Functioning like a theatrical Richter scale, Survivors measures the damage done to a woman named Billie by her abusive, socially respected father. Refusing evenhandedness, playwright L.A. Ross’s uncompromising one-act details the damage wrought by incest with as much compassion as a survivor can supply. To deal with Billie’s trauma, Ross gives her two personas, played by two actors, who serve as agents of healing, reminding her of the life beneath the hurt and her capacity to love and holding out the hope that nature, music, and new love will heal the pain....

Sweet Sculpture: Workers Step Up to the Drawing Board Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In their original game plan Sperandio and Grennan hoped to manufacture the new candy and wrapper in at least a limited quantity at the factory and market and distribute it through the company’s normal channels. But the Franklin Park plant manager, Charles Brashears, says the factory is not set up to make and distribute small product runs, so Sperandio is trying to line up a different manufacturer....

Most mass transit is privately owned, UIC management professor Anthony Pagano reminded the Transportation Research Forum last fall: “The private [transit] sector [not counting taxis, limos, or medical transport] is estimated to operate 14,715 vehicles in the Chicago area. This is over seven times the number of buses operated by public transit in Chicago.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “New York was always a money town [with] Wall Street booms and crashes....

In the dawn of their November triumph, drunk with power from having captured the Senate and the House, Republicans vowed to lead a revolution against federal spending. They hardened their hearts and blocked their ears to the cries of the sick and the poor. Welcome to the revolution, Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s distressing on our residents,” says McCormick. “If you listen to the beats of the drum it is clear that we’re very vulnerable, even if specific proposals change day to day....

THE DESTINY OF ME at the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taking its title from a line in Wait Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” The Destiny of Me is Kramer’s song of himself. It’s long, loud, more than a little self-indulgent, and bravely self-revealing, examining the roots of Kramer’s public outrage in his private pain. A pioneering AIDS activist controversial for his confrontational ways, Kramer dramatized in The Normal Heart how he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis counseling center, then was forced out for his preachy, antagonistic ways....

If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns: The Hiroshima Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nearly 50 years to the day after the devastation of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the topic remains highly charged and explosively political, as op-ed writers and opponents of museum exhibits furiously debate whether the use of the bomb was a necessary evil or a gratuitous show of force, whether the Japanese emperor was ready to surrender or the atomic bomb was the only thing he could understand, or whether we who were born after 1945, as New York Times columnist Russell Baker suggests, have no business discussing it at all....

Did your mother ever tell you, “Don’t touch that! If people threw it out, there must be a reason!”? Well, there is a reason: people are pigs. I’ll never forget that first big haul. I started out around the Fullerton el station, and by the time I worked my way down to Clybourn and Armitage, I had my arms full. Shopping bags overflowing with pillows, planters, rugs, and lamps, I slowly made my way back to Lincoln, where a merchant friend was nice enough to let me put my finds in the back room for a few hours....

Few films are as movingly bleak as Arthur Lipsett’s little-known 21-87 (1963). This stunning evocation of dehumanization juxtaposes found footage from several cities. Cuts between images that don’t match–crowds seen from different camera angles or under different light–subtly express alienation. The editing also creates surrealistic illusions–for example, jumping from a man looking upward to an image of a monkey. Shots of anonymous crowds are combined with shots of people playing roles central to the era–models at a fashion show, a man in a space suit, kids shaking like automatons to (one assumes) rock ‘n’ roll....

THE BALLAD OF BABY DOE Douglas Stuart Moore (1893-1969) mined the same vein of American regionalist folksiness that employed his contemporaries Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland (and, like Copland, worked in New York City, the antithesis of regionalism and folksiness). Their music paralleled the regionalist paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, though their style lasted longer; they were still exploring folk melodies long after Benton’s muscular realism had been replaced in popularity by the spatterings of his student Jackson Pollock....

Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-61 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through June 4 Even the pictures that seem ready to bust out of their frames actually create a subtle interplay between painterly self-assertion and a tendency toward perfectly contained shapes. The central form of Black and White No. 1 (1952) appears to leave the frame at left and right, but the lines at the left edge are bunched together to form a single black shape, and at the right only two lines actually “exit....

By Tom Terranova SATURDAY 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The intersection of film and libido will be the focus of a pre-Valentine’s Day program tonight at Chicago Filmmakers. “The Colors of Love” is a raunchy collection of art films and videos, including Color of Love by Peggy Awesh, Wildgirl’s Go-Go Rama by Addison Cook, and The Operation by Jacob Pander. There’ll also be several archival treasures, including Sweet Smoke, which features two stoners firing up and dancing nasty to psychedelic music and strobe lights....

JULY If you’re bummed about the plight of HotHouse, which closes down this weekend without a new home in sight, you can say good-bye to the club’s old location, 1565 N. Milwaukee, and help contribute to its moving expenses by attending a farewell show tonight featuring a collaborative performance by master West African musician Hassan Hakmoun, multiinstrumentalist Adam Rudolph, and percussionist Hamid Drake. Testimonials and farewells from HotHouse regulars and friends get under way at 8; the music starts at 9; tix are $15....

When school groups visit City Council meetings, they frequently hear two things. First, the group’s local alderman introduces them, and the council gives them a perfunctory round of applause. Then, after some indiscreet alderman has said something nasty about another alderman or the mayor, a third alderman will jump up and say the council is setting a bad example for the school group. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gidwitz is hated with the kind of fervor our ancestors reserved for accused witches....

Still/Here at the Shubert Theatre, March 28 and 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992 Jones, who is HIV positive and whose partner Arnie Zane died of AIDS in 1988, began holding workshops with people who had terminal illnesses, asking them to describe such things as the moment they were told of their illness and the imagined moment of their death. He then used their words–often as lyrics for the songs composed by Kenneth Frazelle and Vernon Reid–and video images of them in the piece....

Some People However, unlike Anna Deavere Smith, who appeared at the Goodman Studio Theatre not long ago, Hoch’s personal viewpoint is everywhere–a great artistic pity. At the end of Some People, barely 20 seconds after the applause has begun, he gestures to his audience for silence and performs a little acoustic rap, using a wooden stage prop as a bongo. He informs us that (a) this show is about “we” and “they,” (b) it “ain’t no performance art” but an evening of theater, and (c) he is “young, single, and free....

Brock Silvers, a Chicago business consultant now based in Beijing, was shocked by what he found several years ago when he traveled through the hinterlands of China in search of Taoist temples. “Many ancient foundations, parts, pieces, wings, etc survived until the modern era,” he writes via E-mail. “Most of that was wiped out by the Red Guards.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Taoism–founded in the second century BC–advises its adherents to lead a life unburdened by excess and tension and in harmony with nature....

By Justin Hayford As a sideline, Fisher has written a book, Adventures of the Rope Warrior: A Legend Is Launched, the first in a projected series about his futuristic alter ego (at the end of book one the Keebarians have invented a highly addictive drug, Zacknu–the primary ingredient is arterial plaque–that they manufacture on earth and distribute all over the galaxy). He’s just had 15,000 copies published. A children’s activity book is also in the works, and Rope Warrior trading cards, more than 100,000 of them, should hit the streets soon....

This young trio from Duluth, Minnesota, has adapted the slow quietude of bands like Galaxie 500 and Codeine and stripped it of nearly all song development, opting instead for static, mantralike trance-out contours. One listen to their just released debut, I Could Live in Hope (Vernon Yard), reveals that Low’s musical skills are rudimentary at best, but they exploit their few strengths to transform simplicity into a striking virtue. Expansively produced by murkmeister Kramer, the record swells the repetitive and hypnotic melodic patterns into elegiac rhapsodies, Alan Sparhawk’s vibrato-heavy guitar swimming around John Nichols’s snakelike bass lines....

The brainchild of Mike Pickering, a former DJ at Manchester’s famous Hacienda nightclub, M People have managed a striking transformation from conception to execution. Setting unabashed 70s-style disco within current dance-music technology, they deliver the link missing from virtually all contemporary club fare: real songs. Vocalist Heather Small, a brassy, gospel-tinged diva, possesses the pipes needed to contend with the group’s thunderous, pumping beat, but she can also quiver whisperingly and inventively craft subtle melodic variations....

This quirky lyrical pastorale about the growing love between two men paints a portrait of an idyllic private world of gentle banter and surreal fantasies. In his second feature, British director Chris Newby is careful not to turn his main characters into blatantly sexual or pitiful misfits: Harry, a shy, gawky young gay man with a facial birthmark in the shape of Madagascar, and Flint, his older, swaggering, ostensibly heterosexual companion, are eccentric loners, but they win us over by being honest if at first reticent about their emotions....