wants people to feel when they visit—beautiful.

Having successfully run another business, where she was able to witness and nurture the growth of children, Brown knew that in addition to providing operating space, she could extend her skill set to supporting other early stage entrepreneurs. Although it’s not always

smooth sailing running a business, Brown is able to serve as a mentor, providing structural support and operational advice. A year later, just in time for a fall refresh, Tranquil Aesthetics is celebrating its first anniversary. Visit their social media to stay the most up to date on current services, specials, and more!

This content is sponsored by the Southeast Chicago Chamber of Commerce

RE LIZABETH CATLETT: “A BLACK REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST AND ALL THAT IT IMPLIES” Through 1/4: Fri–Mon and Wed 11 AM– 5 PM, Thu 11 AM– 8 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/exhibitions, adults $20 – 32 , seniors 65 +, students, and teens 14 –17 $14 –26, children under 14 and Chicago teens 14 –17 free; Illinois residents get in free Thursdays 5 – 8 PM through 9/25

REVIEW

A revolutionary life

The Art Institute’s long-overdue Elizabeth Catlett retrospective

By SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) was a revolutionary printmaker, sculptor, and painter with a body of work spanning six-plus decades. This fall, the Art Institute presents a long-overdue retrospective of her work across mediums, adapted from a curation by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Beginning with her earliest work in the 1940s, the exhibit walks visitors through her political activism and her realist depictions of the people around her, her sculpture and the shifts in her use of shading, all against a baby blue backdrop. The viewer sees Catlett come into her intentions as an artist and distinctive style throughout mediums: while her prints became more and more intricate, her sculptural works became more abstract. Most notably, Catlett revisited her prints over decades, experimenting with different colorways and restyling them into new contexts.

Born in Washington, D.C. and determined to become an artist from a young age, Catlett was accepted into her dream art program, Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Institute of Technology); her admission was rescinded when they learned she was Black. She enrolled instead at Howard University in 1931, where she studied under leading figures in the Black arts scene: printmaker James Lesesne Wells and painters Loïs Mailou Jones and James A. Porter. It was Porter who introduced her to the Mexican muralist movement, and it was the Howard University Art Gallery where she first encountered African sculpture, both of which shaped her painting and sculptural practices. (The Art Institute quotes Catlett alongside an array of her later sculptural works: “I am impressed by the use of form to express emotion; by the simplification towards abstraction; by the life and vitality achieved through form relations. All African art interests me. I see such force, such life. I love it!”)

Post graduation, she worked for two years as a public school teacher, which left her with no time to practice her own art. She entered an MFA program at the University of Iowa, where she studied painting with Grant Wood of recent American Gothic fame. He instructed her to

“take as her subject what she knew best,” and to constantly work and rework her images, two sentiments that remained central to her lifelong art practice. When she showed interest in sculpture, Wood encouraged her to pursue it. In 1940, Catlett became the first Black woman to earn an MFA at the school.

Catlett lived in Chicago for the summer of 1941, studying ceramics at the Art Institute and lithography at the South Side Community Art Center. She moved to New York while briefly married to Charles White, continuing her lithography study and teaching sewing and sculpture to working-class women at Harlem’s George Washington Carver School.

Working at Carver School was deeply influential, solidifying her belief that art should be public and for the people. The Art Institute quotes her below the sculpture Floating Family (1995–96), commissioned by the Chicago Public Library: “Art in public places is only valid when it has some relationship to the community. . . . It is not good enough to be merely functional or even beautiful. We must meet the psychological and social needs of our people.” She was excited about the sculpture’s public library placement, “about the prospect of people sitting there,” she said, “Black people sitting in that building, reading.”

She often depicted her students in her lithography and began a series funded by a Rosenwald fellowship—what became “The Black Woman,” her 15-part narrative epic of Black womanhood in the U.S. across space and time. Predictably, as a teacher, she had little spare time to work on it. So Catlett moved to Mexico, drawn by the revolutionary mural and print art being created there. She joined the leftist print collective Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), which produced political prints for mass distribution. Catlett created over 70 prints with the TGP, depicting Black and Mexican experiences alike. In response to her political subject matter and leftist associations, the U.S. declared Catlett an “undesirable alien.” She gained Mexican citizenship in 1962, and her U.S. citizenship was revoked. Catlett was barred from entry to the U.S. through the millennium with

minimal exceptions, even to visit exhibitions of her own work, until her citizenship was reinstated in 2002 due to a letter-writing campaign.

She turned her focus towards printmaking in the 1940s and ’50s during her three sons’ early childhoods. Catlett began to depict the lives and struggles of Mexican workers, mothers, and children, creating her most well-known print, Sharecropper (1952/1970). While the initial version was black-and-white, she continued to experiment with it in color decades later. Catlett also spoke to larger systems of oppression, illustrating the violence and exploitation of U.S. imperialism with Alto a la agresión (1954). She combined this with Chile I (1980) and Chile II (1982) to create the expansive Central America Says No! (1986) later on. “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples,” she told Ebony magazine in a 1970 article.

Catlett innovated any medium and style she touched. In Vendedora de periódicos (1958/75), she collaged Mexican newspapers

into a linocut print. Repeated faces express multiplicity and collectivity in Malcolm X Speaks for Us (1969) and Angela Libre (1972). The sculpture The Black Woman Speaks (1970) depicts a rounded female face, with an abstract sun and moon as the ear. Man (1975) combines woodcut and linocut, drawing from both African geometric abstraction and Mesoamerican figure motifs. Harlem Woman (1992) collages fabric into a color lithograph. She never ceased to be inventive in all that she did. Catlett was a revolutionary artist—in politics, subject matter, and artistic method— throughout her career. The exhibition’s title specifically pulls from Catlett’s speech to the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art, held at Northwestern University in 1970. Her U.S. citizenship revoked and visa denied, she spoke to the crowd over the phone: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies.”  v m sfriedman-parks@chicagoreader.com

Elizabeth Catlett. Harlem Woman , 1992

Joffrey at the Harris: Matters of the Heart

Thursday, November 6 /

Friday, November 7 / 7:30PM Saturday, November 8 / 2:00PM + 7:30PM Sunday, November 9 / 2:00PM

Photo by Rosalie O’Connor. Courtesy of Ballet Arizona.

STAGES OF SURVIVAL

Raven Theatre still flies high in Edgewater

Classic and contemporary work and fostering collaborations are at the center of the 42-year-old company’s mission.

By KERRY REID

Stages of Survival is an occasional series focusing on Chicago theater companies, highlighting their histories and how they’re surviving—and even thriving—in a landscape that’s become decidedly more challenging since the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown.

When I talked to Raven Theatre artistic director Sarah Slight just as she was moving into that role permanently two years ago, she told me, “I am absolutely planning on continuing the commitment to new plays and revivals that sort of make Raven’s artistic identity in the community.”

That’s a promise she’s kept, along with forging partnerships with local directors and writers to expand the ways in which Raven’s resources can foster new work. The company opens its 43rd season in October with Terry Guest’s Oak , directed by Guest’s longtime collaborator Mikael Burke. Guest is also a member of the Story Theatre, which has been in residence with Raven for several past productions, including Guest’s historical fantasia Marie Antoinette and the Magical Negroes and two stagings of his At the Wake of a Dead Drag Queen

In February, Story’s production of ensemble member Paul Michael Thomson’s Pot Girls will

run simultaneously in Raven’s smaller studio space during Raven’s production of Caryl Churchill’s 1982 feminist classic Top Girls . (Raven has occupied its two-venue space—a former grocery store at Clark and Granville— since 2002. The mainstage theater seats up to 130, and the smaller space can accommodate up to 56 patrons.)

Slight is rather unusual among artistic directors because she’s a dramaturg, not a director or actor. But from her perspective, her training as a dramaturg has prepared her for thinking about how classics can speak to our current moment and how new plays can extend conversations that have been going on in theater for decades. The pairing of Churchill and Thomson’s plays exemplifies that. (Thomson’s brother sister cyborg space was onstage with Raven in winter 2024.)

“This is the first time we’re actually programming together. And I’m so excited to offer sort of a callback to those years of the Hypocrites and marathon theater experiences. [The now defunct Hypocrites produced All Our Tragic, an epic staging of 32 Greek tragedies, in 2014.] We are gonna try to offer a couple weekends where you could see both in one day and have dinner in between. And it’ll be this sort of wonderful long theatrical event,” Slight says.

OAK

The three-play season also offers another first for Raven: a musical. (Raven’s 2015 production of Mark Stein and Harley White Jr.’s Direct From Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys, directed by founding artistic director Michael Menendian and not to be confused with David Thompson, Fred Ebb, and John Kander’s better-known The Scottsboro Boys, was more a play with music than a full-blown musical.)

In spring 2026, Raven presents the Chicago premiere of Octet , created by Dave Malloy, whose Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 received a dozen Tony Award nominations in 2017.

“That’s one of the ways that we are continuing to respond to what we think will be exciting, what fits within the long history of Raven’s programming, and what feels new,” says Slight. “For Octet in particular, that show is about Internet addiction and our life online, which is something that Raven has already investigated with the play Right to Be Forgotten [written by Sharyn Rothstein and produced by Raven in 2023] and was something our audience was so deeply engaged on that it felt like the right kind of topical musical for Raven to jump on.”

Guest’s Oak is part of a rolling world premiere with the National New Play Network, of which Raven is an associate member. Three other theaters around the country (Urbanite Theatre in Sarasota, Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre in Indianapolis, and Alleyway The-

atre in Buffalo) presented the show earlier. Slight says, “It’s a great opportunity for a playwright–director partnership to continue to work on the same new play and then to get to do it in Chicago, their hometown, and at a theater company that really believes in them and has supported them.”

Guest says, “I sort of thought of Raven first as an actor, as a theater company that did classics and classic-adjacent work. And so I kind of assumed that maybe I would act there one day, but certainly my plays would never be produced there because that’s not the kind of work that I make. And then the Story Theatre kind of brought me into the doors, and I got to meet the people who worked there. But still, the Raven and the Story creatively are completely separate entities. And so we got to be our own kind of weird, loud, messy, colorful group within this 40-year-old structured theater company.”

Asked to describe Oak, Guest says, “I am a southern boy, so a lot of my work is about the south. And part of that is that my work tends to have a lot of ghosts, and history and the present are closer to each other than maybe you might assume. It’s very folkloric—lots of stories of monsters and, you know, cryptids and things that happen in the woods at night that you can hear but can’t see. Or things that you can see but can’t hear. It is scary and funny and Black.”

Burke was originally supposed to make

From L: Sarah Slight, Terry Guest, Mikael Burke COURTESY THE ARTISTS

Oak DAVID HAGEN

his directorial debut at Raven in 2020, when former artistic director Cody Estle was still running the company. (Estle took over from Menendian and his wife, JoAnn Montemurro, after the board dismissed the couple in 2017. Estle now runs Next Act Theatre in Milwaukee.) COVID put the kibosh on that, but Burke also already knew Slight from working on a show at now defunct American Theater Company when she was associate artistic director. “It was just a really exciting moment when she came up for the job at Raven, and we were just like, ‘Oh, we have to work together. We gotta figure it out,’” he says.

Slight says, “I consider directors to be the generative artists for those projects. I wanna know, ‘What’s that play that you’ve always wanted to do, and why is it sort of like burning inside you? What is it that you wanna say with that?’ I think last season’s A Lie of the Mind was a good example of a strong partnership between Raven and a director to take a contemporary classic and make it new.” (Azar Kazemi’s production of Sam Shepard’s 1985 play about two families confronting the aftermath of domestic violence reimagined the story to

include a family of immigrants.)

“I love the idea of an artistic director who is a dramaturg because I feel like often, as directors, it’s very easy to get caught up in the production of it all,” Burke says. “And we can lose sight of the story that’s right underneath. There are so many plates that we’re all spinning. When I talk to my students, I talk about dramaturgy as like a really great pair of glasses when you didn’t know you needed glasses in the first place. They help you see all of these details about the story that just maybe weren’t in focus for you because your astigmatism leans that way. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed in talking with Sarah about the work, because the questions that she asks and the curiosities that she brings up are always illuminating and eye-opening.”

Raven’s annual budget in 2024 was just under $1 million, according to their most recent tax forms, and Slight makes $55,000 annually. But like a lot of midsize companies (especially ones that have the sunk costs of running a facility), Raven has opted for fewer shows in recent seasons. It also made the leap to using the Chicago Area Theatre (CAT) Equi-

ty contract in 2021, which added to personnel costs.

Slight notes that Raven, along with Rivendell, Steep, About Face, and Jackalope, received support from the Bayless Family Foundation to investigate shared staffing models. “We are about to complete our first year of investigation and hoping to potentially put some stu into practice as a model for the rest of the city and perhaps for the rest of the American theater in terms of what it could look like to share sta and what that means. There’s so much gig culture. How could five companies turn a gig into actually a full-time job? And so we’re investigating how we might be able to create more sustainable jobs and sustain each other.”

Staying connected to the Edgewater community is also important to Slight. “We try to find at least one partner organization whose work is connected to the content of the show in some way, so that they can try to reach the Edgewater audience and neighborhood, whether they’re local or whether they’re more of a citywide organization. An example of that would be that last season for Gorgeous [Raven coproduced Keiko Green’s play with Rivendell], we partnered with Chicago English Bulldog Rescue to host a rescue event. The title character was an English bulldog. And so we had folks coming through to meet the dogs, perhaps become foster or adoptive dog parents, or even just contribute potentially to their work.”

For the near future, Slight says that her goals with Raven are about sustainability for the company and artists. “We’re not looking to do more plays necessarily. We are looking to increase our artist wages and make sure folks are making a living. And the thing that I would like to see us continue, that we’re making plans for in the next couple of years, is to continue our commissions and announce new writers for that. I really believe in Raven participating in the creation of the next plays for the American theater. But for the most part, we’re gonna stick to three plays and continue to have important conversations that connect people to the cultural fabric of our city and our country.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

PERFORMANCE PREVIEWS

Resistance and respite

Whether you need encouragement for the fight or a chance to unwind, local stages offer plenty to engage.

By KERRY REID

Fall is usually my favorite time of year in Chicago, but I can certainly understand if all the darkness descending around us (and I’m not just talking the shorter days) makes it hard to find the joy. Whether you’re seeking distraction or enlightenment, beauty or absurdity, or some indelible blend of all the changing colors of our human experiences, here are ten shows that may offer what you need, at least for a couple of hours.

COMEDY AND VARIETY

Funny Is Female Comedy Festival

You don’t have to be a fan of Hacks to see that the comedy world, while more welcoming than it used to be, still has some glass ceilings to smash. The inaugural Funny Is Female Comedy Festival aims to bring a hammer or two along with the laughs to this showcase of “women and female-identifying people in comedy.” The powerhouse lineup includes Megan Gailey (cohost of the podcast Sports Bitches) and longtime Chicago favorite Patti Vasquez, along with nearly 60 other comedians. The three-day festival also includes panels with industry professionals to help talent at all stages of their career figure out how to build audiences along with their material. Thu-Sat 10/23–10/25 at Comedy Plex, 1128 Lake, Oak Park; see comedyplex.com for updated schedules and ticketing information.

The Lizzie McGuire Movie: The Play Derek Begrudgingly, purveyors of parodies of beloved childhood pop-culture touchstones, bring their take on this 2003 Hilary Duff vehicle to life with “dance, drag, a live band, over-the-top acting, and giant DIY cardboard props,” all promising a look at “the duality of girlhood: Wanting to be the center of attention but not wanting anyone to look at you.” (Not a problem, presumably, for the women of the Funny Is Female lineup, but certainly still a relatable conundrum for many!) Fri–Sat 9/26–9/27, 8 PM, Color Club, 4146 N. Elston, colorclub.events, $25

DANCE

The Heart of the Story

You have two more chances to catch Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s program of excerpts from the company’s repertoire as part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks series. The pieces are customized to the community in which they’re performed, and each program features eight CRDT company members using dance and storytelling to “highlight the many dualities found within each of us—confidence and doubt, strength and vulnerability, grace and intensity.” (Lizzie McGuire can relate!) Fri 9/12 6 PM, Austin Town Hall, 5620 W. Lake; Fri 10/10 6 PM, Douglass Park, 1401 S. Sacramento, free

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Fall Series

Hubbard Street takes over Steppenwolf’s mainstage for this program of four pieces: Ohad Naharin’s Black Milk, a “ritualistic quintet”; Bob Fosse’s Percussion IV, first created by the late choreographer for the 1978 revue Dancin’ ; resident artist Aszure Barton’s A Duo ; and Johan Inger’s Impasse . The latter two were also part of the 2024 Hubbard Street program Of Joy , praised by Reader contributor JT Newman as “an incredibly original duet” and an exploration of “glorious chaos,” respectively. 11/14–11/23, Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-850-9744, ext. 5, hubbardstreetdance. com, $23-$128.80

OPERA

Euridice

Haymarket Opera Company and the Newberry Consort collaborate on this concert presentation of the world’s oldest surviving opera. Jacopo Peri’s piece was composed in 1600 for the marriage of King Henry IV of France and Marie de Médicis (though using the Eurydice myth as the basis for a wedding present seems a little ghoulish). An ensemble of musicians from Chicago’s thriving early-music com-

munity will perform alongside artists both new and familiar to fans of Haymarket and Newberry. Fri 10/24 7 PM, Fullerton Hall at Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, and Sat 10/25 3 PM, Nichols Concert Hall at Music Institute of Chicago, 1490 Chicago, Evanston, haymarketopera.org, $10-$80

THEATER

Big White Fog

Before there was A Raisin in the Sun, there was Big White Fog. Theodore Ward’s 1938 drama, created through the Federal Theatre Project and influenced by the South Side Writers Group that also gave us Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, comes to life at Court under the direction of Ron OJ Parson. The south-side Mason family struggles with the Great Depression and the racialized violence and segregation surrounding them as they attempt to rise above “the big white fog” that dominates the city and nation. The Louisiana-born Ward moved to Chicago in 1934 and went on to write more than 30 plays. (His name also graced a playwriting award for Black writers sponsored by Columbia College Chicago for many years.) This production is a rare and welcome opportunity to revisit his work. 9/12–10/12, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $42-$90

Veal

A Red Orchid Theatre kicks o its season with the world premiere of Jojo Jones’s dystopic tale (lots of those going around these days!) about Chelsea, who has become “Queen of North America” in the aftermath of a violent coup. Three old friends show up to ask favors of the queen—but before she grants their requests, she’s going to make them revisit some terrible history. Dado directs. 9/25–11/2, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $33-$55

Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival

Some productions feel more urgent than others these days, and given the fascist assault on migrant communities in our streets, the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance’s annual Destinos festival couldn’t be more timely. The bad news is that the current administration’s actions have made it much harder for international artists to participate this year. (The fact that the festival put an estimated $1.2 million into local co ers last year apparently doesn’t matter to the hooligans.) But Chicago has a wealth of Latine theater companies

producing year-round, and most of them are highlighted in the 2025 Destinos celebration, which includes work by Colectivo El Pozo, Subtext Studio Theatre, Concrete Content, Visión Latino, Repertorio Latino, and Aguijón Theater. In the words of CLATA executive director Jorge Valdivia, “We are living in a time when art is being censored, our voices are being silenced, and families are being torn apart. Now more than ever, telling our stories is an act of resistance and resilience. It is how we remember, how we fight, and how we heal.” 10/1–11/2; see clata.org for schedule and tickets.

Ugly Lies the Bone

In Lindsey Ferrentino’s comedy, a veteran of three tours of duty in Afghanistan tries to piece together the broken bits of her life with the aid of virtual reality. Ferrentino has said that the play (which premiered in 2015 in New York, starring Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer) was inspired in part by the video game Snow World, in which burn victims are immersed in a snowy landscape that includes the company of penguins. Longtime Chicago director Jonathan Berry, who just spent three years as artistic director of Maine’s Penobscot Theatre, marks his return to town with this Shattered Globe local premiere. (Ferrentino’s latest, the musical Queen of Versailles, opens on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham in early October.) 10/3–11/15, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, sgtheatre. org, $25-$60

Hell’s Kitchen

Alicia Keys gets her own jukebox musical in this show, featuring a book by Kristo er Diaz (whose Things With Friends just opened in a world premiere with American Blues Theater). The story is loosely based on Keys’s own upbringing in 1990s Manhattan (before the title neighborhood was sanitized as Clinton or, in realtor parlance, “Midtown West”). Keys has described the show as “a love story between a mother and daughter.” After playing off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2023 and on Broadway in 2024 under the direction of Michael Greif (picking up 13 Tony nominations and winning two awards), it’s now on a national tour, which makes a stop in Chicago to warm up the frosty November nights. 11/11–11/30, James M. Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph; see broadwayinchicago.com for schedule and tickets. v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

THEATER

OPENING

R Love Island meets Agatha Christie

Hot People Island sends up reality TV with a twist of murder.

I’ve never watched an episode of Love Island, but that hardly got in the way of my enjoyment of Hot People Island, the high-energy, low-budget spoof now onstage with Corn Productions. Written by Deana Velandra and directed by Maddi LeBlanc, the show features eight people pairing off on a tropical island (duh) searching for love and lucre. Mostly the latter.

The tropes of reality TV are writ large here. Scheming Rylie (Sarah Seidler) tells us from the start that she’s in it to win it, while on the other end of the contestant spectrum, sweet, clueless Brit Freddy (Jake Gartung) is there only because his sister signed him up. The contestants play ring toss with a dildo and pair off for a singing competition—and are also perpetually surprised en flagrante in the unlocked villa on the beach. But with a host named Red Herrington (Jonathan Castillo), you can bet on some twists along the way. Velandra ups the meta content by introducing Tom (Tom Cannan), who hopes to turn his social media fandom for the series into a cash cow and sits in the audience, kibbitzing about the action “onscreen.”

The story takes a dark turn when one of the contestants winds up dead, and the others have to determine the guilt or innocence of their peers, neatly making the point that reality competition shows (and I’ve been a fan of a few!) all share DNA with the Stanford Prison Experiment. (Except maybe The Great British Bake Off.) Underneath the goofy hijinks is a pointed commentary on the increasing demand for people to promote their online “brand” at all times. As Tom finally realizes, “The devil is the Internet, and the Internet is everybody.” We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but at least Hot People Island lets us laugh about our idiocracy. —KERRY REID HOT PEOPLE ISLAND Through 9/27: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM; Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, cornservatory.org, $10-$20

R What wine goes with apocalypse?

Kristoffer Diaz’s Things With Friends is a deliciously dark comedy.

Baron Rothschild, arguably the father of disaster capitalism, allegedly said, “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” Substitute “water” and you’ve got the premise for Kristoffer Diaz’s pitch-black comedy, Things With Friends, now in a sharp and pungent world premiere at American Blues Theater under Dexter Bullard’s direction.

Adele (Audrey Billings) and Burt (Casey Campbell) are a childless middle-aged couple living in a Manhattan high-rise (the 27th floor, to be precise). As the show opens, Burt is searing steaks and Adele is opening a prized bottle of red wine—the last of their private stock. Apparently, she’s ordered more, but deliveries are a little spotty—probably because the George Washington Bridge collapsed in the wake of a flood a little while earlier, and the mention of more rain on the way makes her palpably nervous. When their suburban friends, Vy (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel) and Chabby (Jon Hudson Odom), show up (with several bottles of the

beloved wine appearing in Chabby’s hands from time to time as if by magic), it soon becomes clear that this “thing with friends” isn’t just a long overdue social engagement. Vy and Chabby don’t intend to let a catastrophe go to waste, whether Adele and Burt are onboard or not.

The result is like a Harold Pinter play filtered through the lens of our national fetish for instant gratification and individualism, with a dollop of late-capitalist assumptions about the value of human life. “You guys— no offense—don’t do anything,” Chabby and Vy tell their onetime neighbors, as if merely surviving isn’t enough. Odom’s Chabby is the most odiously rapacious of the two, but Vy is right there behind him, adding a skosh of sanctimony about the fact that they have a child. Things take another turn when that child, Joony (Maya Lou Hlava), shows up and is decidedly not in the same mold as her parents.

Throughout, Nate Santana narrates as “NYC,” offering a seemingly Regular Guy perspective on the world of the haves as the noose of environmental catastrophe begins to tighten around their steak-fed necks. Grant Sabin’s set, featuring filmy white curtains around the stage’s perimeter that suggest the fragility of the outside world, also creates a seemingly bland environment inside the apartment, making the apocalypse happening just outside feel even more unnerving. —KERRY REID THINGS WITH FRIENDS Through 10/5: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 9/10 and 9/17 2 PM, Wed 9/24 7:30 PM, and Sat 9/20 and 10/4 3 PM; ASL interpretation Fri 9/12, touch tour and audio description Sun 9/14 (touch tour 1:30 PM); American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln, 773-654-3103, americanbluestheater.com, $49.50 (seniors $44.50, students $39.50, VIP package $74.50)

Mafia tales from the Big Easy Uncle Carlos Explains brings a mobster’s adventures to life.

As I descended the stairs to the basement of Saint Bonaventure Church, I caught the attention of a mobster in a vibrant green tie. He beckoned me to play a round of craps, so I did (as one does). I rolled a 7, won $20, but didn’t take the money. It’s for the best. Because once you’re in with this family, you might not get back out. This was the perfect introduction to Subtext Theater Company’s Uncle Carlos Explains

Written by Leigh Johnson and directed by Jonathan “Rocky” Hagloch, this play centers New Orleans–based Mafia boss Carlos Marcello (Andrew Pond) as he regales his audience with tales from his life as they wait for a table at his restaurant. Many of the later stories involve Bobby Kennedy, who was one crawdaddy Marcello wanted very badly thrown into the pot. Along the way, we meet over a dozen other accomplices and henchmen, as well as government fellas ready to bring in Uncle Carlos; Sam Brittan and Vito Vittore play all of these roles.

Pond is a dexterous performer tasked with Uncle Carlos’s long-winded tale-telling. His performance gives us the gravitas of the mafioso, but it is the text itself that becomes hard to control. Johnson’s script tries to cover too much of Carlos’s life in one fell swoop and, in doing so, loses the mark. There is only so much talking at you that Uncle Carlos can do before you’re ready to find another restaurant. —AMANDA FINN UNCLE CARLOS EXPLAINS Through 9/27: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; St. Bonaventure Church, 1625 W. Diversey, subtextnfp.org, $30 ($25 students/ seniors) v

ASHLAND AVENUE

BY LEE KIRK DIRECTED BY SUSAN V. BOOTH

Starring Chicago’s Francis Guinan ( The Cherry Orchard ) and Emmy Award-nominee Jenna Fischer ( The Office ), this hilarious and moving new play asks what happens when we step outside of our parents’ footsteps to follow our heart?

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH OCTOBER 12!

REVOLUTION(S)

BY ZAYD AYERS DOHRN

MUSIC AND LYRICS BY TOM MORELLO

DIRECTED BY STEVE H. BROADNAX III

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and The Nightwatchman) Tom Morello brings a ground-breaking new punk/metal/hip-hop musical to our intimate Owen Theatre about a young artist finding his voice, why violence is as American as cherry pie, and how young radicals—across generations—are still motivated by love.

STARTS OCTOBER 4

RTHE SPECTACULAR OPTICAL CORPORATION FILM FESTIVAL Sat 10/25, time TBA, Solidarity Studios, 3323 N. Pulaski, solidaritystudios.org

MP4 cinema is proletarian filmmaking at its scrappiest

Jay Villalobos’s Spectacular Optical Corporation film festival features experimental, microbudget digital shorts.

By JONAH NINK

The walls of Jay Villalobos’s apartment are lined with posters of old films.

Alberto Isaac’s Tívoli (1974), Federico Curiel’s Las vampiras (1969), and Mario Hernández’s El mexicano (1977) stand out with their striking, pulpy artwork, a sight seldom seen in film posters anymore beyond occasional homage. A filmmaker and festival curator herself, Villalobos, 24, says that watching old films helped inform her own cinematic voice.

“When I was 13, I decided I wanted to get into filmmaking,” Villalobos says. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, if I’m going to get into filmmaking, I have to study film.’’’

“I looked at [those] lists, you know, ‘the most important films ever,’ and I just bingewatched a bunch of stu in middle school and early high school. Lawrence of Arabia [1962], Sunset Boulevard [1950]. Watching [films] that were considered ‘the canon.’ When I was in film school, I really gravitated towards my film history classes.”

After graduating from Columbia College’s film program, Villalobos landed a job with Sweet Void Cinema—the now-closed microcinema and production company in Humboldt Park—and became immersed in the city’s film culture. She quickly developed a love of the experimental, microbudget digital shorts that festivals often sidelined. Though wildly di erent products, the shorts had the same commitment to furthering the medium as the classics Villalobos was brought up on.

“I was seeing this subgenre of films there wasn’t anything like. Even in my further education in experimental film, I wasn’t seeing any precedent for it,” Villalobos says.

Villalobos labeled these kinds of shorts “MP4 cinema,” a name coined from the spartan file formats these fringe shorts are often transported in. The only thing the genre seemed to lack was a dedicated screening space, an essential tool for filmmakers looking to develop their work and get feedback.

“I was kind of a shy student; I didn’t really

socialize too much,” Villalobos says. “My thesis film was really the first time I felt confident in my filmmaking abilities and also confident that this was the correct life path for me, especially after we screened.”

Having her original work screened, Villalobos says, “was a really cathartic experience for me. It felt freeing.”

In a convenient twist, Villalobos’s friend and roommate, Cameron Goulder, runs the Apartment, a popular traveling DIY venue that moves between locations in Chicago. Goulder had been wanting to screen films at the venue since late 2024, and screening DIY films at a DIY venue was a perfect combination. With help from graphic designer Frankie Barnes, the pair would develop the Spectacular Optical Corporation festival, which held its inaugural screenings at Avondale’s Solidarity Studios, a Palestinian-owned venue, this past July.

than 50 people arrived to celebrate the experimental works.

“I’m stunned that [the] program was able to bring that many people. I’m confident we’re going to pull more and more,” Villalobos says.

Any unexpected stage fright was thankfully overshadowed by vindication; Villalobos’s hunch that the Chicago film scene was hungry for a night dedicated to digital filmmaking was completely correct.

“I’m feeling very confident that not only [are] there people making work like this, but there’re people who are very much dying to show work like this, and [people] wanting to watch it as well,” Villalobos says. “We had an amazing crowd.”

The Spectacular Optical Corporation festi-

regular, hardworking people.”

These filmmakers are united by an embrace of their material limitations and an ability to do a lot with very little. There’s a genuine excitement about how far a smudged iPhone lens and a pirated copy of Final Cut Pro editing software can take you. MP4 cinema is proletarian filmmaking at its scrappiest.

Villalobos says the most mainstream examples of MP4 cinema would be the Unfriended films—a 2014 supernatural horror and its 2018 sequel—which use webcams, chat boxes, and social media platforms to tell their stories.

As for the content of MP4 films, Villalobos says it’s far from an exact formula. Sometimes they have conventional narratives; other times, conventionality is tossed out altogether. One thing that does bind films together is a championing of digital tech and its orbiting culture.

“We didn’t really advertise that we were looking for these kinds of films when we had our submissions open for the first festival back in July,” Villalobos says. “Through all the submissions that we got, I was able to program two full hours of films that I would classify as MP4 cinema. There was a clear throughline and [a] clear spectrum of what that subgenre entails.”

Villalobos and Goulder expected a small event with a handful of film enthusiasts, maybe even enough to warrant a second run. Those expectations were shattered when more

val will return to Solidarity Studios on October 25 with a night of horror-themed shorts for Halloween. And of course, costumes are fully encouraged.

What are the hallmarks of MP4 cinema? And who are the people making these shorts?

“The trend of people who make work like this tends to be people who don’t really have a lot of money, who don’t have access to sets or film equipment. They really only have access to whatever program is in front of them and downloaded on their computer, whether that be a legitimate license or pirated software. It’s

“Stories that deal a lot with isolation in the digital age tend to lend themselves to MP4 cinema.”

When curating the order in which festival films were screened, Villalobos put more conventional shorts first and progressively turned to more avantgarde material to naturally show off the genre’s full capabilities.

“We started with this short called double a by Dylan Maris. It was the most ‘film’ of the bunch. It didn’t have a traditional narrative, more of a slice-of-life film about these two girls partying,” says Villalobos. “ Ridethrough [by Elijah Valter] is on the further end of the MP4 spectrum as it is a series of flashing pixels.”

Other films showcased that night included CORPSECORPSE by dd o0 bentl, and Keeping Company by Arryana Jocelyn Walls, Nadia Freitag, and Nel Jesiak.

“It’s still [a growing] event,” Villalobos says. “We’re not married to any way of running this operation and are looking forward to seeing how [Spectacular Optical Corporation] evolves.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

A collage made with elements from the fi rst Spectacular Optical Corporation festival fi lms

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

Please Join Us For The Opening Friday, September 19th | 4:30pm - 9:30pm 3040 N. Ashland Ave, Chicago

Nesbitt

FESTIVAL PREVIEW

CUFF contends with ‘potential forms of consciousness entirely different’

Broaden

your mind with the upcoming 32nd Chicago Underground Film Festival.

By KAT SACHS

“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while around it, parted from it by the flimsiest screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely di erent.”

At a few points in Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025), the documentary’s subject quotes these words, written by “the father of American psychology,” William James. For Lilly, the controversial scientist, it seems to have inspired a distinct body of work, including the creation of the sensory deprivation tank, the study of communication among dolphins, and the belief in the existence of a hierarchical group of cosmic entities (the latter inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs). I thought about James’s words in relation to the 32nd Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF), where the film will screen.

Each year, the occasion of the festival brings with it consideration of the word “underground”—what it means, especially in connection to film. James’s assertion seemed to be an apt metaphor for the festival, where “potential forms of consciousness entirely di erent,” if slightly less towering, are manifested through the numerous shorts and feature films. Di er-

ent forms of consciousness come through in the customary medley of genrelessness that ultimately defines itself; this year, I focused on the feature films, which is not to discredit the various shorts programs. If anything, that’s where excellence is most surely to be found, each film a new opportunity to experience another consciousness without having to leave one’s seat. This year’s selection includes films across ten programs by Mark Street, Chi Jang Yin, Kelly Sears, Josh B Mabe, Drew Durepos and Isaac Brooks, Jesse Malmed, Shayna Connelly, and Sara Sowell, among many others.

This is what the underground really means: a place for discovery, for ideas and forms that exist outside the obvious, waiting to be seen.

Opening the festival on Wednesday, September 17, at 8:15 PM at the Siskel Film Center is Zac Farley and cult author Dennis Cooper’s third collaboration, Room Temperature (2025), a strange, dark comedy about a family whose yearly DIY haunted house attraction goes from being a quirky pastime to a nightmare in and of itself. The film is unsettling,

at times even irritating, but it nevertheless stayed with me. Similarly befuddling but in a good way, though to a less aggressive degree, is Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025), which screens Thursday, September 18, at 6:30 PM at the Harper Theater. It’s an experimental noir of sorts, almost like an essay film, about a missing filmmaker, also called Julian Castronovo, who had been investigating the disappearance of an art forger and aspiring to make a film about it. He becomes embroiled in something much bigger than his errant curiosity. The film is likewise resourceful and imaginative, with the hard-boiled elegance of Raymond Chandler, but for those raised with the Internet. Lu Ruiqi’s Contact Lens (2024), screening Sunday, September 21, at 3 PM at the Harper Theater, is also a revisionist endeavor, specifically of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), though, in my opinion, a less successful one—a more shapeless concept than a fully formed idea.

Sometimes the documentaries at CUFF evoke the concept of the underground with

portraits of people who march to the beat of their own drum. Max Hey’s Now! More! Yes! (2025), which screens Thursday, September 18, at 5:30 PM at the Harper Theater, is about the filmmaker’s legally blind, car-obsessed landlord, TW Hansen, a used car salesman who runs a “picture car” (vehicles used in movies, TV shows, etc.) side hustle. Hansen is himself an amateur music video director, and overall is just one of the strange figures of the Milwaukee art and music scene. Even as the people in his life are sometimes understandably frustrated by Hansen, one is still moved by his unwavering commitment to being himself. For some people, this comes later in life; such is true of Mary Phillips, the subject of Adam Sekuler’s The Flamingo (2024), screening the same day at 5 PM and again at noon on September 20, also at the Harper Theater. I’m a longtime admirer of Sekuler’s documentaries, and this latest one extends his empathic

From L: Stills from A Body to Live In (2025), Room Temperature

RTHE 32ND CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

Wed 9/ 17–Sun 9/21, Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper, Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $100 all-access passes, $13 –$15 general admission single tickets, cuff.org

worldview into the world of BDSM. Shot over five years, the film explores Phillips’s late-inlife sexual awakening; the only thing more curious and tender than the subject is Sekuler’s camera, which steadily observes with an almost tangible lack of judgment.

Sometimes these underground subjects manage to become more well-known—if not quite household names, then at least still necessitating their own Wikipedia entries. With John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office , Almereyda (2017’s Marjorie Prime , 2020’s Tesla ) and Stephens (2021’s Terra Femme) craft a compelling portrait of an unusual figure, and in doing so trace the “figure of the dolphin swimming through the collective dream life of the late 20th century, from the initial discovery of their intelligence to their ascendance as spiritual entities in the 1980s,” per Stephens. Narrated by Chloë Sevigny, the film is an exploration into a symbol that’s evolved

into a shorthand for the struggle of man versus the potential of an expanded consciousness. Something similar is explored in Angelo Madsen’s evocative documentary A Body to Live In (2025), about artist and body modification pioneer Fakir Musafar, screening Saturday, September 20, at 6:30 PM, and Sunday, September 21, at 1 PM, both at the Harper Theater. For Musafar, his corporeal form was the vessel for such exploration: “In my journey I sought to explore the seas of consciousness, my own inner self,” he wrote. “The most personal and accessible vehicle was my own body.” Madsen imprints the film with a chimerical keenness that turns it also into a vessel, onto which a consciousness of its own begins to form.

It’s not often that stars of Sevigny’s caliber are involved in underground film festival fare, but this year there’s that and another auspicious appearance by an A-list actor. Originally shot in the lead-up to 9/11, Taste the Revolu-

CHANNELING:

tion (1999/2025) is a mockumentary cowritten by filmmaker Colin Trevorrow and starring Mahershala Ali as the leader of a revolutionary group that falls apart over the course of an extended summertime retreat in upstate New York. The more things change, the more they really do stay the same; as in the film, milquetoast liberalism and lefty purism continue to be a few among many blockers to any real change. Taste the Revolution was later shelved following the terrorist attack. Other films centered on knowable figures include Maria Arena’s documentary Uzeda - Do It Yourself (2024), about the Sicilian noise-rock band Uzeda and also featuring legendary producer Steve Albini in one of his final appearances, screening Friday, September 19, at 8:30 PM, and Sunday, September 21, at 4:30 PM, both at the Harper Theater, and Adrian Goycoolea’s 2025 documentary A Mixtape for Stom, which screens on Saturday, September 20, at 7 PM,

also at the Harper, about the late Japanese experimental filmmaker Stom Sogo. Even when trying to group what remains by theme, genre, or sensibility, there is still more to explore. Each work takes its own approach, o ering fresh ways of looking at the world and how one relates to it. They often come from the hidden underground, not something to escape but a space full of possibility, where the overlooked often proves the most revealing. Sitting in a theater at CUFF, you feel it happen as the flickering movie screen and the flimsiest screens of the mind align, letting you step briefly into the perspective of the work itself, into another consciousness entirely, and you realize this is what the underground really means: a place for discovery, for ideas and forms that exist outside the obvious, waiting to be seen. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Image: Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, Ocean Avenue (film still), 1999.

(2025), Uzeda - Do It Yourself (2024), and The Flamingo (2024) COURTESY CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

REVIEW

The Long Walk is a forceful call to fight fascism

Still, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s powerful first novel is not quite revelatory.

By NOAH BERLATSKY

Stephen King wrote his first novel, The Long Walk , in 1966 and ’67, and it’s arguably the closest he ever got to a protest novel. It’s set in a future U.S. mired in depression and ruled by an authoritarian called the Major. Every year, the regime holds a patriotic bread-and-circuses event called the Long Walk, in which young men chosen by lottery walk south from Maine. Those who slow down or leave the route are shot; the Walk goes on until only one boy remains. He wins a lifetime of riches and one wish. It’s a story that foreshadows Survivor and its ilk, though with substantially more blood.

The book is a metaphor for the draft and the pointless slog of Vietnam. It’s also a parable about the American rat race and capitalism’s ruthless every-man-for-himself ethos. The new film, directed by Francis Lawrence, is, if anything, even more clear in its political message than the book: In the opening scene, the Major (Mark Hamill) tells the gathered boys that they are there because they have the right “work ethic,” that their sacrifice will increase the GDP, and that the problem with the rest of the country is that they are lazy.

The stark rebuke of intertwined authoritarianism, patriotism, and neoliberalism obviously resonates. At the same time, the film’s greater clarity and its streamlined plot turn the story into something like a heroic narrative. That’s a path that King very deliberately turned away from, because heroism (and even ambivalent Hollywood empowerment) was part of the detritus of American myth that he was satirizing and rejecting. King didn’t believe you could dismantle the master’s house by traveling the master’s road. The movie does—for better and worse.

In general outline, the film is quite faithful to King’s original. The protagonist is still Raymond Garraty (Cooper Ho man), the one participant from Maine and therefore something of a hometown hero. He forms a quick friend-

same reason that young boys often join the army—because he wants to prove himself, because he has visions of glory, because he wants to impress his girlfriend, because he’s probably bisexual and is desperate to prove his manliness. It’s Stebbins who has a bitter understanding of the pointless cruelty of the Walk and of a society that waters its fascism with its children’s blood.

The film turns Garraty into a much more conventional hero. He’s driven not by horniness (the book’s scene in which he races off the road to hump a random eager fan is

ship with Peter McVries (David Jonsson) and a quick antagonism with a hostile, knowing boy named Stebbins (Garrett Wareing). The bulk of the film chronicles the walk of the 50 boys (down from the one hundred in the novel) as they razz each other, reveal details of their pasts, bond—and get charley horses and are shot, are stricken with diarrhea and are shot, attempt to run from the road and are shot, simply collapse and are shot. And are shot. And are shot.

Even though the basic route is the same in both forms of the tale, the scenery is subtly but definitively different. In the novel, Garraty’s consciousness and point of view are starkly limited. He joins the march for the

notably absent) but by his relationship with his resister father. He educates Peter (whose complicated romantic past is also flattened out) on the realities of neoliberal choice. When you’re picking between a life of poverty and a horrible death march, he says, it’s not a real choice at all.

Book Garraty is too young, too ignorant, and too distracted by hormones and propaganda to know why he’s walking. Movie Garraty, though, is walking because he wants to change the world. He’s a hero who inspires others and whose sacrifices and suffering have meaning.

This isn’t to say that there’s no resistance in the book. That resistance, though, is compar-

RTHE LONG WALK R, 108 min. Wide release in theaters thelongwalk.movie

atively fragmented, confused, and generated from the experience of the Walk itself, rather than stated at the beginning of the narrative by a clear-eyed rebel. There are no discussions in the book of the theoretical virtues or limits of violent resistance, as there are in the film. Instead, part of the tragedy of the Walk is that the boys are all so young and so enmeshed in patriotic balderdash that they do not understand their own motives or their own anger until, in almost every case, it is too late.

In the film, in contrast, the acts of rebellion are connected more clearly to Garraty and to the narrative arc of the plot. At the end of the book, Garraty walks on because he simply cannot imagine any other way out of the Walk, his trauma, or the totalitarian regime. The film retains some ambiguity, but Garraty’s firmer purpose means that the boys sacrifice themselves for one another with greater consciousness and greater narrative weight, almost like they’re in the John Wayne war movie that the Major is clearly trying to stage. The film’s climax, too, is a much more Hollywood dramatic confrontation and a much more forceful call to fight.

Forceful calls to fight fascism are certainly welcome right now. But it’s hard not to notice that in the film, the story of the Walk is in many ways the very story that the Major wants to propagate. There’s one telling moment (in the film, not the book) in which the boys start shouting, “Fuck the Major! Fuck the Long Walk!” The Major isn’t upset, though; he just praises them for their grit and balls and spirit. The Long Walk (the movie) and the Long Walk (the event) dead-end into the story of struggling and overcoming that the novel The Long Walk is specifically trying to grind beneath its tired boots.

I’d argue that the novel—one of King’s best and most beautifully written—is more thoughtful and more powerful than this decent but not revelatory adaptation. But I appreciate the movie’s desire to take a stand and the way in which it shows how di cult it is to find a path to resistance and heroism when our narratives of resistance and heroism are so coopted by militarism, Hollywood, empty self-help platitudes, and toxic exhortations to manliness. King attempted to solve this impasse by walking o on an uncharted road; the movie, in contrast, tries to twist the Major’s ugly path back on itself. The two take slightly different directions, but I think they’re still walking together. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Roman Griffi n Davis as Curly (top) and other boys on the Long Walk

MURRAY CLOSE/LIONSGATE

A MILESTONE SEASON STARTS SOON!

by Sandra Delgado

directed by Kimberly Senior

Motherhood, marijuana, and the multiverse collide in this Chicago-set story of family, immigration, and American identity.

EUREKA DAY

Chicago is the Pulse of Poetry

Experience it at the Poetry Foundation with FREE entry and events

VS Podcast: Live Farewell

September 18, 6 PM

CHICAGO

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Join powerhouse poets Cornelius Eady and Major Jackson as we bid a fond farewell to this acclaimed podcast

Victoria Martinez: Frente a la vida / Facing Life

September 20, 2 PM

Attend the opening of an exhibition by Chicago artist Victoria Martinez featuring murals and ceramic paintings that respond to the life and work of Peruvian poet and activist Magda Portal

poetryfoundation.org/events

Poetry Foundation 61 W Superior St

LEAD TOURS AT HISTORIC FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT SITES

This weekend, President Donald Trump posted to social media an AI-rendered photo of himself as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) with helicopters shown flying away from the city and “Chipocalypse Now” emblazoned across it in the original film’s iconic typeface. Accompanying the image, Trump tweeted, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

There’s so much wrong with this, but let’s isolate the factor most relevant to this column: its connection to Coppola’s famously not-antiwar film. Coppola acknowledges that himself, noting that “an anti-war film cannot glorify war, and Apocalypse Now arguably does. Certain sequences have been used to rev up people to be warlike.” As to whether he feels guilty about that, he says, “No. I don’t feel guilty, because I know my role in the whole process,” which is ultimately a stance I admire—depiction, even done so showily, doesn’t equal condonation. To that end, anyone who watches Apocalypse Now and feels anything in it is worth imitating, or anyone in it is worth being, is ultimately as fucked up as the characters themselves. Trump, for example, seems to have watched it and taken inspiration from the literal “horror, the horror” depicted therein, indicting himself in the process.

Opening on Friday, October 10, 2025 Exhibition continues through February 22, 2026

That got me thinking about the impact movies have on culture, which seemed to relate to two movies I saw this week. One of which was A Bug’s Life (1998) at the Music Box Theatre, on 35 millimeter. I’ve written about not liking kids’ movies that much, and honestly, I probably wouldn’t have made the trek if it hadn’t been for the theater’s ingenious marketing campaign, which was a poster in the style of Soviet propaganda. It’s

fitting because A Bug’s Life is an anti-capitalist, pro-socialist manifesto of sorts, one that even takes into account the necessity of a certain degree of individuality and the importance of the arts. All this manifests in a plot centered on Flik, an ant who stands up to the grasshoppers who, every year, demand a bounty for their protection (there are parallels to Trump positioning his decision to invade Chicago as if for the citizenry’s safety). Flik later enlists, if at first mistakenly, a band of circus insects to help fight o the invaders. The head grasshopper, Hopper (voiced ominously by Kevin Spacey), acknowledges that the ants outnumber the grasshoppers and are actually more powerful than they know. However, showing the ants mercy or allowing them to question the status quo could embolden them to realize their full potential.

I was reminded of having seen Kenny Ortega’s Newsies (1992), which screened at the Music Box several years back, and how that centers on the unionization of newspaper sellers. Maybe these films are the exception, not the norm, when it comes to children’s films, but most boast egalitarian themes such as kindness, friendship, forgiveness, and the like. All this to say nothing of children’s television, with figures like Mr. Rogers, Barney, and the Muppets. If art and media are so influential, then how are we shown these things—by major corporations no less, against whose overarching values this work seems to protest—and still as a society turn against these sentiments?

Perhaps that’s where, later, for those who look around and wonder where everything went to hell, things like satire might be a salve on the wound. Because I also saw this week Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942) at the Siskel Film Center, where it screened as part of the Cinema of Resistance series; in it, a troupe of Polish actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw helps overturn a plot to sabotage the underground movement. The humor is so dark, but as in any Lubitsch film, it’s delivered still so elegantly. It was another reminder of the power of art in strange times, not only to occasionally provide levity but also to contextualize the absurdity of what’s going on. I did see some of the Music Box’s Noir City o erings, but more on that next week.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er. A still from A Bug’s Life (1998)

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The Conjuring: Last Rites

Perhaps the most disquieting element of the Conjuring franchise is the reminder that these paranormal horrors are “based on a true story.” These films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, respectively. In real life, Lorraine proclaimed herself a clairvoyant, and her husband Ed practiced as a demonologist. Together, these two God-fearing Connecticuters pioneered the field of paranormal investigation in the U.S. What made the first iteration so chilling—and poignant—is the reminder that these stories aren’t pure fiction, per se. The horror o en hits harder because its demons are tethered to real families who believed they were under attack. That’s not to say the series hasn’t always indulged in liberties with its core characters and its demons alike. But in The Conjuring: Last Rites what could have felt distinctive is partially smothered by the franchise’s usual bag of tricks. (Not to point fingers at a particular doll by the name of Annabelle.) Much of this comes from its swan-song posture: Director Michael Chaves frames the film as a curtain call for these characters (and the franchise’s fans) rather than a story that needs telling.

The Conjuring: Last Rites kicks off as Ed and Lorraine undertake an early case in the 1960s. A young

woman recounts how her father felt haunted by a devilish spirit, and, once he committed suicide, she felt the same presence. This leads a pregnant Lorraine into a dark storeroom, pulled to a very obviously haunted mirror. She touches the mirror, and something pushes her into early labor, unraveling the moment into a harrowing birth scene with a ghost in the ra ers.

The bulk of the film takes place about 20 years later, when their daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is grown and in love with a kindhearted boy named Tony (Ben Hardy). Lorraine tries with all her might to keep her family retired from paranormal investigations, worried about Judy’s supernatural sensitivities and Ed’s bad heart. But the family is pulled closer to the Pennsylvanian Smurl family. Turns out, this quaint family is tormented by the same demon that the Warrens faced when Judy was born.

The Conjuring: Last Rites boasts much of what made the original a horror phenomenon: family drama, raw suspense, and an unabashed belief in the supernatural. Yet, it’s bogged down by superfluous sentimentality and nostalgia, making what could’ve been its most compelling possession story feel clunky. It might not conjure something phenomenal, but, for longtime fans, it’s a mostly fitting curtain call for a franchise that always believed in its own ghosts. —MAXWELL RABB R, 135 min. Wide release in theaters

The History of Sound

Much of The History of Sound is rooted in the old ballad “The Unquiet Grave,” an Irish English folk song in which a young man’s grief is so consuming that he loiters on his love’s grave and unsettles her eternal rest. One lyric, a haunting plea, is repeated in Oliver Hermanus’s latest feature: “Oh, who sits weeping on my grave, and will not let me sleep?” This slow-burning queer love story is a tale steeped in wistful yearning, yet it dwells too much in the rhythms of mourning and moving on.

The History of Sound pairs two of Hollywood’s young heartthrobs—Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor—in this muted romance. The title cards alone are likely to draw crowds to the theaters, garnering comparisons to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005). But much like Hermanus’s most recent film, Living (2022), The History of Sound is too tonally restrained to deliver the heart-wrenching love story it aspires to. A meandering narrative further undercuts its romantic potential, too assured in its so tone to fully unravel its characters’ pain.

Lionel (Mescal) is a Kentucky-born farm boy with the voice of an angel. He manages to leave rural America behind to attend a conservatory in Boston. Once there, he meets David (O’Connor), who is sitting at a bar piano singing a folk song that Lionel’s father sang

in his childhood. A charming young composer, David obsessively collects folk songs. He tells Lionel that he traveled the world with his uncle to collect and conserve music. Lionel then shares a song David doesn’t know: “Silver Dagger.” This somber tune is about a mother imparting to her daughter the danger of men— and love. (It’s a bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing.) That night, they drink and sing before returning to David’s apartment.

The romance is quickly severed when David is dra ed into World War I, while Lionel, sidelined by poor eyesight, charts a different path, eventually singing his way to prominence in Rome and Oxford. The narrative leap is abrupt, leaving scant space for their relationship to develop. The bulk of the romantic weight of the film falls when they reconnect: David invites Lionel to join him in rural Maine for a songcollecting journey—a trip that moves from self-assured intimacy into a fraught connection plagued with doubt. However, the schism never fully surfaces. At times, this type of suppressed conflict can deepen grief; here, though, the film’s melancholy smothers any nuance of its performers, snuffing out whatever fire might have flared between two Hollywood favorites. —MAXWELL RABB R, 127 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, limited release in theaters v

The Conjuring: Last Rites COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES

MUSIC

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of September 11

Rap greats Little Brother part ways—but not before one last Metro show

LITTLE BROTHER

Sat 9/13, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out (registration available for tickets that may still be released). 18+

BARRING SOME UNFORESEEN stroke of luck, this Metro show is one of the last times Little Brother will perform live—they’ll play only four more shows on their final tour, which ends on the Rock the Bells Cruise in late October. That’s it. Pardon the pun, but for the duo of Phonte Coleman and Thomas “Big Pooh” Jones, the hip-hop ship has sailed. Little Brother got together in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 90s, and since their 2003 debut album, The Listening —produced almost exclusively by beat-making pillar 9th Wonder—they’ve been your fave’s fave for their core commitment to the craft of hip-hop. They use great samples that give you the feels, their production slaps, and their MCing is approachable yet deadly. It all makes for music that’s heartfelt, witty, and very, very Black.

In 2007, 9th Wonder left the group, and in 2010, Little Brother went on a hiatus that lasted till 2019. In their absence, touring became more expensive, and in an April interview with the Fader, Jones said that in recent years it’s become unsustainable. But Little Brother are leaving on their own terms. As solo artists, they’re potent. Coleman’s fusion of soul singing and MCing has influenced some of our biggest rap-

adjacent stars; Jones is a poised storyteller and bar architect. But the magic they make when they’re onstage together has been evident since their early days as student rappers on the campus of North Carolina Central University. Their deep friendship bleeds into their live show, and their love of hip-hop, each other, and their fans is always on full display.

Jones recently told me over email that the sweetest part of Little Brother’s farewell tour has been being able to be present in the moment. “Usually, I’m thinking about, ‘What’s next?’” he said. “With this tour, I’m focusing on being in the moment and enjoying the fellowship with my brothers.” When I asked what he believes has set Little Brother apart from their peers, he told me it has to do with scarcity. “We don’t oversaturate. We don’t compete for daily attention. We aren’t pushing content. We focus on the art, share it when it’s ready, then duck o until we are ready to share again. . . . I guess the saying is true, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’” To love Little Brother is to understand how much they’ll be missed. Fortunately, we’re getting a Chicago date on this highly coveted last hurrah. Let’s rejoice! —CRISTALLE BOWEN

FRIDAY12

Slow Crush Faetooth and Flooding open. 7 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $29.35. 17+

Formed in Belgium in 2017, Slow Crush merge shoegaze and noise pop to create a lush terrain for the serene, understated vocals of bassist and front woman Isa Holliday. Their first two records, 2018’s Aurora and 2021’s Hush, didn’t push the boundaries of those genres—their blissful atmospheres glowed with the requisite dreamy beauty, but the band seemed more interested in developing as songwriters. But Slow Crush’s new third album, Thirst (released last month on Pure Noise), aims to envelop the listener the way the band’s live show does— in a press release, Holliday says Slow Crush challenged themselves to create a sound that would enact the record’s themes of love and connection. The lush warmth of the earlier releases hasn’t gone anywhere, but Slow Crush also sink deeper into their heaviest side—the title track, for instance, features jubilantly gleaming guitars and ends in an immolating rush. The minimalist “Hollow” feels like floating on a fluff y bed of clouds as a shadow grows on the ground below. “Haven” opens with a crunch of guitar that dissolves into waves of somber postmetal-adjacent soundscapes. The triumphant “Bloodmoon” leans further into this kind of contrast: Layers of blissful guitar fade in and out over heavy bass and drums, then sail up into the heavens. If you like your shoegaze to have teeth and give you a hug, Thirst should hit the spot. —JAMIE LUDWIG

SATURDAY13

Little Brother See Pick of the Week at le . 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out (registration available for tickets that may still be released). 18+

TUESDAY16

Simon Joyner & the Nervous Stars Leah Senior opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $23.65. 21+

In a songwriting career spanning three and a half decades, Simon Joyner has reliably applied unflinching verity and scrupulous cra to portrayals of characters in states of existential extremis. Both those qualities remain strong on his most recent album, last year’s Coyote Butterfly (Grapefruit), where the Omaha-based singer and guitarist deals with some very personal experiences. Set to sparse, mostly acoustic accompaniment, its songs map out the sadness, isolation, and self-recrimination Joyner felt a er the 2022 death of his adult son, Owen. On “I’m Taking You With Me,” the titular “you” shifts between Owen and the audience, but the precisely measured registration of emotion and information never falters.

This concert is part of Joyner’s first U.S. tour since the album’s release, and his current band, the Nervous Stars, differs substantially from any that

Let’s Play!

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

he’s previously brought to Chicago. Only drummer Myke Marasco comes from the circle of Nebraska musicians who have previously accompanied him on the road. Brothers Caleb and Micah Dailey (from Phoenix, Arizona) are a guitar and keyboard team who recently recorded several lo-fi interpretations of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed songs with Joyner; folk-rock singer-guitarist Leah Senior and guitarist Jesse Williams (both based in Melbourne, Australia) recently backed Joyner on a tour of the Antipodes. Senior will open the evening playing solo, and Joyner will headline with a set that includes songs from Coyote Butterfly, as well as older material and selections from a forthcoming album to be released in 2026. —BILL MEYER

WEDNESDAY17

Alex G, Nilüfer Yanya Alex G headlines. 7 PM, Salt Shed Fairgrounds (outdoors), 1357 N. Elston, general admission sold out, premium tickets $135.80.

Somewhere in the blur of the past decade, Philadelphia singer-songwriter Alex G became a rare indie-rock success story, slowly ascending the rickety scaffolding of the music biz while cementing his status as a generational talent. I remember thinking it was a big deal when he came through Chicago to headline the Fireside Bowl in 2015—it felt like a win for the weirdos that a college-age kid whose Bandcamp page was full of scruff y home-recorded songs with melty, lopsided pop hooks could draw a crowd of a few hundred. I couldn’t have predicted then that he’d go on to establish such a sterling track record, dropping a new album every two to three years and reliably delivering songs that sound as familiar as a visit from a longtime friend even as their details confound and surprise. He’s touring to support July’s Headlights, his tenth album and first for a major label, in this case RCA (though the distinction “major” means less and less these days).

G, Nilüfer Yanya CHRIS MAGGIO, MOLLY DANIEL

SEPT 15

THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

WITH SPOON AND FAZERDAZE

SEPT 17 ALEX G

FAIRGROUNDS WITH NILÜFER YANYA

SEPT 18 VIAGRA BOYS .

FAIRGROUNDS WITH DIE SPITZ

SEPT 19 BIG WILD

WITH SHALLOU

SEPT 20 ETHEL CAIN . .

FAIRGROUNDS WITH 9MILLION

SEPT 21 MOVE AT THE SHED .

SEPT 22 POLO AND PAN .

. . . THE SHED

. . FAIRGROUNDS WITH TYCHO : ISO50 ON SALE NOW

This Fall at Symphony Center

SEP 18-19

Season Opening with Szeps-Znaider

SEP 20

Joyce DiDonato & the CSO

SEP 25-28

Ravel Piano Concertos & Suite from Carmen

SEP 26

Aida Cuevas: 50 Years

Singing to México

OCT 3-4

Piccolo Play & Adagio for Strings

OCT 9-11

Hadelich, Dvořák & Brahms 2

OCT 10

Christian McBride & Brad Mehldau

OCT 14

TwoSet Violin

OCT 16-18

Mäkelä Conducts Symphonie fantastique

OCT 19

Yunchan Lim Selling fast!

Aida Cuevas

Joyce DiDonato

MUSIC

continued from p. 34

On the new record, Alex G polishes up his warped multitracked vocals and stumbling instrumental arrangements, but he leaves other quirks intact— including his somber but quixotically optimistic tone. Headlights isn’t his best effort, but it carries the memory of his entire oeuvre, and that lends the music a welcome, weary tenderness. Opener Nilüfer Yanya is also building an enviable indie-rock career, and her July EP, Dancing Shoes (Ninja Tune), cushions her rich, otherworldly voice with trip-hop beats and gauzy melodies. She’s a striking singer who can turn your legs to jelly with a husky whisper.

—LEOR GALIL

Discus Lawn headline; Discus open. 8 PM, Subterranean downstairs, 2011 W. North, $21.80. 17+

Brothers Jake and Paul Stolz have honed an elegant indie-rock aesthetic playing together in a variety of supporting roles for several Chicago groups, including Varsity and Pool Holograph. Discus is the Stolz brothers’ own band, and as its creative anchors, they’ve fashioned a sweet, relaxed sound built on their tidy guitar playing and Jake’s gentle, layered vocal tracks. Discus isn’t a “songwriters and session players” type of project, though—the Stolz brothers have fostered creative relationships with all their bandmates. On Discus’s second album, the March release To Relate To (Sunroom), bassist Kevin Fairbairn (also of Deeper) and drummer Nick Konkoli provide a stable, reliably precise undercarriage for the songs’ gentle, floating harmonies, whose feathery contours are shaped in part by second vocalist Sarah Clausen. Familial familiarity helps Discus play even knotty passages with inviting smoothness— there’s never a wrinkle in their intimate, lived-in coziness. —LEOR GALIL v

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Star Lab Corporation seeks Finance and Administration - Director (Franklin Park, IL) to oversee the financial operations of the company. Must have MBA & 5 yrs of exper. in 1. a leadership finance role in Accounting, Finance & Administration & 2. in Business Development, Strategy Formulation, Risk Management, Regulatory Compliance, Marketing & Controls. Salary offered is $221,312. Benefits include PTO, medical insurance, & matched 401k. To apply send CV to vincesy@starlabcorp.com.

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No need for a Schindler, MLK in Heaven. No need for a Soldier in Heaven. No need for a Hero in Heaven. No need for an Einstein in Heaven. No need for those who fight hate, discrimination, poverty in Heaven. No need for a Plato, Socrates in Heaven. No need for a Doctor, Nurse in Heaven. No need for those who want to help those in need in Heaven. ALL are needed here, and God is with them. GOD IS WITH THE LIVING, NOT THE DEAD! For more visit: HeavenVs Reincarnation.com

Prayer To The Blessed Virgin (Never known to fail.) Oh, most beautiful flower of Mt. Carmel, fruitful vine, splendor of Heaven, Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin, assist me in my necessity. Oh, Star of the Sea, help me and show me, herein you are my mother. Oh, Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth! I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart to succor me in this necessity. There are none that can withstand your power. Oh, show me herein you are my mother. Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee (3x). Holy Mother, I place this cause in your hands (3x). Holy Spirit, you who solve all problems, light all roads so that I can attain my goal. You who gave me the divine gift to forgive and forget all evil against me and that in all instances in my life you are with me. I want in this short prayer to thank you for all things as you confirm once again that I never want to be separated from you in Eternal Glory. Thank you for your mercy toward me and mine. The person must say this prayer 3 consecutive days. After 3 days, the request will be granted. This prayer must be published after the favor is granted. jcrawford000@gmail.com

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Discus CLARE BYRNE

Roy Book Binder/ Todd Albright In Szold Hall

Joe Henry & Mike Reid In Szold Hall

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 8PM Dan Rodriguez/ Heather Maloney In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 8PM Grant-Lee Phillips In Szold Hall

GOSSIP WOLF

IN 2021, EMERGING Chicago rapper Kaicrewsade suffered from insomnia. During his sleepless hours, he passed the time with online videos, and he especially liked to find clips of great musicians performing festival sets. As he watched, say, DMX rapping in front of a massive crowd, he started to want to put on his own fest. He loved seeing so many people coming together for a singular purpose. “It doesn’t have nothing to do with nothing but the music,” he says. “The sole purpose, why everybody is in this room, is to get a groove, and listen to music, and connect to the music,” he says. On Tuesday, September 16, he’ll finally learn what it feels like to throw a music festival: That night, the first Crewsadefest takes over Beat Kitchen

Kurt Elling with Christian Sands In Maurer Hall

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5 7PM

Bob Mould: A Conversation and Performance

A

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9 7PM & 9:30PM

Hiss Golden Messenger with special guest Rett Madison In Szold Hall

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

it,” Kai says. The past year or two has likewise been the craziest part of Kai’s career so far, and his rapid ascent has brought him to some unforeseen places. “My first time going to LA, my first time going to New York, my first time going to the UK—it was all these newer life experiences that were fast-paced and fun,” he says. “I think the music I was making was reflecting that.”

Kai recorded most of Joint4u! in Los Angeles, and he spent much of last year flying back and forth between LA and Chicago. “Imma homesick type of dude,” he says. “So I can only go so long not being at the crib.” Unsurprisingly, Crewsadefest is a hometown event, and it’s stacked with musicians from Kai’s inner circle—plus Femdot, an artist he’s long

The event doubles as a “listening jam” for Kai’s new full-length, Joint4u! It’s the followup to 2024’s Yvette , a relaxing listen that braids sumptuous soul and jazz into easygoing melodies. This time out, Kai wanted to bring an entirely different energy to the table. “My personal goal with this was just to make something that was super chaotic,” he says. The project’s first two singles, “Beeper!!!!” and “Geeksqaw!!!!,” pile up exclamation points in their titles to telegraph their frantic energy— both songs speed through thickets of horns and keys on beats powered by restless, jazzy drumming. On “Beeper!!!!” in particular, Kai’s laser-focused rapping flies so fast it’s like he’s trying to outrace the music.

“I listen to a lot of chaotic music, day in, day out—whether that’s jazz or any other genre, I always try to find a lot of the crazier parts of

admired. “I grew up on Fem,” Kai says. (Femdot also appears on “Let’s Get It!,” the opening track of Yvette.) Menace4Hire, Chairman Cuto, and Lowlife also perform. Tickets cost $14.69 in advance; the show is 21+, and the music starts at 9 PM.

THE 26TH ANNUAL Englewood Jazz Festival celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The fest runs for five days, beginning on Tuesday, September 16, and for the fi rst four days it’s held in the Hamilton Park Cultural Center/Fieldhouse at 513 W. 72nd Street. (The final day moves outdoors in the same park.) Tuesday’s sets are by Extraordinary Popular Delusions (6 PM) and the Roscoe Mitchell Trio (7 PM). Wednesday begins at 4:30 PM with a panel on the AACM at 60, which includes festival

founder Ernest Dawkins (a former chairman of the AACM) and several other AACM veterans. At 6 PM, Dawkins performs with a slew of fellow saxophonists, and Ben LaMar Gay closes the evening with a quartet set at 7 PM.

Thursday’s festivities consist entirely of Great Black Music—Ancient to the Future , a long-form work Dawkins composed in tribute to the AACM’s founders. Dawkins has put together a knockout 13-piece ensemble for this debut performance, which includes Dee Alexander on vocals, Corey Wilkes on trumpet and electronics, Micah Collier on double bass, Fred Jackson on flute and alto and soprano saxophones, and Kevin King on tenor saxophone, flute, clarinet, and oboe. The concert starts at 6 PM, as does Friday’s show, which is another large-ensemble performance—this one devoted to Renée Baker ’s composition Infinite Opus. Score Eternal. Baker has recruited ten musicians, among them three percussionists ( Alex Wing , Carlos Pride, and Art “Turk” Burton) and three vocalists (Alexander, Ugochi Nwaogwugwu , and Taalib-Din Ziyad).

The festival wraps up Saturday, September 20, with a big lineup of outdoor music beginning at noon with the Young Masters , performing under Dawkins’s direction. Another AACM elder, pianist Adegoke Steve Colson, premieres his composition On the Back Porch at 3:35 PM, and the Alexander McLean Project closes out the day at 5 PM. The entire festival is free and all-ages.

IF YOU’VE EVER BOUGHT a button for an indie band (like, say, Sonic Youth) or record label (hello, Sub Pop), you probably advertised your subcultural bona fides with a product that came from Busy Beaver Buttons & Merch . President and owner Christen Carter launched Busy Beaver in 1995 in Bloomington, Indiana, and the button maker has called Chicago home since 1998. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Busy Beaver is throwing a party at Color Club on Saturday, September 13, that it’s calling “Hot Dam! We’re 30.” (That’s not a typo—it’s a beaver-related pun!) Chicago power- pop sensations Sharp Pins headline with a set they say will include some Guided by Voices covers—the Ohio indie-rock titans were Busy Beaver’s very first customers. Detroit garage band the Hentchmen will also perform, and Chicago songwriter Amalea Tshilds will lead a sing-along. Essential Logic will DJ. Tickets cost $20.30 in advance; the all-ages party kicks off at 6 PM. —LEOR GALIL

Got a tip? Email your Chicago music news to gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

Kaicrewsade hosts the fi rst Crewsadefest next week. @PRODDAVE_

SAVAGE LOVE

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Quickies

Making more precum, threesome readiness, and responsible parenting

By DAN SAVAGE

Q : How do I ensure a herpes simplex 2-positive (HSV-2) new partner is taking their meds to reduce transmission risk?

a : In a high-trust relationship, you trust your partner to take their meds. In a low-trust relationship, you insist on your partner taking their meds in front of you or sending you a video of them taking their meds.

Q : I’m a gay male in San Francisco. I’m a bit of a showoff and need some advice on easy and appropriate ways to share my content. OnlyFans feels too elaborate and “Close Friends” on

Instagram comes with content restrictions. What’s the best way to share my spicy pics/vids with an interested audience?

a : I keep reading that BlueSky is dying or dead—or that’s what I keep reading on Twitter—but BlueSky seems to be the “showing off ” app of choice for gay men who are sick of Mark Zuckerberg’s puritanical bullshit and don’t want to be associated with Elon Musk’s authoritarian bullshit.

Q : Why do gay women love watching porn with gay men? I do. I’m not alone either. Why?

hair during doggy-style intercourse. She also loves to have her hair pulled in this position. The issue is that it’s hard to get a grip on her short hair. I would really like to find out if there are any types of clamp-on hair extensions that will stay securely in place while giving it a strong tug. Is there some product out there that can help us make hair pulling a little easier?

a : If your spouse doesn’t want to grow her hair out— and liking to have your hair pulled in your favorite sex position seems like a huge incentive to me—she could get a weave. But weaves, as we’ve all seen on our favorite reality TV programs, can be yanked off someone’s head pretty easily. So, maybe you should go with a nice head harness instead?

Q : How do I make more precum? Is it possible?

a : You stay hydrated, you take supplements that promise to increase the amount of precum for their actual benefits and/or their placebo effects (which, when they occur, are actually beneficial), and you hope for the best.

a : Julianne Moore explained it best in the movie The Kids Are All Right

Q : Have you heard the term “sparkle straight”?

a : Straight men who hung out with gay men—and seem a little faggy themselves— used to be called “fruit flies.” But “fag hags” and “fruit flies” were both considered derogatory, and they’ve been phased out in favor of the less interesting but more inclusive “sparkle straight.”

Q : My spouse has short hair, which I love. I am the one straight man who likes short hair. I love to pull her

important thing is whether it causes symptoms—pain, bleeding, or problems with bowel movements. If it doesn’t, there’s no reason to avoid anal play. Use plenty of lube (preferably silicone), start slow, and consider using quality anal dilators to help the body adjust comfortably. If irritation or swelling becomes an issue, it’s worth seeing a sexual health specialist for treatment options. My practice is always available for telemedicine sessions, and in-person evaluations and management. Honestly, many people start by sending me ‘outie hole’ pics to figure out the best next steps via Instagram.”

You can follow Dr. Goldstein—and send him your outie pics—at instagram.com/ drevangoldstein.

Q : How do I know if I’m ready for a threesome?

at what you want and they’re guessing wrong. If you tell them what you need and what you want, they don’t have to guess, and you might actually get what you want.

Q : How do I get over my partner talking to other women while being OK with trying ethical nonmonogamy (ENM)?

a : If the thought of your partner talking with other women is upsetting—just talking with other women— you’re not ready for ENM.

Q : What do I say to be more vocal as a very shy girl in bed?

Q : My male partner has an outie butthole. He doesn’t like to talk about it but wants to engage in butt play. I let him know I haven’t seen one like his before and could use some guidance on what to do or not to do, but he doesn’t know either. Any suggestions?

a : “When people say, ‘outie butthole,’ they’re usually describing hemorrhoids that prolapse—come in and out—or extra skin stretched from chronic hemorrhoids,” said Dr. Evan Goldstein, a proctologist, anal sex and health expert, and the founder and CEO of Bespoke Surgical. “The most

a : You picture your partner fucking the shit out of someone else—right in front of you—with the same enthusiasm that they used to fuck the shit out of you: desperately swallowing that other person’s tongue, eating that other person out like they haven’t had a meal in weeks, etc. If that picture turns you on, you’re ready. If that picture doesn’t do anything for you, you’re not ready. If that picture enrages you, you will never be ready.

Q : Sex life with my new partner is completely unsatisfactory. How do I tell them?

a : You no doubt hesitate to tell your new partner that the sex is bad because you’re worried about derailing the relationship. But you’re not going to want to stay in the relationship—you’re not going to want to fuck this person for the rest of your life—if the sex doesn’t improve. Right now, your partner is guessing

a : These are my trademarked tips for dirty talk beginners: Tell them what you’re gonna do (“I’m going to fuck the shit out of you”), tell them what you’re doing (“I am fucking the shit out of you”), tell them what you did (“I fucked the shit out of you”). People get selfconscious about dirty talk because they think they need to spin out some elaborate fantasy. You don’t. Simple statements of fact are all you need.

Q : Is it weird to have sex with your dog watching?

a : Not if, like us, your dogs were required to sign NDAs.

Q : Should I send my collegeaged or adult children Magnum subscriptions to the Savage Lovecast?

a : All responsible parents do.

Q : My boyfriend wants to stop using condoms because we’re monogamous and I should trust him. The thing is, I don’t trust him.

a : DTMFA. v

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Where should I share my spicy videos with an interested audience? CHARLES DELUVIO/UNSPLASH

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Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967.

© Yoko Ono. Photo by and © Clay Perry.