Having Our Say, Briar Street Theatre. Living long is the best revenge, if you live as well as the life-loving, resilient Delany sisters. And Emily Mann’s wonderful 1995 play, adapted from Amy Hill Hearth’s biography Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, is a theatrical gem, a Broadway hit and a sure success in Chicago (where it’s also staged by Mann). In their Mount Vernon, New York, home these delightfully hospitable centenarian sisters regale us with their memories: their father was a slave, their mother a crusader, and family friends included Booker T....

BILLY JOE SHAVER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Shaver’s a bona fide outlaw, and country radio, if some recent hits are any indication, only likes Indian outlaws, self-described “wild ones,” and people who wish they were cowboys. Today’s outlaws are a far cry from the original outlaw movement of the 1970s, the progressive fraternity led by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson of which Shaver was a founding member....

With legends it’s not always easy separating fact from fiction, but Merle Haggard’s dossier reads true. No disrespect to Johnny Cash, but he only played San Quentin–Hag did time as part of the captive audience. “I turned 21 in prison, doin’ life without parole,” he sings in “Mama Tried.” In reality he only served 2 years of the maximum 15 years for burglary, but who’s quibbling when you’re talking the biggest house of all?...

A priest is coming to say evening mass at Riem Nguyen’s new house. It’s good luck, says Riem. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new town house is one of 28 recently built in Uptown by Voice of the People, a community-based development organization. They were built on city-owned vacant land, and the city is subsidizing their purchase. The owners, chosen by lottery from a pool of 156 applicants, reflect the races and ethnicities of Uptown: African, African American, Asian, Native American, white, Latino, Middle Eastern....

By Juan Rodriguez The music comforts me like Linus’s security blanket. I know it’s time to quit when I start scribbling a question about Monk’s middle name (Sphere). Gee, I wish we could do an all-jazz edition, but, alas, I must content myself with Elvis, Beatles, Madonna, Michael. I close the books. I decide to wind down by watching tonight’s taped editions of Beavis & Butt-head. The maximum number of characters per question line is 45, no more than three lines per question....

Non-Prophet Theatre Company, at Cafe Voltaire. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Mamet’s brilliant, controversial comedy-drama receives a solid, interesting production under the direction of Jerry Dellinger, a theater teacher at Lincoln College in central Illinois. By casting two former students as the antagonists in Mamet’s darkly funny study of ideological friction in academia, Dellinger blurs the age difference the playwright intended: instead of a baby boomer confounded by his student’s hostility to his glib liberalism, Michael Loeffelholz’s John is a struggling young prof not much older than the woman who accuses him of sexism, elitism, and pedantry....

For artists the go-go 80s were mighty fine. Now galleries close faster than they opened, and painters who once sold on spec scrounge for corporate commissions and jobs at Starbucks. Artists and dealers chalk up the art world’s doldrums to bad times all over: people just don’t have enough money to buy art. Create some jobs, they say, and new works will again fly off studio walls. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

With at least a dozen superior recordings of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony available, why should we bother to hear it performed live? The answer is obvious: a live performance keeps one’s mind focused on how the music unfolds, on the interplays between various instrumental groups–not to mention the possibility of inspired interpretation or awkward missteps. Besides, how can you ever get tired of listening to any of Beethoven’s symphonies? All of which goes to say that this concert by the Orchester der Beethovenhalle from Bonn promises to be a noteworthy event–a chance to hear the Seventh played by well-regarded Beethoven specialists under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies, a maestro who knows how to make the familiar sound startlingly new....

The city is scorching trees all over Chicago, and no one in a position to stop it is doing a damn thing. That’s what Madeline Kanner and other environmentalists believe, as they spread the word about a new machine that may be seriously wounding trees as it repaves the streets. “It takes a generation to grow a tree, but only a few minutes to destroy it,” says Kanner. “This resurfacing machine is part of a multiple environmental assault that’s destroying our trees....

Something Like the Real Thing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The high, lonesome, and keening harmony singing of Carter and Ralph Stanley is among the greatest sounds this country has ever produced. Amid plenty of terrific brother teams–the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and later, the Louvin Brothers–Virginia’s Stanley Brothers stood alone. Their slightly raw, soaring harmonies brought a dusky flavor to the then-blossoming bluegrass movement....

Though less original than her earlier work, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, now at the Shubert Theatre in an efficient-to-inspired touring production directed by Daniel Sullivan, treats its characters with tenderness and its audience like grown-ups. Rich with homage to Chekhov’s trio of siblings, this reunion of three deeply divergent sisters offers each woman a chance to measure her own choices and sacrifices against those of the others–and to reassess her Jewish roots....

Suicide in B-Flat Bill Helbig would have understood the spirit behind Sam Shepard’s 1976 “mysterious overture” Suicide in B-Flat, would have gotten what Shepard was driving at in this beautiful, dreamlike, nonlinear play about a jazz composer who hates his life so much that he kills himself–or perhaps fakes his own suicide–and about the people he leaves behind who try to piece together what he did and why. This is such a strange, sad, fascinating work that, like the best of Shepard’s other plays, it defies easy explication....

By Elizabeth Weil What makes this guy so appealing? Of course the man’s talented. Also smart, insightful, funny, and humane. But when fads flare up, it’s often telling to take a closer look. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Back in New York, hub of things literary, some of Wallace’s editors–like Gerald Howard, editor of The Broom of the System and Girl With Curious Hair–claim that they maintained a decade-long faith in Wallace’s “absolute genius....

NIKITA GASHUNIN What gives these works their uniqueness, and much of their visual pleasure, is Gashunin’s nonsystematic method of organization. The found objects, detritus of the modern world, are arranged neither casually nor according to some predictable formal pattern. Instead Gashunin seeks maximum variety: colors and shapes are arranged mostly next to others that are visually contrasting, even opposites, to create a collision of forms. But lest such an arrangement become too predictable, he will sometimes juxtapose similar or identical shapes: near the top of Plastic Egg are several identical red construction-crane-toy parts, side by side....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Persian” is the proper designation in English of the language known to its own speakers as Farsi, just as “German” is the proper designation in English of the language known to its speakers as Deutsch, etc., etc. It’s unnecessary, and insulting to both English and Persian, to use the native term for a well-known literary language, older than English, which has had a word to designate it in English, French, Russian, Italian, Swedish, etc....

Adriana Carvalho made her first sculptures when she was a child, playing on the banks of a river in the Brazilian town of Taquaritinga, where she was born in 1961. From the clay beds she and her friends sculpted models of their town–“little houses, trees, people, animals, a whole scene,” she recalls. “It was great to create my own characters, my own dolls, each one with their own personality.” And she liked having the freedom to make them look however she liked....

APRIL Friday 30 All the big-time art fairs on the east side of town have goosed the west-side galleries of Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Bucktown into taking some competitive action. But the gallery owners and managers of the West Side Gallery District Association would rather switch than fight: they’ve pooled their resources and rented out a space in River North for a group show. Go West, a sampling of art from the WSGDA’s 25 member galleries, opens tonight with a free reception from 5 to 9 at the new space, 730 N....

The later works of Johann Sebastian Bach are seldom heard on the sort of instruments for which Bach wrote them. The period-instrument debate goes back and forth (would Bach have preferred modern instruments if he’d heard them?), but even those who prefer a modern sound can gain new insights from listening to old sonorities. Chicago Baroque Ensemble is presenting a program that includes the local period-instrument premiere of the Concerto in D Major for Harpsichord as well as the Sonata in G Major for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord and the Suite no....

COCKS HAVE CLAWS AND WINGS TO FLY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The event that seems to have broken the family apart is the recent senseless murder of the father. Youngest son Guero (Carlos Tamayo), who witnessed the killing, is so racked with guilt that he escapes into drugs. Mama (Laurie Martinez) has made a career out of caring for the nearly helpless Guero but never attends to her own wounds....

The secret to Coed Prison Sluts, which most of its many imitators miss, is that it’s a carefully constructed satire masquerading as an artless mess. Faith Soloway’s hilarious, well-written songs artfully mate sweet, sappy, very pop tunes (reminiscent of the mindlessly happy songs people sing in children’s television) with taboo-breaking lyrics (“Shit! Motherfucker! Hey! You cunt!” Or “You prick! Blowjob! Suck my dick!”). Likewise, the screwy plot, developed through improvisation under Mick Napier’s watchful eye, wittily marries the cliches of prison movies–the deadening daily routine, the underground prison economy, the climactic showdown between the good prisoner and his archenemy–and those of old-fashioned musical comedies: the cute meet, the relationship-threatening conflict, even the traditional pair of couples, the leads meant for romance and the others for comic relief....