YOU’RE BLOCKING MY VISION OF REALITY Endangered Species Theatre Company at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The situation comes right from Pirandello, but writer-director-actor Schiff has omitted all philosophical grounding and sense of play. A frustrated. author named Frank (Bill Russell) picks up a water pistol and interrupts a play he claims he wrote himself 15 years before and another writer stole and trivialized....

For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake–namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers–doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St....

Friday 3 Saturday 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you’re really interested in the nearly half-a-million used books collected for the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee’s World’s Largest Used Book Sale, you can shell out five bucks tonight to get an early shot at them. The opening night affair runs 6 to 10 at the site, moved this year to the southeast corner of the back parking lot at the Northbrook Court Shopping Center, half a mile west of the Edens on Lake Cook Road in Northbrook....

Darkside, Eclipse Theatre Company. The success of the film Apollo 13 may have inspired Eclipse Theatre to take a chance on Ken Jones’s 1987 space saga, an 80-minute depiction of three astronauts embroiled in a space emergency even more dire. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately, Jones’s melodrama could never be confused with that taut and believable film: the crew of “Apollo 18” are at least as beleaguered as the 1970 astronauts and even more beset with standard-issue psychological breakdowns....

This strong program of witty films and videos, all but one by Chicagoans, is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s upcoming “First Fridays” social event. In Jerrys (1976), a portrait of a local deli, Tom Palazzolo’s handheld camera and jagged editing capture the proprietor’s raw energy. Ines Sommer’s The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof (1990) humorously juxtaposes images of supermarket products with the voices of televangelists. Heather McAdams’s frenetic The Space Cadets (1979) uses old found footage toward often hilarious ends: the sound track connects soldiers at war with “space cadets,” and eventually the term’s use for a person who isn’t all there becomes the operative pun....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are a thousand cool places up in the Dells. Thank God Heather McAdams only knows of ten [“Hester Duzz Da Dells, July 1]! I’m looking at the Wisconsin Dells Travel and Attraction Guide right now and all I can do is shake my head. On the one hand I am happy Heather did not give away the truly hip hideouts of the Dells, only giving credence to the most obvious establishments, which one would have to be blind not to see....

WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS Haun prefers difficult contemporary music, often string music–the Kronos Quartet, Anton Webern, Paul Hindemith–and it’s easy to see why: the attenuation, variety, and innate drama of strings are perfect for her stretched, precise, angular choreography, which often turns unexpected corners (two abstract works from 1990 on this program, Next and Trials, are good examples). The lugubrious comic side of string music is also appropriate to the understated humor of Haun’s 1991 barroom drama Close My Eyes and the 1992 tongue-in-cheek love duet Other Sides (Section II)....

Much of the risk that typified performance in the 1970s and ’80s has disappeared. Yoko Ono isn’t inviting strangers to cut off her clothes anymore, Stelios Arcadiou isn’t piercing his skin with fish hooks and suspending himself in midair, and Chris Burden isn’t having himself shot. Paula Killen is bucking this trend. Though she never puts herself in harm’s way, she turns in her riskiest piece to date with her one- woman tour de force Niagara Falls: Straight to the Top....

I boarded a nearly empty 76 Diversey bus with several dozen people. As the bus pulled away from its stop, a toddler began crying incessantly. He squirmed and screamed in his mother’s arms, and nothing she did or said could calm him. Meanwhile, against the bus driver’s warnings, an elderly woman moved from seat to seat trying to strike up conversations. A weary passenger finally asked the mother what was wrong with the little boy....

“Audiences in this country really haven’t seen films in which two men fall in love, just as heterosexual couples do,” says Mark Bessenger, who recently finished shooting Rhapsody, a locally produced independent feature about a gay romance. “In Rhapsody we take the relationship at face value. These are regular guys with normal emotional dilemmas. I believe America is ready for a more realistic take, not only the angry shockers from the new queer cinema....

Making its debut so soon after the demise of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago, this brand-new project seems to challenge the notion that the Windy City isn’t hospitable to events of this kind. Producers John T. Mills and James Ellis hope to succeed where others have failed by offering a more sharply defined image implied by the word “fringe,” more concentrated programming (more than two dozen acts in just 11 days, all in one venue with three different performance spaces), a special outreach to family audiences with its special weekend “Kids’ Fringe,” low prices, and the inclusion of Chicago artists alongside visitors from around the English-speaking world....

Uh, well–maybe you’ll go blind. Dr. Walter Barr of Loyola University Medical Center: “If you compare X-rays of patients who are habitual knuckle crackers to those who have never developed the habit, you will not find any…evidence of disease or joint abnormalities. The idea that knuckle cracking causes arthritis or big knuckles could be termed an old wives’ tale.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still doing good and doing well after all these years....

As someone whose opinion of The Crucible was never tainted by some dry-brained English teacher’s lifeless interpretation, I came to the Raven Theatre production with fresh eyes–and was blown away. First by Arthur Miller’s fine, multilayered play. The way Miller wove together the various strands of his story–the Salem witch trials, the HUAC hearings, life in colonial Massachusetts–into a taut two-act play is nothing short of brilliant. However, I was even more amazed by Michael Menendian’s glorious production....

In an up-and-down season, the Bears came to last Sunday’s game with an opportunity to define themselves once and for all. On the strength of an impressive upset of the Miami Dolphins the week before, the Bears had gotten themselves to 6-4, tied for second in the Central Division of the National Football Conference, a game behind the Minnesota Vikings. The day’s opponents, the Lions, were no great shakes as a football team–their record stood even at 5-5–but they had beaten the Bears in Detroit, and given the National Football League’s tendency toward parity (read mediocrity), the football gods seemed to desire an outcome that would leave both teams at 6-5 and confirm them as middle-of-the-pack also-rans with an outside chance to embarrass themselves in the playoffs....

Lawrence Steger visits Chicago stages with the brilliance and rarity of a comet. If you’re lucky you’ll catch sight of him once every few years, tearing through the postmodern vacuum of irony-laden autobiography, adding humor and pathos to a scene best known for its detached cynicism. But after years of quasi-confessional monologues Steger–like a comet in its final orbit–faced burnout. “I had no more truth to tell,” he says. Teaming up with fellow performance artists Douglas Grew and Laura Dame for his first ensemble piece, The Swans, he discovered new theatrical truths in lives other than his own....

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare Repertory. Where Griffin Theatre’s recent Twelfth Night played up the innocence of the self-blinded lovers, siblings, and buffoonish hangers-on, Shakespeare Rep’s revival is statelier and more substantial, reflecting the characters’ extremes. Consider the misplaced love of Henry Godinez’s Orsino–astonished to learn that love is right there, in Elyse Mirto’s radiant Viola–and the unresolved rage of Greg Vinkler’s brittle Malvolio, a Humpty Dumpty who falls but isn’t lucky enough to break....

Think of it as the Joe Orton play that never was, or the Richard Lester movie that might have been. Written in 1967 as a screenplay for the Beatles (whose agents rejected it), and then taken under consideration by trendsetting filmmaker Lester until Orton was murdered by his boyfriend, Up Against It is peppered with impudent Ortonisms: jabs at organized religion and political corruption, an obsession with sexual fetishism and gender confusion, and an outsider’s contempt for both conventional proprieties and hip amorality....

YAIR DALAL & the AL OL ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to the liner notes for the new album by Israeli musician Yair Dalal, “Al Ol is the name of a desert wind, a small tornado . . . the spirit of a jinn . . . punished to spin around himself for eternity.” Though that image may be more descriptive than it is hopeful, it’s also the name of Dalal’s experiment in musical detente–an ensemble comprising Israeli and Palestinian musicians exploring their shared musical heritage....

With their new album Vee Vee (reviewed this week in section one), Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf should put to rest the comparisons to Superchunk and Pavement that have plagued them since their first single three years ago. It’s true that the band’s rock-out enthusiasm mirrors Superchunk’s, just as their careening detuned guitars recall Pavement, but Archers of Loaf have set their sights higher without succumbing to their own sense of importance....

There are a lot of common stereotypes about Delta bluesmen: they’re emotionally intense but artistically limited, possessed by visions of death, erotic catastrophe, and existential despair. After a lifetime of that, they die young. Ebullient Big Jack Johnson from Clarksdale, Mississippi, joyfully dispels these myths, making music that’s as powerful and robust as his physical constitution, which he developed working for oil refineries around the Delta. He’ll take a folkie war-horse like “Tom Dooley” and transform it into a juke-joint jump–replete with echoes of everything from Elmore James’s slide guitar to the hillbilly hipsterisms of Bob Wills–then plunge effortlessly into a backwoods deep-blues classic like “Catfish Blues....