Eugène Ionesco’s Killing Game, first produced in 1970, will always be relevant—which paradoxically explains its dramatic ineffectiveness. It’s set in an unnamed town visited by a vicious, unaccountable plague. Death roams the streets unfettered (personified in this Red Orchid production as a towering, black-clad night terror lumbering purposefully across the stage throughout the evening). As tens of thousands drop without warning every week, the besieged living respond in all-too- familiar ways: blaming the victims for their immorality, carelessness, or ignorance; insisting that wealth, science, religion, or government can save everyone; cowering before authoritarian officialdom or fomenting insurrection against it....

The drama and intrigue of female friendships has filled works from the sublime (Margaret Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye) to the louche (any installment of the Real Housewives franchise). Tina Fey’s 2004 film Mean Girls mined some of the same cutthroat teenage frenemies territory as 1988’s Heathers—though it was directly inspired by Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 self-help book about surviving high school cliques, Queen Bees and Wannabes. Crucially, the narration that frames the story, voiced in the film by Lohan’s Cady, now comes from Janis and Damian, which serves to distance us from Cady’s own growing awareness of what her attempts to fit in have cost her personally and socially....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Demilich When I previewed the first Chicago show by these veteran Finnish death-metal weirdos, I didn’t get into their dry sense of humor. So here’s my best recollection of my favorite stage banter by front man and guitarist Antti Boman: “We were afraid to play in Chicago because of all the Mafia movies....

For as long as I can remember, every political thinker from Milton Rakove to Mike Royko divided Chicago politics into two main factions: independents and regulars. Independents being the handful of elected officials who were unafraid to stand up to the boss—usually a powerful mayor—and the regulars being the loyal troops in the boss’s army. The Machine—as created by the old bosses such as Mayor Richard J. Daley—is rooted in an alliance between Democratic Party and union powerhouses....

If you’re not working retail this Christmas Eve, spare a thought for those who are—possibly by carving out time to listen to Isaac Gómez‘s Wally World, a two-act audio play now available through Steppenwolf’s “Steppenwolf Now” digital season. And if you need a last-minute dose of resistance and joy to help you get over the last days of 2020, About Face Theatre’s digital celebration of Black queer lives, Kickback, has heart and fire to spare....

Playwright Kenneth Lin’s got nothing on Frank Capra. In this gauzy, diagrammatic new play, given its world premiere by Jackalope Theatre, two forensic economists descend upon the aftermath of a plane crash that took the life of Hank Baylor, 63rd richest man in the world. Cynical Mitch (Joel Ewing), hired by the airline, is a once-heralded math genius who’s now designing algorithms to calculate the value of lives snuffed out in accidents....

In 2017, Paris-based electroacoustic composer Kassel Jaeger (born François Bonnet) and Chicago-born multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke joined forces for Wakes on Cerulean, a kaleidoscopic duo recording filled with shape-shifting electronics and field recordings. On their brand-new second collaborative album, In Cobalt Aura Sleeps (Editions Mego), they aim to convey a similarly rapturous experience, but the piece they deliver develops in an even more striking and engaging manner. The recording begins with the serene, soothing sounds of waves, insects, and birds, before a spurt of electronics makes evident the artists’ presence....

In an October 31 letter directed to felony trial attorneys, a supervisor in Cook County public defender Amy Campanelli’s office forbade staff from entering courtroom lockup areas at the criminal court building at 26th and California “until further notice.” The reason? Public defenders are being sexually harassed and even assaulted while visiting their clients in lockups. One of the most common forms of assault cited is defendants masturbating in front of female public defenders....

How important are the arts in the upcoming Chicago mayoral election? Here’s who showed up: Gery Chico, Lori Lightfoot, Toni Preckwinkle, Paul Vallas, and Willie Wilson. Over the course of a 90-minute session in which each candidate got a minute and a half to answer a series of questions put by the moderators, Chicago Humanities Festival artistic director Alison Cuddy and WBBM Newsradio political editor Craig Dellimore, Gery Chico repeatedly called for “a plan for the arts in this city” as if it were a brand-new idea....

Al Podgorski /Sun-Times Media Chicago’s segregated black neighborhoods are suffering, Bill “Dock” Walls said Friday during a debate at the Sun-Times. Mayor Emanuel was not asked to respond. In the Reader this week, we focus on Chicago’s persistent racial segregation, and how that fundamental problem is once again being ignored in the mayor’s race. We sought to interview the mayoral candidates about racial segregation this year, as we had before the last election, when the issue was also being ignored....

QI think my husband is addicted to porn. I find porn in his browser history almost every single day. He says I’m the only one he wants, but I find that hard to believe knowing he watches nonstop porn before fucking me. He also parties every time he goes on a business trip. Needless to say, I also suspect he cheats. He says he would never cheat on me because he “doesn’t need to....

All Them Witches are a heavy blues-rock band from Nashville that recently pared down to a trio following some lineup hiccups on the keyboards late last year. The group are kicking off a long tour that’ll take them through the U.S. and Europe on the back of their powerful fifth album, last fall’s ATW (New West). Their sound leans heavily on the Black Sabbath/Blue Cheer/Hawkwind flavors of black-and-blue riff rock, which they pull off seamlessly: “Workhorse” has an irresistible low build and grind, and “1st vs....

Canadian-born pop artist Odie embraces his Nigerian heritage, and talks a lot about growing up with the sounds of African gospel and Fela Kuti. His family history pumps blood into the heart of his debut album, April’s Analogue (Unite Recordings/Empire), which transposes Afrobeat rhythms onto mopey pop instrumentals that feel ready made for Top 40 radio. The 21-year-old frequently cites Kid Cudi and Coldplay as his influences; he has a deep understanding of how their milquetoast material can harbor big emotions for large masses of listeners who at a person-to-person level may not share the same interests in emerging artists....

When you hear the word “bread,” what do you imagine? A bakery? A sandwich? The beginning of a meal? Isabelle Frances McGuire, who rejects gender binaries and doesn’t seem to approach anything in a straightforward way, thinks of the artist’s own body. The title “I’m a Cliché” comes from the song “I Am a Cliché” by 70s British punk band X-Ray Spex, whose lyrics often dealt with feminism and anti-consumerism. Relatedly, the setup at Prairie Gallery is somewhat spartan—a small, windowless room whose walls and floor are painted white....

A little over a year ago, New York label Palto Flats collaborated with Swiss imprint WRWTFWW to reissue Midori Takada’s beautifully meditative 1983 solo album Through the Looking Glass, galvanizing an unlikely comeback, and—for many listeners—a discovery. Takada is an imaginative Japanese percussionist whose work in the 80s and 90s gracefully dissolved lines between free jazz, minimalism, and new age. The sound she developed still rings utterly contemporary, melding pulsing rhythms on tuned percussion and sharing Steve Reich’s adaptation of the circular rhythms of West Africa—but creating something more fragile and less mechanistic....

In the new American art film The Mountain, which I considered at length in the current issue of the Reader, director Rick Alverson looks back on the final days of the lobotomy as an accepted psychotherapeutic practice. The movie follows the exploits of a traveling therapist (Jeff Goldblum) who visits state hospitals and performs the procedure on mental patients with the goal of bringing them to an “innocuous state.” Though he trades in incapacitation and seems to enjoy his work, Goldblum’s character isn’t evil per se; Alverson seems to be saying that the therapist merely follows the order of the day and that this allows him to see himself as rational, even humane....

Karin Dreijer has made a career out of music that might not seem commercially appealing. In the Knife, the electronic-pop group she founded with her brother, Olof, and as a solo artist performing and recording under the name Fever Ray, Dreijer has made a mountain of music that pulses in unfamiliar ways, that disembowels and reconfigures pop music, that is, in a word, “weird.” But her songs always find a way of hitting their mark, and despite the unconventional paths she might take, she always seeks clarity in how she chooses to express herself....

Classic-movie fans will be pleased to learn that Dennis Wolkowicz—president of the Silent Film Society of Chicago and, under the pseudonym Jay Warren, its resident organ accompanist—is now general manager of the Patio Theater in Portage Park, where he has launched a Tuesday-night revival series in addition to an irregular schedule of indie screenings and free community shows. Built in 1927, the Patio has had a tortured history in the new century....

One of the most personally enjoyable things to come out of the pandemic for me so far is to see all the nimble, singularly creative, and sometimes desperate projects I wrote about blossom into something bigger as the city reopens. Alexis Thomas and Eve Studnicka formalized their meal delivery partnership into Funeral Potatoes, Tony Quartaro’s Beverly-born fresh pasta startup is settling into a brick-and-mortar pastaficio; Vargo Brother Ferments is just a GoFundMe fraction away from moving into a commercial kitchen; and after John Avila transitioned his Minahasa pop-up into a permanent space at Revival Food Hall, he and his partner began scheming to open the first and only Indonesian grocery store in the midwest (more about that later this week....

Chicago rapper and prison abolitionist Ric Wilson suffered a big loss this past Saturday when someone broke into his car in Lincoln Park and made off with his recording rig. Wilson had been traveling around town with a Mac Mini and an Avid Mbox 2 to put the finishing touches on his follow-­up to the November EP The Sun Was Out, which half the Gossip Wolf team called one of the best overlooked Chicago hip-hop releases of 2015....