Chicago Reader: print issue of June 9, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 35) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J U N E 9, 2 0 1 6

At Proﬁles Theatre the drama— and — is real

For more than 20 years, actors and crew members stayed silent about mistreatment they suffered at the acclaimed storefront theater. Now they’re speaking up, hoping to protect workers in nonEquity theaters across the country. By AIMEE LEVITT AND CHRISTOPHER PIATT 16

An essential guide to the world’s largest free BLUES FESTIVAL Politics Airbnb vs. Mayor Rahm 10

Transportation Promote bike helmets or prevent crashes? 12

g n i c n a D & o f Mu s i c

An EveniTnHgE T A L L S H I P W I N D Y m p ABOARD 0 1 7 · 4 2 e n u J · y a d i r F ERIS DREW

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2 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

THIS WEEK

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | J U N E 9, 2 0 1 6 | V O L U M E 4 5 , N U M B E R 3 5

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS STEVE BOGIRA, MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, ZAC THOMPSON, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS JESSICA KIM COHEN, MARC DAALDER, KT HAWBAKER-KROHN, FARAZ MIRZA, SUNSHINE TUCKER

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Christopher Chen’s Caught at Victory Gardens, Mel Brooks at the Chicago Theatre, Hany Abu-Assad’s ﬁlm The Idol, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

8 Street View An image consultant talks about how her hair shaped her own self-image.

12 10 Joravsky | Politics Airbnb and an old mayoral ally team up against Rahm. 12 Transportation Bike advocates say it’s time to shift from promoting helmets to preventing crashes. 14 Higher education A contentious appointment to the State Board of Ed pits Rauner against Illinois’s academics.

30 Lit R.L. Stine, Ruth Reichl, Seymour Hersh, Marcia Clark, and more Printers Row Lit Fest highlights 33 Movies Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or-winning Dheepan

MUSIC

44 Shows of note Nothing, Hot Mix 5 Festival, Joey Purp, Gregory Porter, and more 46 The Secret History of Chicago Music Saxophonist John Gilmore played with Sun Ra for 40 years.

ARTS & CULTURE 8 8 Chicagoans A Chicago swinger oﬀers advice for starting nonmonogamous relationships.

28 Theater The Goodman savors human decency in Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976. 29 Comedy/Dance Second City and Hubbard Street collaboration The Art of Falling returns.

FOOD & DRINK

53 Restaurant review: Artango There’s an Argentine steak house plopped down on the stroller lanes of Lincoln Square. 56 Bar review: Mezcaleria Las Flores Mezcal is having a moment— notably at this Logan Square spot.

CLASSIFIEDS

57 Jobs 57 Apartments & Spaces 59 Marketplace 60 Straight Dope Cecil goes back for seconds on the question of cannibalism. 61 Savage Love Guy with small penis seeks small penis humiliation. 62 Early Warnings Angel Olsen, DJ Shadow, Patti Smith, and more 62 Gossip Wolf Radical performance-art collective Schimpﬂuch-Gruppe comes to Elastic.

FEATURES

---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------THE READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. © 2016 SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. POSTMASTER: SEND CHANGE OF ADDRESS TO CHICAGO READER, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654.

ON THE COVER: DESIGN BY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS

ARTS & CULTURE

MUSIC

For more than 20 years, actors and crew members stayed silent about mistreatment they suﬀered at the acclaimed storefront theater. Now they’re speaking up, hoping to protect workers in non-Equity theaters across the country. BY AIMEE LEVITT AND CHRISTOPHER PIATT 16

The world’s largest free blues fest bustles with a diversity of traditions and talents—including Irma Thomas, Lazy Lester, Wee Willie Walker, John Primer, and tributes to Otis Rush and Otis Clay. BY DAVID WHITEIS AND BILL DAHL 35

At Profiles Theatre the drama— and the abuse—is real

Our guide to the Chicago Blues Festival

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

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The Good Doctor ò MATTHEW YEE

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Caught Christopher Chen’s tantalizing hoax begins with a R “preshow” exhibit of works by Chinese dissident artist Lin Bo (Ben Chang). He says a few words about his recent imprisonment, then is suddenly a character in a scene set in the oﬃces of the New Yorker after an American academic has questioned the veracity of an interview he gave the magazine about his imprisonment. When “the play” ends, a real cast member conducts a “talkback” with ersatz playwright Wang Min (Helen Young), who spouts ingenious and impenetrable theories about cultural appropriation. Finally, the actors who played Wang Min and Lin Bo hang out discussing their performances. In moments it’s grad-school precious, but mostly it’s a provocative look at the mutability and exploitability of “truth.” Seth Bockley’s Sideshow Theatre production is as smart as Chen’s script. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 7/3: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, sideshowtheatre.org, $20-$25.

Constellations Cribbing string theory and pulp sci-fi, British playwright Nick Payne posits a world where every choice you make or fail to make generates an alternate you in an alternate universe. Thus he presents sequential iterations of lovers Marianne (a quantum cosmologist) and Roland (a beekeeper), all played by Jessie Fisher and Jon Michael Hill, enacting multiple, slightly altered relationship moments. Roland proposes five times, for example, and gets a definitive yes only once. For those inclined to moon over life’s what-ifs, Payne’s unchallenging observations—e.g., bad timing, bad moods, and terminal illnesses can screw up relationships—may hold allure. But by design, nothing of consequence can happen, and the characters can’t develop beyond momentary possibilities. It’s a 70-minute acting exercise. Still, Jessie Fisher’s astute, hair-trigger performance as Marianne is a mar-

vel. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 7/3: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf. org, $64-$82. Cowboy Mouth Across from the Red Line’s Lawrence platform is a small apartment, just above Demera Ethiopian Restaurant. There’s no name on the buzzer, no sign on the door. But on the second floor, Slimtack Theatre Company invites you to be a voyeur for an hour, inside not only a Chicago apartment but the minds of Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, through their 1971 fever dream Cowboy Mouth. Poetic and loud, leaving plenty of unanswered questions, this experience is just as intense and uncomfortable as you’d expect, with two damaged musicians fighting over love and art in an effort to give birth to a new religion. It’s chaotic, unhinged, and volatile—but that’s the underbelly of drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. And if you can’t bear the fear and loathing, don’t take this ride. —A.J. SØRENSEN Through 7/9: Fri-Sat 9 PM, 1142 W. Lawrence, 773-469-5608, chenrysmith.org/cowboy-mouth, $10. The Cure A dreamlike, ensemR ble-devised dance-theater piece about sickness and healing in an age

of industrialized medicine, The Cure features only minimal dialogue by Emma Stanton but conjures a powerful atmosphere through movement, choral harmony, and costumes. Most of the hour is spent in the Chicago Cultural Center’s lavishly ornamented Sidney R. Yates Gallery, as a limber and emotive cast of Walkabout Theater Company members wheel wooden gurneys across the echoing ﬂoor, twirl vials of colorful serum, and parody various doctor-patient interactions; performer Nigel Brown even presents a TED talk. In one memorable sequence, ensemble member Dana Murphy lies ﬂat on a gurney as four castmates whip a bed sheet into the air above her, then tightly down over her body, then up again. For cryptic acts like these to feel as moving as they do takes some magic, and The Cure provides just the rare sort that will do the trick. —MAX MALLER Through 6/18: Fri-Sat and Mon

Cahn Auditorium, Northwestern University, 600 Emerson, Evanston, 847-4674000, lightoperaworks.org, $34-$98. Northanger Abbey This musical R stage version of Jane Austen’s ﬁrst novel is an engaging piece of the-

The Good Doctor Presented in repertory with Vladimir Zaytsev’s Out of the Blue, this 1973 Neil Simon homage presents a handful of stories by Anton Chekhov with Simon’s signature light comedy. Josh Anderson’s production for Organic Theater Company capitalizes on Simon’s levity while an ensemble of versatile performers brings authenticity to his richer characters, and over the course of nine vignettes, histrionic gooﬁness gives way to tender revelations and moments of Chekhovian insight. In “The Governess,” Sara Copeland is precise and transﬁxing as a servant struggling to remain composed while getting screwed over by her bourgeois employer; Jim Heatherly is at once heartwarmingly and heartbreakingly pathetic throughout. —DAN JAKES Through 7/7: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, organictheater. org, $25.

atrical storytelling, with a captivating lead performance by soprano Stephanie Stockstill. She plays Catherine, the naive teenage daughter of a country parson. Invited to the spooky ancient abbey home of a young clergyman she’s falling in love with, she dreams of becoming the heroine of a romantic thriller like the Gothic novels she adores reading—but instead awakens to the more mysterious complexities of real life. Playwright Robert Kauzlaric and songwriter George Howe eﬀectively convey Austen’s wry humor and observant insights into human behavior (though the ﬁrst act could use some pruning), and Howe’s appropriately Mozartean score is played impeccably by a classical piano trio. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 7/17: ThuFri 7:30 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $40.

My Fair Lady This Light Opera Works show features two actors reprising their roles from the company’s 2009 production of Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I didn’t see that one, but it’s clear why they were invited back: Nick Sandys as the upper-class linguist Henry Higgins and Cary Lovett as Alfred P. Doolittle, the unapologetic exemplar of the “undeserving poor,” turn in delicious performances as flawed males on opposite ends of the social hierarchy. Elizabeth Telford is feisty and fine as Eliza, Doolittle’s daughter and the subject of Higgins’s diction experiment, conducted to win a wager. It’s choreographed within an inch of its life, but the generally excellent cast handles that and Cahn Auditorium’s distorting amplification with aplomb. Roger Bingaman conducts the 28-piece orchestra; Rudy Hogenmiller directs.—DEANNA ISAACS Through 6/12: Wed-Thu 2 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM,

Out of the Blue The story surrounding Vladimir Zaytsev’s drama is more interesting than the thing itself. Staged in Moscow last year, Zaytsev’s by-the-numbers sexual coming-of-age story was a head-on challenge to Vladimir Putin’s repressive 2013 antigay “propaganda” law. Alexander Gelman and Organic Theater Company present it in repertory with Neil Simon’s Chekhov tribute, The Good Doctor, but free of dialect and detached from its cultural context, it loses its punch. There’s a lot of truth and compassion in Will Burdin’s performance as a teenager navigating the complications of gay life (girlfriend “beards,” zealot grandparents, shallow hookups); still, the script is such an overlong and dramaturgically clumsy aﬀair that the most devastating moments become the most tedious. —DAN JAKES Through 6/11: Sat 3 and 8 PM; 6/12-7/10: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $25.

Xanadu ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of June 9 Giordano Dance Chicago

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

ò GORMAN COOK PHOTOGRAPHY

Late Late Breakfast’s Pilot R Taping The live taping of local comedy show Late Late Breakfast’s

television pilot features special guests Megan Gailey, Ryan Singer, Will Miles, Ben Kronberg, and Giulia Rozzi, plus, as always, pancakes. Sat 6/11, 1-6 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $25.

Sherlock Holmes and the MysR tery of Portage Park Observation, knowledge, and deduction are the

skills employed by Sherlock Holmes in this promenade-style production for which audience members choose to walk or bike. Thanks to a “duplication machine,” the investigation is led by three Holmeses and three Watsons, each leading a small group through the Portage Park neighborhood—from City News Cafe to Sears to Dickinson Park, among other local spots. At each location, the groups encounter suspicious characters to interview and search for clues before returning to Filament Theatre for some ﬁnal evidence and a surprising conclusion. It’s one of the most interactive shows I’ve seen in a long time; the kids in our group were wholly engaged, and I learned a lot about the charming, oft-overlooked northwest-side neighborhood. Encyclopedia Brown fans will be especially enthralled, but there’s enough funny business from the large cast to keep everyone happy. —SUZANNE SCANLON Through 6/25: Sat 11 AM; 7/9-7/23: Sat 11 AM and 2 PM, Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee, ﬁlamenttheatre.org, $20.

Voice Lessons Scholars are now certain that Mr. Kurtz was referring to this imbecilic little comedy by Justin Tanner when he croaked out “The horror! The horror!” and died. Starting with an Alzheimer’s joke and running downhill from there (“retard” quip, fat lady sight gag, bizarre reference to smelly Latinos), Tanner gives us Ginny, a trailer-trash Florence Foster Jenkins whose experience in community theater has convinced her that she’s got star potential. She hires vocal coach Nate to take her there, but he’s stymied by her utter talentlessness, unnerving stupidity, and refusal to take instruction. We’re supposed to ﬁnd this amusing—and even, in the end, gooﬁly romantic. But neither the script nor the lead performances by Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart yield a single moment’s fun, much less honesty. The old critique of Steppenwolf was that its actor-centered ensemble valued fat parts over quality scripts; brought to the company as a vehicle for Metcalf, this 55-minute . . . thing . . . gives the old critique scary new life. —TONY ADLER Through 6/11: Wed-Thu 8 PM, Fri-Sat 8 and 10 PM, Sun 4 and 8 PM, Tue 8 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf. org, $65-$75.

Xanadu A tribute to American R Theater Company’s late artistic director, PJ Papparelli, this energetic

revival of the 2007 Broadway musical based on the campy 1980 ﬂop Xanadu (Papparelli’s favorite movie) mines all that’s great about the material—the eccentric story, the silly pop hits, the myriad opportunities for late-disco-era nostalgia—while avoiding most of the pitfalls of the belabored book. Director Lili-Anne Brown packs the production with brilliant quadruple threats (They sing! They dance! They act! They roller boogie!), but Landree Fleming kills and kills as Clio (played by Olivia Newton-John in the movie), a demigoddess come to earth to inspire a dopey Venice Beach artist/hunk (well portrayed by Jim DeSelm). And Arnel Sancianco’s transformation of the American Theatre Company space into a roller disco is sheer genius. —JACK HELBIG Through 7/17: Wed-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron, 773409-4125, atcweb.org, $48-$58.

DANCE Giordano Dance Chicago R Giordano Dance Chicago closes out the Auditorium Theatre’s Made in

Chicago dance series. Sat 6/11, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, auditoriumtheatre.org, $28-$68.

COMEDY

Felonious Munk Nightly Show correspondent Felonious Munk is moving to New York full-time, but before he does, Dave Helem hosts this good-bye show with special guests dropping in to bid the comic adieu. BYOB. Fri 6/10, 8 PM, the Silver Room, 1442 N. Milwaukee, 773-278-7130, thesilverroom.com, $5 suggested donation. Sasheer Zamata Stand-up from the Saturday Night Live cast member. Sat 6/11, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, lh-st.com, $20.

VISUAL ARTS Driehaus Museum “Chicago’s Leading Ladies,” Chicago historian Sally Sexton Kalmbach lectures on the numerous achievements and intriguing lives of the city’s entrepreneurial women. Tue 6/14, 4 and 6 PM. $15. 40 E. Erie. Museum of Contemporary Art Join the Chicago Young Friends of the Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundation for a private screening of the latest Paul Dalio-directed romance, Touched With Fire. A cocktail hour with hors d’oeuvres precedes, and a panel discussion featuring author Kay Redﬁeld Jamison (Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament) follows. Thu 6/9, 5:30 PM, $100. 21Minus, celebrate 25 artists from ages 15-19 with an afternoon of art installations, performances, and workshops. Sat 6/11, 1-6 PM, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military.

LIT

Mel Brooks Famed comedian and R ﬁlmmaker Mel Brooks presents a screening of his classic comedy Blazing Saddles and discusses the making of the production. Sun 6/12, 3 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $78.50-$93.50.

Ilana Manaster ò ELENA CAÑIZARES

Ilana Manaster The author reads from and discusses her debut novel, Doreen, a modern retelling of

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thu 6/9, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773-235-2523, citylitbooks. com.

Mortiﬁed Participants—including the Promontory’s own Jake Austen and Eric Nix—share their embarrassing childhood diaries, letters, and poems. Sat 6/11, 7 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave West, 312-801-2100, getmortiﬁed.com, $23, $20 in advance.

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Prologue, a literary cocktail R party The 826CHI Associate Board hosts its annual cocktail party

fund-raiser. The evening includes hors d’oeuvres, an open bar, a raﬄe, and special guest Peter Sagal (Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!). Fri 6/10, 7 PM, Parliament, 324 W. Chicago, prologue. 826chi.org, $85.

Andi Zeisler The cofounder and R editorial director of Bitch Media, discusses the evolution of feminism in

pop culture in her latest book, We Were Feminists Once. She’ll be joined in conversation by local author and blogger Veronica Arreola. Thu 6/9, 7:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenﬁrst. com.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Eva Hesse Marcie Begleiter R directed this warm documentary about the short, extraordinary life of the

title artist, who died at age 34 of a brain tumor. Born in 1936, Hesse started as a painter inﬂuenced by abstract expressionism but ended up as a sculptor whose work helped establish postminimalism in the 60s. Her great talent was to make synthetic materials feel organic; cold, geometric forms appear personal, even sensual. Begleiter incorporates reminiscences by close friends, archival footage, and readings of diary entries and letters (delivered by actress Selma Blair) for an overview that should be instructive and inspiring to younger audiences, particularly aspiring artists. —DMITRY SAMAROV 105 min. Producer Karen Shapiro attends the screening. Fri 6/10, 2 and 7:45 PM; Sat 6/11, 3 PM; Sun 6/12, 4:45 PM; Mon 6/13, 8:15 PM; Tue 6/14, 7:45 PM; Wed 6/15, 6 PM; and Thu 6/16, 6 and 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news at chicagoreader.com/ food.

The Idol Oscar-nominated R director Hany Abu-Assad (Omar, Paradise Now) depicts the true story of

Mohammed Assaf (Tawfeek Barhom), a Palestinian pop singer known for winning the second season of the megahit Arabic television show Arab Idol; as µ

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA B the only contestant from Gaza, Assaf risked his life to cross the border into Egypt to audition. The script, cowritten by Abu-Assad and Sameh Zoabi, deftly connects Assaf’s journey to the struggle and perseverance of his people—his belief and commitment would go on to inspire millions. Beautifully shot, and with a powerful performance from Barhom, this is a biopic at its best. In Arabic with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 100 min. Fri 6/10, 4:45 and 9:45 PM; Sat 6/11-Sun 6/12, 11:30 AM, 4:45, and 9:45 PM; and Mon 6/13-Thu 6/16, 4:45 and 9:45 PM. Music Box A Monster With a Thousand Heads If a health insurance company unfairly denied coverage to a patient who needed it, it’d be easy to empathize with someone who decided to exact revenge on his behalf. In Rodrigo Plá’s thriller, a woman (Jana Raluy) does just that, gradually confronting each person in the chain of command of the insurance company that refuses to assist her dying husband. While some of the plot points in this Mexican drama strain logic, there’s an undeniable emotional truth to every step the woman takes; the icy, formal cinematography assists by accentuating her helplessness against a faceless bureaucracy. By the time she realizes all she has done is for naught, the executives and their employees are already hard at work erasing any trace of her. In Spanish with subtitles. —DMITRY SAMAROV 75 min. Fri 6/10, 6 PM; Sat 6/11, 7:45 PM; Sun 6/12, 5 PM; Mon 6/13, 6 PM; Tue 6/14, 8 PM; Wed 6/15, 8 PM; and Thu 6/16, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

CHICAGO FLAGSHIP STORES 5 6 E A S T WA LT O N S T R E E T 3 1 2 - 2 0 2 -7 9 0 0 6 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping This cameo-stuffed mockumentary tries to be the next Zoolander, but it’s more of a vanity project for Andy Samberg and his cohorts in the comedy trio the Lonely Island (aka Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, who codirect; all three wrote the script and act in the film). Samberg plays Conner4Real, a narcissistic rapper-singer who split from his successful boy band to become an even more successful solo artist. The fake documentary crew follows the pop star and his entourage (played by Tim Meadows and Sarah Silverman, among others) as they promote a poorly received album and embark on a European tour supported and threatened by the opening act, a provocative rapper (Chris Redd). There are jabs at EDM, TMZ, and the Grammys, but half of the jokes are just celebrities popping in to mutter a line or two. It quickly becomes evident that this expensive-looking feature is an overextended Saturday Night Live digital short that would have worked better on the small screen. —LEAH PICKETT

The Idol 86 min. City North 14, River East 21, Showplace Icon, Webster Place Presenting Princess Shaw Chicago-born singer-composer Samantha Montgomery, aka Princess Shaw, seeks personal and artistic validation in this aﬀecting documentary. When she’s not working at a New Orleans nursing home, Montgomery attends local open mike events and uploads her a cappella performances to YouTube. Unbeknownst to her, she ﬁnds a fan in Israeli musician and video artist Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, who mixes her renditions with instrumentals from other YouTube contributors and gets her noticed by a wider audience. Montgomery’s music is informed by her hardships—childhood abuse, poverty, losing a lover—and as her emotional struggles continue the movie starts to straggle. Ido Haar directed. In English and subtitled Hebrew. —ANDREA GRONVALL 80 min. Landmark’s Century Centre The Uncondemned During R the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 800,000 people—

mostly Tutsis—were massacred in just 100 days by the Hutus (the majority ethnic group). Three years later a United Nations-backed international tribunal in Tanzania sought the ﬁrst-ever conviction of genocide as a legally deﬁned crime when they tried Jean-Paul Akayesu for atrocities he condoned or perpetrated while he was the mayor of Taba, a Rwandan commune. In their eye-opening documentary, directors Nick Louvel and Michele Mitchell reveal how the young, idealistic prosecutors, already overextended, uncovered evidence

Unlocking the Cage

of the systematic violation, torture, mutilation, and enslavement of women in Taba; they soon after amended their case to add rape to the list of Akayesu’s crimes against humanity. Interviewees include three resolute female survivors of the ethnic cleansing, who testiﬁed at great risk. In English and subtitled French and Kinyarwanda. —ANDREA GRONVALL 81 min. Mon 6/13, 6 PM. Associate producer Schatzi Throckmorton will appear at the screening. Gene Siskel Film Center Unlocking the Cage If a R corporation is a person, why isn’t a chimpanzee? That question

and many related ones about consciousness, autonomy, and personhood are at the heart of this thought-provoking documentary. Directors Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room) follow Steven Wise and his Nonhuman Rights Project through a series of legal proceedings and on visits to petting zoos, wildlife sanctuaries, and other places where highly intelligent animals are housed; numerous examples of animals demonstrating communication skills, showing empathy, and acting out of grief make for compelling arguments. What constitutes self-determination and what responsibility humans have toward other sentient beings can’t be answered by a single ﬁlm, but this is nevertheless a valuable contribution to an ongoing and still shifting conversation. —DMITRY SAMAROV 91 min. Fri 6/10, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 6/11, 7:45 PM; Sun 6/12, 3 PM; Mon 6/13, 7:30 PM; Tue 6/14, 6 PM; Wed 6/15, 8 PM; and Thu 6/16, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center v

FAQ & U P DAT E S - C H I C AG O PA R K S F O U N DAT I O N . O R G

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE

“No amount of talking will prepare you for the moment you see your partner having sex with another person,” Beckett says. ò DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

OUR MOST READ ARTICLES LAST WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM IN ASCENDING ORDER: What the Obama administration’s transgender policy means for bathroom bills in Illinois —NICO LANG

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

A Chicago swinger offers advice for starting nonmonogamous relationships —ANNE FORD

Street View

Curl up and dye

WARDROBE STYLIST AND image consultant Elizabeth Margulis is proud of her nickname, “Big Hair Big City”—which comes from her fashion blog Big Hair and the Big City—but she hasn’t always embraced her lavish curls. “My relationship with my hair started oﬀ bumpy. In school I was mercilessly teased,” she says. “I started to straighten my hair and tried to make it all sorts of ‘normal.’” In her junior year, Margulis had an epiphany. “I gave up and let my curls run free. I was surprised at how making my hair a staple of my wardrobe and my personality improved my self-esteem and curated my image,” she says. “Now it’s all about the bigger, the better!” To see more of Margulis’s looks, follow her on Instagram at @bighairbigcity. —ISA GIALLORENZO

IPRA’s video vault is a horror show of Chicago Police Department shootings, Taser use, and physical altercations —JAKE MALOOLEY

Gathering storms— in Chicago and America —MICHAEL MINER

Why won’t Mayor Rahm grant Alderman Sue Garza unpaid leave from CPS? —BEN JORAVSKY

Diameters of circles are proportional to the number of page views received.

Chicagoans

The swinger hip coach, Cooper S. Beckett, 38; relationship podcaster, author, and pegging enthusiast I WENT TO CATHOLIC school until I was in sixth grade, and they really didn’t get into sex much, but I do remember them taking the time to say if you masturbate, you go to hell. Thankfully, I transferred to public school, where I didn’t get good sex education, but at least they weren’t threatening me with damnation. Just STDs. I got married at 23. Once we decided not to have kids, that led to “What do we do now?” We both wanted to have sex with other people, but we didn’t think there was a way to do that that didn’t involve cheating. As a joke, we said, “Well, there’s always swinging,” and that joke became our reality for four years. What nonmonogamy has given me is the acceptance of who I am. I was always so worried about the fact that I wanted to have sex with other people, because I was told that if I was happy in my relationship, I wouldn’t want to do that. But I think that’s a lie. Look at the number of people who fantasize about other people, the number of people who cheat on their partners. Now, I don’t believe for a moment that everybody should be in an open relationship. The point is, I didn’t know I had a choice. Swinging sort of muted our problems for a while, but nonmonogamy is not a ﬁxer, so ultimately

they came back, and we recognized that we were better off not married. Swinging gave us four years that we wouldn’t have had otherwise, and I consider that a big win. Even though our relationship didn’t survive, swinging is who I am now. It’s not that having sex with people is the saving point. It’s the change in perspective that has made a source of guilt and shame OK. There is definitely a subset of swinging that’s about the anonymous quick fuck, but generally swinging has evolved into a community development engine. Because of the Internet, people can meet other people like themselves, and when they do that, the temptation is to come together. What I see in swinging is people desperate to ﬁnd people like themselves, and desperate to be told they’re normal, and if not normal, at least that there are others who do the same thing. I recently started doing coaching for people in nonmonogamous

relationships. A lot of newbies try to work through every possible scenario instead of actually doing anything. No amount of talking will prepare you for the moment you actually see your partner having sex with another person, and that is a point you need to get to, because that will determine whether swinging is something you can actually do. So a number of my coaching sessions have been about, “OK, how do we get you into a ﬁrst experience?” Once they’ve been in the lifestyle a little while, they tend to be lifers. Why do I include “pegging enthusiast” in my brand? Because it shows I’m willing to put myself out there as saying, “Look, I tried a bunch of things, I fucked up all over the place, this is what works for me. I tried something that society tells me I’m not supposed to do, and I love it.” You never know when you’re going to encounter that thing that defines your happiness. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

Ñ Keep up to date on the go at chicagoreader.com/agenda.

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 9

FRIDAY 10

SATURDAY 11

SUNDAY 12

MONDAY 13

TUESDAY 14

WEDNESDAY 15

* Ac tivate: Hear The Chicago Loop Alliance hosts Activate: Hear, a “silent” disco during which guests listen to DJ sets from DJ IMGRNT, White Mystery, and Khallee. RSVP to this free event in advance for a complimentary drink ticket. 5 PM, Sullivan Center Alley, Monroe between State and Wabash, loopchicago.com/activate. F

^ M id sommar fest Andersonville celebrates the 51st year of its annual summer festival. The weekend features live music, vendors from all over the midwest, plenty of food and booze, and activities to keep the kids entertained. 6/10-6/12: Fri 5-10 PM, Sat and Sun 11 AM-10 PM, 5356 N. Clark, andersonville. org, $10 suggested donation.

M A Prairie Home Companion Head over to Ravinia’s pavilion as Garrison Keillor hosts the ﬁnal live broadcast of his popular radio show from the festival. 4:45 PM, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay & Lake Cook, Highland Park, ravinia.org, $10-$65.

× Pilsen Fo od Truck Festival This festival features more than 20 local food trucks in one place—Da Lobsta, Pierogi Wagon, and Tamale Spaceship among them. Sat 6/11-Sun 6/12: 10 AM-11 PM, 18th and Allport, pilsenfoodtrucksocial.com, $5 suggested donation, $20 sampler tickets available.

| Eddie Huang Celebrity chef Eddie Huang discusses his latest book, Double Cup Love, the story of his search for his Chinese roots. All tickets include a copy of the book. 7 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, chopshopchi. com, $34.

E Chicago Af rican D iaspora Film Festival This festival celebrates the black experience with independent features, animations, and shorts from around the world, including the documentary Invisible Heroes and the drama Stand Down Soldier. 6/10-6/16, Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, nyadiﬀ.org, $8-$15.

¸ Science Night As part of its LookOut summer series, Steppenwolf Theatre hosts an interactive game show that brings the experiences, successes, and failures of scientists to a live audience. 8 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, thedilettantes.org, $10.

8 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

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JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

Read Ben Joravsky’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

A Hyde Park man named Chester appears in one of Airbnb’s ads attacking the mayor. ò THE INTERNET ASSOCIATION

POLITICS

How to rent friends and inﬂuence people Airbnb and a former mayoral ally team up against Rahm. By BEN JORAVSKY

t around the same time that Alderman Ameya Pawar was blasting Governor Bruce Rauner last week, former alderman Will Burns was lighting into Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Well, not Burns directly, but Airbnb—the company he works for. The point is, you effectively had one former mayoral ally undercutting the efforts of a current ally, who was trying to make the mayor look good in his ﬁght with Rauner. If you’re confused, I don’t blame you. It’s always hard to keep up with the shifting alliances in this town. A little background might help. In my mind, Pawar and Burns will always be linked as the smart guys Rahm turned to in the ﬁrst years of his reign, when he needed a surrogate to offer a little progressive spin on his policies. As such, I had many conversations with Pawar and Burns that went a little like this: Me: Why are you pimping for this schmuck? Them: What you don’t understand is, if you want stuff for your ward, you got to play the game. Pawar is still at it, more or less. On Thursday he released a statement in which he blasted

10 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

Rauner as a “terrible person.” This statement came a few days after the mayor ripped Rauner—his old business partner and wine-drinking pal—for vetoing his police- and ﬁre-pension bill. Pawar tells me there was nothing choreographed about his comments. It’s just a coincidence that he delivered them on the same day other Emanuel allies—Alderman Howard Brookins and CPS official Janice Jackson— were also ripping into the governor. OK, Alderman. And sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, as Mr. Freud once said. Pawar says he was set off by Rauner’s comments—the governor blasted house and senate Democrats, accusing them of “competing” to see “who can spend more to bail out Chicago with . . . tax dollars from southern Illinois and central Illinois,” the parts of the state full of “hardworking families” who “pay their taxes,” according to the governor. As if Chicagoans aren’t hardworking and don’t pay their taxes. Yes, Alderman Pawar, I share your outrage—Rauner really is a royal ass. But it’s not as though Mayor Rahm had no hand in his creation. In some ways, Rahm is Dr. Frankenstein and Rauner is his monster. Back in the early

days of the mayor’s tenure—when he was trying to position himself as the kind of Democrat that Republicans could work with—Rahm put Rauner on his transition team, giving him the credibility to run as a bipartisan businessman who could save our state. That was what Rauner promised, remember? Noticeably absent from the Rauner-blasting chorus was Burns, who might have been leading it had he not stepped down in February. During his stint as Fourth Ward alderman, Burns was one of Emanuel’s closest allies. In the last mayoral race Burns oversaw Emanuel’s campaign in three south-side wards. And Emanuel rewarded Burns for his loyalty by putting him in charge of the City Council’s education committee, where he dutifully bottled up proposals that the mayor didn’t want adopted. But things have changed since Burns stepped down as alderman to take a job as director of midwest policy for Airbnb. Soon thereafter, Airbnb began negotiations with the city over an ordinance that would regulate the home-sharing industry. Residents in the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park—the mayor’s political base—called for restricting the number of units Airbnb can rent in the city. Naturally, Airbnb wasn’t a fan of that idea. So the mayor had to choose between the company that employed Burns, his old ally, and the wards that gave him roughly 80 percent of their vote. As Airbnb sees it, the mayor’s sided with the Gold Coast with his ordinance, which is set to come for a council vote later this month. In response, the company counterattacked. In an attempt to rally a majority of aldermen against the mayor—good luck with that—the Internet Association, a trade group of companies including Amazon, Facebook, and Google, unleashed a series of radio spots and TV commercials blasting Mayor Rahm on behalf of Airbnb. Let me tell you, as a guy who was bashing mayors long before it was fashionable, this is pretty good stuff. The radio spot goes like this: “Do you think wealthy special interests downtown deserve another sweetheart deal from the city?” Sounds like one of my privatization stories. “They are pushing the mayor’s office to pass a special law at the expense of people in our neighborhoods.” Or one of my TIF stories. “Those downtown special interests want to make it really hard for people in our neighborhoods to rent out their homes for short

periods of time.” As though the only reason Airbnb’s in business is to look out for the little people. “What we need is a revolution of the proletariat!” Oops. That may have been an e-mail I recently got from one of my friends. My bad. Here’s the real ending: “Tell your alderman and the mayor not to put the special interests downtown ahead of our neighborhoods.” The company is also running two TV commercials, with more to follow. My favorite stars a cool cat named Chester. He’s a jazz guitarist who also works as a substitute teacher and high school wrestling coach for CPS. As Chester tells the story, the mayor’s ordinance would force him to give up renting his apartment, and thus cut him off from the cash he needs to stay in Chicago.

If Chuy Garcia had had been able to saturate the airwaves like Airbnb, he might be mayor today. “If he’s the mayor, he should be the mayor of every street corner all over the city,” Chester says. “I would say to Mayor Emanuel, ‘Leave the little guy alone.’” Great line. Wish I’d thought of it. Burns has no comment on the ads other than to remind me that city law prohibits him from having anything to do with lobbying the council or the mayor for a year after leaving office. The mayor’s spokesman has slammed the commercials as unfair and counterproductive. Coming at a time when the mayor’s trying to depict himself as the friend of Chicago who’s standing up to Rauner, the commercials hit him where he’s most vulnerable—they make him look like a tool of rich guys who doesn’t give a shit about ordinary Chicagoans and remind people why he’s known as Mayor 1 Percent. Hell, if Chuy Garcia had been able to saturate the airwaves with a similar message, he might be mayor today. You know, it’d be interesting to see how Chuy would deal with Rauner’s lunacy. v

v @joravben

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JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE Chicago's high rate of cycling fatalities complicates the helmet debate. ò DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

TRANSPORTATION

Always use protection?

Some bike advocates say it’s time to shift from promoting helmets to preventing crashes. By JOHN GREENFIELD

he bike helmet debate stirs strong emotions. Many of us have heard stories of people who suffered traumatic brain injuries after being struck by a motorist while biking without a helmet. For example, in December 2012, Justin Carver, a friend of a friend of mine, was biking home from his library job in the western suburbs. As he rode through a Berwyn intersection with the light, he was struck by a teenage driver who failed to yield. Carver, who was wearing a helmet, sustained damage to his frontal lobe as well as injuries to much of the left side of his body. Although he became a father a year ago, he still uses a wheelchair and has major cognitive challenges. “I have to imagine the helmet lessened the impact,” Carver’s wife, Kim, told me shortly after the crash. “I believe that if he didn’t have his helmet on it could have been over instantly.” On the other hand, there are many people— even mainstream American bike advocates— who say helmets aren’t necessary for all kinds of riding. Gabe Klein, Chicago’s former transportation chief, caught flak last fall for being photographed for Washingtonian magazine in a D.C. bike lane, astride a Capital Bikeshare bike, bareheaded.

12 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

“I purposely don’t wear helmets now in photo shoots,” Klein said in a follow-up article. “I would never ride my fixed-gear [bicycle] in mixed traffic, my mountain bike off-road, or my racing bike without a helmet,” he continued, “but when traveling at slow speeds in bike lanes, helmetless riding is quite safe.” Denmark-based Mikael Colville-Andersen, a polarizing figure who runs the transportation consulting firm Copenhagenize as well as the influential photo blog Copenhagen Cycle Chic, takes this position several steps further. Not only is special headgear totally unnecessary for urban commuting, he argues, but helmet use sends a message that cycling is dangerous, and can discourage others from riding. He’s been known to brand the companies that sell helmets, and government and media figures who promote them, “fearmongers.” Of course, it’s easy for Colville-Andersen to argue that helmets are superfluous when he lives in a city where bicycle infrastructure is first-rate, more than a third of all trips are made by bike, the rate of cycling injuries and fatalities is extremely low, and helmet use is rare. The question of whether helmets are necessary for everyday commuting is far more complex in a city like Chicago. Here, less than 2 percent of trips to work are made by bicycle, protected bike lanes are still fairly uncommon, and we have an epidemic of aggressive and

distracted driving, resulting in comparatively high injury and fatality rates. Between 2009 and 2013, an average of about six bicyclists a year were struck and killed by drivers in Chicago, according to Illinois Department of Transportation data. (Judging from news reports, there have been no deadly bike crashes so far this year, but bike fatalities are most common during the summer and fall, according to the IDOT ﬁgures.) Helmet use “dramatically reduces the risk of head injury in the event of a crash while bicycling,” CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey says via e-mail. He points to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that cyclists wearing helmets in a crash have a 69 percent reduction in the risk of head injury and a 75 percent reduction in the risk of brain injury. However, a 2011 meta-analysis of all published studies on the effectiveness of bike helmets by the scientific journal Accident Analysis & Prevention found that helmets only reduce the risk of head injuries by 25 to 55 percent. Moreover, the report stated, because helmets create a greater risk of neck injuries, the net reduction in head and neck injuries is lower still. Claffey says that the department encourages people to use helmets when using the Divvy bike-share system, noting that annual members receive a discount on helmets at participating bike shops. However, helmet use is rare among U.S. bike-share users, and Seattle’s mandatory helmet law has been blamed for the low ridership levels in that city’s Pronto Cycle Share. Still, a study released in March by the Mineta Transportation Institute found that there have been zero fatalities since the first American bike share debuted in Tulsa in 2007. This safety record has been credited to the fact that the bikes are slow, stable, and have built-in generator lights, and because users are often new to urban cycling, and therefore cautious. The lack of helmets may even make bike-share safer by further discouraging risk-taking behavior. Active Transportation Alliance director Ron Burke says that while the advocacy group doesn’t support helmet laws like Seattle’s, it strongly encourages helmet use. “Obviously helmets prevent and reduce the severity of head injuries,” he says. “Just as important as helmet use is having laws and infrastructure that make our streets safer for cyclists from the get-go.”

CDOT installed 103 miles of buffered and protected bike lanes within the first four and a half years of the Emanuel administration. The city also recently raised the fine for “dooring” a cyclist from $500 to $1,000. Both of these initiatives are steps in the right direction toward preventing crashes. Of Chicago advocates, Randy Neufeld, the founding director of Active Trans, who now runs the SRAM Cycling Fund, may have the best understanding of why northern-European cycling is so safe. The fund provides grants for cycling infrastructure projects in North America, Europe, and Taiwan, so Neufeld has traveled to many countries to check out best practices. Neufeld says the reasons why cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam have such good safety records is threefold: bicyclists are never forced to share the road with fast-moving car traffic; all citizens receive bike-safety education at a young age; and local laws always hold the driver responsible in a crash with a cyclist, unless it can be proven the bike rider was at fault. “My attitude towards helmets is the same as the European one,” Neufeld says. “You wear a helmet when you’re doing something dangerous. You wear a helmet for football or hockey, but you don’t for basketball or soccer. That’s not to say that head injuries never occur in soccer or basketball, but there’s a tradeoff between safety and things like field of vision, comfort, and enjoyment.” Similarly, he argues, riskier types of biking call for helmet use, while safer types of biking don’t require it. While Burke says he wore a bike helmet when he rode in Copenhagen a few years ago, Neufeld says he never wears a helmet while riding in northern-European cities “because it’s not dangerous,” and he usually doesn’t wear one while running short errands in his neighborhood. But he does strap one on if he’s commuting downtown. Neufeld adds that he’s fully supportive of people making their own choices about what’s safe. However, he feels it’s important for Americans to realize that helmets are not a panacea, and important to continue to push for safety measures that prevent crashes, not just mitigate their effects. “My goal is to make Chicago a place where, someday, you won’t need to wear a bike helmet,” he says. v

John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago. v @greenfieldjohn

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JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

CITY LIFE John Bambenek at a Chicago Tea Party Fourth of July rally in 2009. ò STEVE RHODES/FLICKR

HIGHER EDUCATION

The budget isn’t the only thing hung up in Springﬁeld

A contentious appointment to the State Board of Ed pits Rauner against Illinois’s academics. By DEANNA ISAACS

ou’ve got to give Governor Bruce Rauner this: some parts of his job are complicated. Like negotiating a budget in a political war zone. But an appointment to the only faculty seat on the 16-member Illinois Board of Higher Education? I didn’t expect that to be one of them. And not just because the words “faculty seat” and “Illinois Board of Higher Education” (unlike, say, “no budget” and “your money”) are enough to put most of us into an immediate, deep sleep. Faced with the need to make this appointment, as he was last fall, all the governor had to do was follow the standard procedure and pick one of the two candidates already researched and vetted for him by the board’s very own Faculty Advisory Council. The council is made up of 36 representatives from every kind of postsecondary educational institution in the state, so they’ve got a

pretty good handle on who would be right for the job. Or, if he wanted to have a go at it on his own, Rauner could’ve selected any regular faculty member at any of Illinois’s colleges or universities. Thousands of them would’ve qualiﬁed. It should have been a piece of cake. But, like everything else in Springfield this year, this appointment wound up stalled in a committee, with the governor looking like he’s waving a fat middle ﬁnger in the face of anybody who cares. Instead of appointing a full-time, tenure-track or tenured professor, Rauner picked a businessman whose academic experience consists of a one-course adjunct gig. DePaul University professor Marie Ann Donovan, who chairs the board’s Faculty Advisory Council, puts it this way: the governor didn’t do his homework.

14 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

“And when my students don’t do their homework, their grade suffers,” Donovan says. “On this one, it’s an F—failed.” The board is a 16-member body responsible for creating and interpreting the policies that control every higher education institution in the state (except for community colleges, which have their own board). Members are mostly appointed by the governor, and most serve six-year terms. By law, one of those board seats is set aside for “a faculty member at an Illinois public university.” The person holding it is meant to represent all of his or her academic colleagues across the state. When that seat opens up, Donovan says, it’s the job of the Faculty Advisory Council to suggest a replacement. So, last October, the council sent Rauner two possible candidates— both experienced members of the FAC—and waited for a response. Winter came and went, but “we never heard anything,” Donovan says. Then, on April 15, they were surprised by an e-mail announcing that an appointment had been made. Rauner had selected John Bambenek, a cybersecurity consultant and former Republican candidate for the state senate, who teaches one computer course a year on the University of Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus. According to the governor’s announcement, “Bambenek’s experiences as a lecturer at the University of Illinois and as a small business owner will bring a unique perspective to the board.” Donovan says it was unique, all right. “We started looking into him, and found he’s taught one course, three or four times. And that’s it. He didn’t even have a master’s degree.” He did, however, have a 2007 appearance on the Daily Show to his credit, putting to rest the mythic cyberthreat of a daylight-savingsinduced “Aclockalypse Now.”

“There is no conceivable scenario in which Mr. Bambenek would be chosen as a representative of the faculty of this campus, let alone as a representative of all the university faculty in this state.” —UIUC senate

The appointment set off alarm bells at the American Association of University Professors. John K. Wilson, writing on its Academe blog, described Bambenek as “a dutiful right-winger” with “a disturbing record of seeking to suppress freedom of speech,” including an attempt “to get the federal government to shut down free-wheeling opinions on the liberal website Daily Kos” by ﬁling a Federal Election Commission complaint accusing it of being a political committee rather than a blog. Wilson’s post ran under this provocative headline: “Gov. Rauner Appoints a Right-Wing Crackpot to Represent Faculty on the Illinois Board of Higher Ed.” Bambenek, reached by phone last week, says he’s not going to address those complaints, most of which are “misrepresentations” of things he wrote “over a decade ago for the college paper.” As for the claim that he’s opposed to free speech, he offers this: “I ran as a Rand Paul delegate in the primary.” Make of that what you will. Donovan doesn’t want to politicize the issue, and says it’s not about Bambenek personally. She’s focused on what she says is “the heart of the matter” regarding this particular seat: the fact that, as she wrote in a May 12 letter of “shock and dismay” to the Senate Executive Appointments Committee, Bambenek “has never worked as a full-time faculty member.” That point is seconded in a May 20 letter to the same committee from the UIUC senate, which points out that “by the terms of the University of Illinois Statutes, he would not even qualify as a member of the ‘Faculty.’” The UIUC senate letter continues: “There is no conceivable scenario in which Mr. Bambenek would be chosen as a representative of the faculty of this campus, let alone as a representative of all the university faculty in this state.” The appointment awaits senate conﬁrmation. And the state awaits a budget. v

v @DeannaIsaacs

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please recycle this paper JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

At Proﬁles Theatre the drama— and — is real A promotional photo from Proﬁles’s 2003 production of Blackbird. Darrell W. Cox starred as a Gulf War veteran spending Christmas with his girlfriend, a heroin-addicted former stripper. ò PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: “WAYNE KARL”

16 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

For more than 20 years, actors and crew members stayed silent about mistreatment they suffered at the acclaimed storefront theater. Now theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re speaking up, hoping to protect workers in non-Equity theaters across the country. By AIMEE LEVITT AND CHRISTOPHER PIATT

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

ooking back, Profiles Theatre’s 2010 production of Killer Joe, Tracy Letts’s black comedy about an insurance scam in a Texas trailer park that goes terribly wrong, was probably the high point of the company’s history. During its 20 years of existence, Profiles had developed a reputation as one of Chicago’s better non-Equity theaters, regularly producing dark and edgy new work, but Killer Joe was special. For months, audiences filled the intimate 50-seat storefront in Buena Park. The run was extended, and then extended again, and finally Profiles uprooted the whole production and moved it to the Royal George in Lincoln Park, right across the street from Steppenwolf, the epitome of great and gritty Chicago storefront theater. The run at the Royal George coincided with the production of William Friedkin’s film adaptation and the national tour of Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County, and Hollywood people began coming to the theater too, to see how it was done. Reviews began to appear in the national press, and there was even talk of taking the production to New York. Critics praised the show for its energy and intelligence. Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss called it a “knockem-dead revival . . . performed with the sort of gonzo explosiveness so emblematic of ‘the Chicago style.’ ” The Tribune’s Chris Jones was less enthusiastic, but wrote that the director, Steppenwolf veteran Rick

Snyder, “helps the play step away from slick sensationalism and move closer to social commentary.” The five actors were lauded for their performances, particularly Somer Benson as Sharla, the scheming wife; Claire Wellin as Dottie, her childlike stepdaughter; and Darrell W. Cox as the title character, a Dallas cop who moonlights as a killer for hire. “A better Killer Joe is hard to imagine,” Tony Adler wrote in his otherwise tepid review in the Reader. “With a deep voice that can soothe even as it brooks no argument, Cox is funny, menacing, sexy, outright scary, and sometimes disconcertingly wise.” Profiles’s motto is “whatever the truth requires.” Onstage, the cast was stripped naked, literally and emotionally, especially in the knock-down fight at the very end. “This was certainly a show that took people by storm, and you kind of get on that train, and you just go with it,” Benson says now. “And then you think of the work you’re doing, ‘This is what it requires. This is whatever the truth requires. This is what is required of me to do this.’” In her review, Weiss noted the bruises on the actors’ arms. “At one point, a female cast member is being brutally choked, then forced to give a makeshift blow job,” wrote the Chicago theater blogger the Fourth Walsh. “It’s vicious and real!” The reason Killer Joe felt so vicious and so real was because it was. All of it: the choking, the bruises, the deep-throating of a chicken leg, the body slam into the refrigerator, Cox’s groping of Wellin through her dress as Joe attempts to seduce Dottie, Cox’s semierection at the beginning of Act II after Joe succeeds. “It was real,” says Darcy McGill, the costume designer, “because there was a psychopath onstage.” In the play, members of the Smith family think they’re paying Killer Joe to do a job—to kill Ansel Smith’s first wife so they can collect the insurance money—but it quickly becomes clear that Joe is running the show. And, as Proﬁles’s production of Killer Joe progressed, it began to seem to members of the cast and crew that the man who played Killer Joe was doing the same, breaking down all the systems that were in-

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The cast of Killer Joe. From left: Cox, Howie Johnson, Claire Wellin, Somer Benson, and Kevin Bigley. "It's vicious and real!" one blogger wrote of the production. ò SUN-TIMES PRINT ARCHIVE

tended to keep the play and reality separate. “I remember feeling like Darrell was controlling the room, that Darrell controlled the rehearsals, that Darrell really was like the driving force of everything,” remembers MaryEllen Rieck, the stage manager. Early in the rehearsal process, Rick Gilbert and David Bareford of R&D Choreography were brought in to work out ways to make it appear as though Cox was beating the crap out of Benson and Kevin Bigley, who played the Smith son, Chris, in the climactic final scene, without actually hurting them. Gilbert and Bareford would be nominated for a Jeff Award for their work on Killer Joe. But by the time the play opened, after Gilbert and Bareford had left the rehearsal room, much of that choreography had been tweaked

beyond recognition without the choreographers’ knowledge. “I didn’t see any indication of the kinds of things that I later found out were going on,” Gilbert says now. According to Rieck, Cox told the cast that since the theater was so small, the violence needed to be palpable. As stage manager, Rieck’s job was to serve as the liaison between the director and the cast and crew and keep everything running smoothly. Whenever she approached Snyder, the director, with questions about the fight choreography, she says, “I just kind of got treated like I was being too involved or whatever, or I was overstepping my bounds.” Snyder declined to comment for this story. Throughout the eight-month run of the show, actors Benson and Bigley were covered in bruises.

During one performance, Cox-as-Joe slammed Bigley-as-Chris into the on-set refrigerator so hard that the refrigerator smashed into the back wall of the set and cracked it. Bigley was just 21, right out of college. “He said his scene partner [Cox] wanted to keep it real,” says Jonathan Berry, who was then directing a show at Steppenwolf for which Bigley was an understudy. “He didn’t feel like he could insist that they stick to the ﬁght choreography. He thought he was supposed to keep it real and make it feel real.” Bigley did not respond to an e-mailed interview request. But in the play, it’s Sharla whom Joe singles out for violent humiliation and degradation. And it was Benson who took the brunt of the violence onstage. The assistant stage manager,

Corey Weinberg, remembers one particular fight that looked and sounded too real to be choreographed. “It was [Benson] getting thrown to the ground,” he says. “And you heard that crack, and it sounded like thunder sticks at a baseball game being clapped together. And you could tell those whimpers that she was making, those were real.” Another night, Cox squeezed Benson’s throat so hard, she says she began to see specks. She tried to squeeze his thigh and say the safe word they’d agreed upon to let him know he was hurting her, but he didn’t respond to the signal and held her throat so tightly she couldn’t make a sound. After every performance, Weinberg had ice packs ready for Benson. She would sit outside the dressing room, still in her costume, too ex-

hausted and overwhelmed to move or speak. Sometimes she would sob uncontrollably. “I often just would say, ‘Are you OK?’ ” remembers her friend and costar Claire Wellin. “I would always address her, and address it, but she often was so upset that she couldn’t really speak. She couldn’t talk about it.” “I think I was just stripped,” Benson says now. “Mentally, like, just kind of gone at some points.” Rieck and Weinberg both remember that Cox always blamed Benson for the problems with the scenes. He told her she was missing her marks, and when she told him he was hurting her, he replied that she was too sensitive and wasn’t doing the choreography correctly. She wrote him e-mails apologizing for hitting the wall wrong. She said she was worn out from working full-time and doing the play. In the pivotal scene at the end of Act I where Joe slowly seduces Dottie over a tuna casserole dinner, he persuades her to take off her jeans and baggy sweatshirt and change into a dress, to stand behind him and put her hand down his pants, and then to switch places so he can fondle her too. Like all sexual choreography, the scene was arranged so that Cox would only appear to be groping Wellin—his hand was actually around her hips and stomach, over her dress. But as the run went on, she noticed he was moving his hand lower and lower. At first she couldn’t believe it was happening. But then it got to the point, she says, where he came close to disregarding the choreography and actually touching her between her legs. For a long time, Wellin said nothing. “I would feel guilty and disgusting, maybe like I was crazy.” Finally she told Cox he was making her uncomfortable. He apologized, and it never happened again. But Wellin still felt conflicted about what had happened. “I didn’t want to believe that any of that was true,” she says, “because then I kind of felt stupid for helping be the face of the work they were doing at that theater, because it was such a small show and I was so proud of it.” Plus, there was Cox, pointing out to everyone how the house was full every

night and how well the audience responded to the violence. He dodged questions, Wellin and Benson say, by showing up at the theater only a few minutes before curtain time, too late to make any adjustments to the night’s performance. After eight months, Killer Joe finally closed. It would win three Jeff Awards: best non-Equity production, best director, and, for Cox, best actor in a principal role. Profiles hasn’t had such a triumph since. But now it was known as a place that did exciting, daring work, led by Cox, an exciting, daring actor. “Regulars at the Profiles Theatre see a pattern,” noted Chris Jones in a 2007 review of Vern Thiessen’s drama Apple. “Most shows at this long-lived storefront feature Darrell W. Cox in the lead role. He’s almost always surrounded by young women who are emotionally embroiled with his character. At least one of these young women is willing and able to remove her clothes. Nice work, one supposes, if you can get it.” This wasn’t as bothersome as one might think, Jones added, mostly because of Cox’s skill and the theater’s knack for discovering and casting talented young actresses. But something troubling was occurring behind the scenes of Killer Joe, something that was part of a long-standing pattern of abusive conditions at Profiles for nearly two decades. In extensive interviews conducted over the past year, more than 30 former Profiles cast and crew members described in disturbingly similar terms what they suffered or witnessed while working at the theater. They alleged that, since the 1990s, Cox has physically and psychologically abused many of his costars, collaborators, unpaid crew members, and acting students, some of whom also became romantically involved with Cox while under his supervision at the theater. Others in key roles in the theater, they say, did little if anything to stop it or turned a blind eye altogether. Although the source material Profiles favored was often violent and misogynistic, the quality of its shows and the critical acclaim they garnered—coupled with a culture of fear and silence that developed inside the theater— allowed bad behavior to flourish

“It was [Benson] getting thrown to the ground. And you heard that crack, and it sounded like thunder sticks at a baseball game being clapped together. And you could tell those whimpers that she was making, those were real.” —Assistant stage manager Corey Weinberg

behind the scenes, unbeknownst to audiences or the media. Fearing personal or professional retaliation, few witnesses ever came forward. Now, a group of actors, including Benson and Wellin, have decided to share their stories. In doing so, they join a burgeoning national movement to protect actors and crew members from exploitation and harassment in the workplace. Over the past two years, theater professionals have pressed their unions and other organizations, through petitions and direct appeals, to take an active stand against abuse within their community. This includes a petition against workplace harassment created by the Lilly Awards Foundation that has since been signed by more than 500 actors, tech workers, and activists. Recently, Actors’ Equity, the actors’ union, featured an article on addressing sexual harassment and provided a list of resources in Equity, the monthly magazine that goes out to its 50,000 members. While Actors’ Equity has extensive rules and codes of behavior that cover everything from auditions to closings, including procedures for filing official complaints, these safeguards aren’t available to individuals or institutions not affiliated with the union, so-called non-Equity actors and theaters. The movement has now turned its attention to non-Equity theaters, with their relative lack of protections and safeguards. Here in Chicago, more than 700 actors and other theater professionals have joined together to form Not in Our House, a support group to deal with the aftereffects of abuse and to establish a code of conduct for non-Equity theaters. Proﬁles Theatre joined Equity in 2012, after many of the behindthe-scenes problems had occurred. Cox himself is not a member. The Reader made multiple attempts to speak directly with Cox and Profiles Theatre’s other senior company members. The theater responded, through a PR representative, with this statement: “Profiles has been part of the Chicago theatre community for almost three decades. We are very proud to have worked with thousands of J

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continued from 19 actors, directors, and crew members on many award-winning productions during that time. We take personnel issues very seriously, but we will not comment on groundless allegations.” Benson, meanwhile, still has a difﬁcult time talking about Killer Joe: “To be praised for the way it was done and what I sacriﬁced, or what I allowed myself to—how I allowed myself to be attacked, essentially, onstage. And in people’s minds, they think that this was just such a wonderful production and it was, ‘Oh, my gosh. You were—’ I still will get people who say things, and it’s like I—I cringe because I know what that cost me to do that.”

lmost nobody remembers anymore that Darrell Cox was not a founding member of Profiles Theatre. He wasn’t even cast in the first show he auditioned for, a 1990 production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Joe Jahraus, one of the company’s founders and the casting director of the play, didn’t think Cox was good enough. Cox wouldn’t appear on the Profiles stage until the company’s fourth production, Sam Shepard’s True West, where he was billed as Darrell Christopher. Jahraus was his costar; it was the first of several shows in which they would play brothers. In later years, remembers one of Cox’s former girlfriends, Cox and Jahraus liked to tell the audition story in the lobby after shows and laugh about how Jahraus failed to detect the early signs of Cox’s future greatness. (“It was the only time I’ve ever heard Darrell be self-deprecating,” she says.) By then, the theater was Cox and Jahraus’s shared enterprise. They each had the title of artistic director, though the Profiles cast and crew generally considered Jahraus Cox’s sidekick. Jahraus was the kind and quiet member of the team, while Cox was charming and boisterous. But he could easily turn menacing, using his tall, muscular frame and intense blue eyes to intimidate. Back in 1990 though, Cox was a 22-year-old actor newly arrived

from Texas, where he’d studied acting at Sam Houston State University. As far as almost everyone who knew him was concerned, Cox appeared in Chicago fully formed. After True West, he became a fixture at Profiles, though he also performed at other theaters around town, including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, TimeLine, and American Theater Company. He married an actress named Kerry Richlan who took his last name; they appeared together in several shows at Profiles. They “play so many messed-up, blue-collar couples,” Chris Jones wrote in the Tribune, “that the various roles are beginning to blend.” Like many young actors, they took odd jobs to pay the rent. She worked at a law firm while he, among other jobs, acquired a real estate license and found a gig as an assistant building manager at an apartment high-rise in the Gold Coast. Richlan declined to speak to the Reader for this story. By 1999, Profiles was struggling. The company consisted of just the Coxes and Jahraus. In order to make it appear bigger and more substantial than it was, and to hide the fact that Cox and Jahraus were directing the shows in which they appeared, they invented several people to help them out, say former ensemble members. This isn’t an accepted practice in the theater the way it sometimes is in the movies. Nonetheless, at Profiles, Wayne Karl, graphic artist and set and lighting designer (his name was a combination of Cox and Jahraus’s middle names) and Sal V. Armano, costume designer (for Salvation Army, source of many of those costumes), remain artistic associates. Director Sarah Atkins, meanwhile, was nominated for a Jeff Award for “her” work on Julie Jensen’s Stray Dogs, which became Profiles’s first big hit. These phantom company members, whose names don’t appear in any public records, were an open secret within Profiles. Cox and Jahraus didn’t even create plausible biographies for them; Sarah Atkins, for instance, was said to have previously worked in a London theater that never existed. “They had no way to know you’re going to be able to, years later, check up on it,” remembers Sara, a former girlfriend of Cox’s who was also a

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member of the company from 2000 to 2004. Sara and others asked to be identified by their first names out of fear of personal or professional retaliation. A few years later, in 2003, wounded that he was the only cast member in two successive productions not to receive good reviews, Cox decided that the press was prejudiced against him and brought the phantom Atkins back under the name Sarah Franklin to direct Snakebit by David Marshall Grant. She’d gotten married in the interim, he and Jahraus decided. “Franklin” even gave interviews to the Tribune and Chicago Arts & Entertainment via e-mail to promote the play. It was actually Cox answering the questions; the woman in the accompanying photo in Chicago Arts & Entertainment was a relative of the real Sara. A second fake female director, Carla Russell (really Cox and Jahraus) helmed the 2005 production of The Glory of Living, Rebecca Gilman’s play about an older man, played by Cox, who uses his teenage girlfriend to lure other young girls back to their motel room so he can rape and murder them. “It’s especially egregious because The Glory of Living is a play about the mistreatment and abuse of young women,” says Kelly O’Sullivan, who played Cox’s onstage teenage girlfriend. “There’s the assumption that probably there were more female voices in control in the room, that people in leadership positions were probably looking out for the best interests of the other women in the room—which doesn’t always happen. But there were no female voices of any kind of roles in power for that show.” Stray Dogs was the ﬁnal show in which Darrell and Kerry Cox performed together, and the pair would eventually divorce. She was still listed as a company member, but she was never around the theater during Proﬁles’s next production, an adap-

From top: Headshots of Kim, Somer Benson, and Sara—which they shared with the Reader and which the paper has published with their permission—show each woman as she appeared when she ﬁrst met Darrell Cox. ò COURTESY OF THE ACTORS

tation of Ben Elton’s novel Popcorn. Popcorn was Profiles’s first violent black comedy, the sort of play that would become the company’s signature and distinguish it from the many other ambitious storefront theaters in Chicago. It was also the show where Sara met Cox.

cting teachers often define the art of acting as living honestly within a set of imaginary circumstances. Cox accomplished that feat brilliantly, say those who worked with him. “When you’re watching him, you feel like you’re watching something going on in real life,” says Tyler Gray, a former company member. “You don’t feel like he’s acting. You feel like you’re seeing something that you shouldn’t be seeing.” But it also meant that the boundaries between the world of the play and the world Cox actually lived in became fuzzy. In other words, Killer Joe was not an isolated example. “I don’t think he leaves the character at any point in a show,” Benson says. Onstage and in real life, his former cohorts say, Cox wanted to be in complete control. In the theater, that meant that he was always in charge of the production, even if he wasn’t the director. Other actors had to adjust their performances to accommodate his acting choices. He required absolute devotion from his cast and crew. They were less a theater company, Cox liked to say, than a family or a commune. “He created a little bit of a cult mentality, and isolation, and disciple mind-set,” Wellin says. It’s a sentiment that’s echoed among other actors and crew members who have passed through Proﬁles. There was a sense that Cox, and Proﬁles, were special, set apart and better than every other theater in Chicago. Good acting, he would say, only came from honest, “real” people, people like them. Wellin remembers sitting alone with Cox backstage during performances of Killer Joe listening to him criticize the other cast members. “He would sort of implicate you,” she says. “He’d say, ‘Well, you know, we have some people, like, it’s hard

A scene from Proﬁles’s 2010 production of Kid Sister. The photo is credited to the ﬁctitious “Wayne Karl.” ò PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: “WAYNE KARL”

to do the work because they’re not bringing their real lives to the table. They’re not showing up, they’re not being honest. And we, you and me, it’s not like that.’ And you’re getting a compliment, and you’re 22 years old, and you’re new to this city and you really love the play, right?” As both a director and performer, Cox was exacting. The entire cast and crew could spend hours breaking apart a scene and analyzing a single line. This could be exhilarating for newcomers. It could also be frustrating. “He directed me in my first show at Profiles, my first professional show ever,” Gray remembers. “I never was able to get what he wanted right. One night he had me stay till 4:30 in the morning with another actor because we didn’t do the scene right.” “I always felt so much empathy for outside actors who would come in to work for the company, because they were initially always charmed by him and complimented,” Sara says. “And then, with a few exceptions, he would systematically break people and critique them to the point that it was hard to even do any acting onstage, because after every

show, he would let you know all the things that you did that were horrible and how you were a terrible, terrible actor and person.” Cox also blurred the lines between theater and reality in his relationships, his former girlfriends say. Often they were his girlfriends onstage too, or his wife, and those onstage relationships were not happy ones. Offstage, they say, Cox would take on the characteristics of the people he played. When he was a serial killer in Popcorn, Sara remembers, he took to carrying a baseball bat in his car. If someone pissed him off in traffic, he would grab the bat, get out of the car, and approach the other driver looking menacing. “The best time we ever had in our relationship was when he played a schizophrenic,” Sara says. “I don’t mean that as a joke. That was such a sad day when that show closed, because we actually got along very well and he was as timid as his schizophrenic character was—kind of introverted.” Sara met Cox during her callback audition for Popcorn in August 1999. She’d been asked to appear in just her bra and underpants. She was 30 and

had recently gotten divorced. It was a vulnerable time in her life, she says. Cox slowly isolated her from the other women in the cast by installing her in a separate dressing area next to his own. He told her it would be more private. “This all seemed reasonable at ﬁrst,” she says. He was charming. He seemed fascinated by her. He asked her endless questions to get to know her better. Within six months, they’d moved in together. “It just sort of happened,” Sara says. The relationship eventually turned sour, affecting both their domestic lives and their work together at Profiles. Cox was jealous and controlling, Sara says. He convinced her to destroy the blouses she wore to work because he thought they were too revealing. He would look through old photo albums with her. “You want to keep that one, hon, do you?” she remembers him asking when they came across pictures of her high school boyfriend. “You don’t want to keep that picture. You should just rip it up. If you love me, rip that up.” He insisted on being in the room whenever she talked on the phone to her family. Slowly,

Sara felt him chipping away at her personality. The tension offstage began bleeding into their work onstage. About three years into their relationship, they played a married couple in Snakebit. “We were always having these sparring matches on stage,” Sara remembers. “By then, because our personal relationship was so scary and terrible, he would come at me onstage, and I was not a formidable opponent because I was so used to not being allowed to do anything or have an opinion. So I don’t doubt that my acting was suffering because of that.” Cox thought his own acting was suffering too. Jahraus told Sara that the crease between Cox’s eyes was getting deeper because he was working so hard to pick up her slack onstage, and it made his character look mean. To solve the problem, he got Botox. And then after that, Sara says, he would tell her, “It was because of you the theater has to spend $500 every four months for me to get Botox.” Sara ﬁnally moved out of the apartment she shared with Cox in March 2004 after an argument over a cell phone she’d bought and hidden from him after he’d forbidden her to have one. During the fight, she says, he pushed her to the ground and she hurt her wrist. “That was ultimately what got me to leave,” she says now, “but that wasn’t the worst. Cutting up my shirts, tearing up my old boyfriend’s pictures—that was a lot worse to me. Being isolated from people.” Sara says that the difficulties she faced during those four years have helped her appreciate her present life more. But she no longer has any desire to act. “I don’t think I should be acting unless I really have the passion for it,” she says, “and until I have that back, there’s no point. And I don’t have it back. I think that that was taken from me.”

ve ven people who say they ha have been mistreated ad admit Darrell Cox can be a good actor and director. He knows how to inhabit a character. He gives intelligent notes. He knows how to raise the stakes of a scene and uncover nuances J

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and relationship factors that other actors haven’t noticed. So it probably seemed logical in 2002, after the success of Popcorn, when more people were interested in working at Profiles, that Cox quit his job at the apartment building and began teaching an advanced scene study class. The classes were held at the theater on Mondays or Tuesdays when there were no performances or rehearsals. But Cox knew that studying at Profiles alone wouldn’t be enough of a draw. So he asked his friend Erica Daniels, then the casting director at Steppenwolf and, therefore, a powerful person in Chicago theater, to help out. Daniels, now president of Second City Theatricals, also occasionally cast shows for Profiles, including the production of The Glory of Living directed by the fictitious “Carla Russell.” “He asked her at the very last minute because he thought that would kind of clinch the deal,” Sara remembers. “If he had her come in and do the last session and critique the scenes they’ve been working on, people would just be like, ‘Oh my God, I have to take that class because it’s Erica Daniels from Steppenwolf.’ And he was right.” Cox placed ads in PerformInk, the Chicago theater industry newspaper. Tuition was $390 for a six-week session. Daniels’s cut would be $100 per student; there were usually between ten and 12 students each session. Cox also placed ads in PerformInk for general auditions for Profiles, where actors who’d never worked at the theater before could come and be seen and be considered for future roles. At the time, though, most of Profiles’s shows had small casts filled out by members of the ensemble. So Cox would ask Sara, or someone else at the theater, to call up those aspiring actors and tell them they didn’t have any parts available for that person’s type, but Cox thought they’d be perfect for the advanced scene study class. Cox taught his own acting process. It was partially inspired by the Meisner technique, which requires an actor to respond to external circumstances (as opposed to method, where an actor relies on memories)

and partially inspired by a quote from T.S. Eliot: “A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything).” As the scene study class went on and the casts of Profiles’s productions grew larger, a few students would get roles onstage, most recently in the annual holiday production of Hellcab. And some, like Somer Benson, after taking classes for many years, eventually became part of the company. Benson was originally drawn to the classes by the promise of being seen by Daniels. At the time, she was 24, a recent graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA, living in the suburbs, and taking care of her grandfather. “I was mesmerized by [Cox] in the beginning,” she remembers. “There did seem to be this raw—this way that he would explain things that was very charismatic and seemed like he really understood what it was to be fully present, real, onstage.” Benson also noticed that Cox had a way of coaching actors through scenes by building one up at the expense of the other. She didn’t necessarily approve of the belittling, but she enjoyed the praise. “There deﬁnitely felt like this—a vibe that was, you know, mentorship but also that, again, he was building me up as this special thing.” Cox made an effort to charm newcomers. In return, many worshipped him as an actor and a mentor. He appeared to be what they needed him to be and to see them the way they wanted to be seen. He gave them important positions, like stage manager, when they were still very young, with very little professional experience. More importantly, he gave them a place to belong. Others found Cox’s demeanor unsettling, even creepy. One actress, who asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, remembers meeting him in the lobby of Profiles after a performance. He told her he was interested in having her audition for a show, although he’d never seen her act. She admits that she might have been ﬂattered if she were younger, but as a more experienced actress, she was wary. “It felt like I was in a singles bar, and

22 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

A publicity shot from Popcorn, the 1999 show that established Proﬁles's reputation as a theater that produces edgy black comedies. ò PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: SUN-TIMES PRINT ARCHIVE

not in a theater lobby,” she writes in an e-mail. “If you make me feel like I need a shower when you’re telling me how much you want to hire me at your professional theater? That’s a sign something is off.” During the run of Killer Joe, the playwright, Tracy Letts, had a party at his house to celebrate the national tour of August: Osage County. The entire Proﬁles cast was invited. For Claire Wellin, the young actress who played Dottie, the party was a turning point. “Darrell was sort of parading me around, and that was one of the experiences that I had when I was like, he’s trying to isolate me from the rest of the cast and from the rest of the people that are at this party, as if I belonged to him, and I felt just disgusted with myself for not realizing it sooner.” Cox didn’t reserve the treatment just for attractive women. He used it on men too. “He gets very close to you very quickly, in a way that isn’t quite earned,” says Hans Fleischmann, who played Cox’s brother in Neil LaBute’s In a Dark Dark House in 2008. “He throws around the word ‘love,’ he hugs you, he kisses you.

He would say things like ‘I love you,’ but he didn’t care to ask very much about me.” Fleischmann was nominated for a Jeff Award for his work in Dark Dark House. Cox was not. “It was like a switch ﬂicked,” Fleischmann remembers. Almost immediately, Fleischmann says, Cox became hostile, even onstage during performances. Fleischmann would say his line, and Cox would break character and answer, “What? Is that how you’re going to say that?” Once, Fleischmann says, Cox got physical with him onstage. “I don’t remember if it was a push or grab, but it was violent, and it was for no reason,” Fleischmann says. “It wasn’t in the script. We weren’t supposed to be ﬁghting. There was no reason other than this personal anger.” No one else in the cast or crew reacted. “The way the things are set up there,” Fleischmann says, “you are completely disarmed and no one’s got your back. They all turn a blind eye to it.” Fleischmann began to wonder if he was the one who was crazy. Benson was the assistant director of In a Dark Dark House. Years later,

she would apologize to Fleischmann for failing to speak up. But at the time she was still under Cox’s influence. After five years of taking classes, she was finally cast in a show in 2007, Things We Said Today, a collection of short plays by LaBute. She played a young woman who goes on a blind date with a man who, it’s implied, is going to kill her. Cox didn’t list her name in the program or allow her back onstage to take a curtain call, telling Benson it was “suspending the disbelief” to make the audience think she was actually dead. She says she didn’t find this odd: “I was believing anything he told me.” After Things We Said Today, Benson was formally inducted as a company member and started doing most of the theater’s administrative and organizational labor. After Killer Joe, she was paid a small nonemployee stipend for her onstage work; in fact, since she was still taking classes, she was paying Profiles. Her work at the theater took up as much time as her regular full-time job; Cox encouraged her to quit and take other jobs with more flexible hours like nannying and dog walking. In early 2008, she says, she and Cox

began sleeping together, though he told her their relationship had to remain secret. Her grandfather, the person she’d been closest to, had died, and she says Cox had driven a wedge between her and the rest of her family and friends, telling her that her mother was overbearing and controlling and that her old friends didn’t understand her. He suggested she stop going back to the suburbs to see them. She didn’t know that Cox was driving a wedge between her and the other company members as well. Cox and Jahraus didn’t involve her in major decisions. “It was like, they would say great things about her, and she was held in high regard,” says Jeremy Hersh, who joined Profiles as an intern and then became the company’s literary manager in 2009, “but you sort of feel like Darrell was creating a little bit of a sense of, oh, she’s a live wire—you don’t want to, like, piss her off. Which was just a way of undermining her and sort of gaslighting her.” Sometimes older, more experienced actors would confront Cox about the way he treated others. But when they did, they risked Cox’s anger, which they say could take over and ruin an entire performance. “He had power over the people who were there,” says an actress who starred in several shows, and who asked not to be identified out of fear of professional retaliation. Whenever she tried to speak up about the way Cox spoke to other actors, including Benson, he would tell her things like, “You don’t understand, it’s a bigger story than what you’re seeing.” Jahraus was directing the show, but after it opened it was Cox who gave her notes and criticized her performance. Then he started giving notes onstage while they were performing. She would say a line and he would respond, “I don’t believe you,” and make her say it again. “It stopped being about the play,” she remembers. “It started being about someone judging you onstage.” When she finally told him she was done with the notes, he started to complain about her performance behind her back. “It wore down my confidence,” she says. “Even though I did good work there, I paid a price afterwards.”

bu buse often begins with a building of trust. Then th that trust is exploited, sa says Melissa Sanchez, a th therapist who specializes in workin working with artists. Sanchez has never met Cox or other members of Profiles, nor did she want to comment on any particular case or allegation. But broadly, she says, there’s a vulnerability in being an artist, especially in an art form like acting, where the body is involved. “You have to go deep into yourself emotionally to be good and taken seriously,” she says. “If the trust an actor places in a director is violated, it taints the craft. There’s a sense of safety lost in the art form.” Abusers, Sanchez adds, are very good at reversing blame and making their targets question their own judgment. But there were two other women who were disturbed enough by their experiences that they decided to join Sara and Somer Benson in a formal complaint to Actors’ Equity last year. Kim met Cox in 2008 at American Theater Company in North Center. Cox was onstage in one of his increasingly rare ventures outside Proﬁles, starring in a production of The People’s Temple as the cult leader Jim Jones. Kim was a recent college graduate, newly arrived in Chicago and working in the box office while she looked for a more permanent theater job. After performances, she and Cox would sit on a bench outside the theater and talk. He was a sympathetic listener. She didn’t know many people in the city and was glad to have someone to hang out with. At first, she thought of their relationship as purely platonic. “For the longest time I was like, ‘Well, he’s too old,’” she remembers. “I wouldn’t even consider this. Then somehow he convinced me it wasn’t a big deal and that it was pretty great.” Two months after they started dating, Kim’s mother came to visit and Cox took them to the Signature Room at the 95th, at the top of the John Hancock building. When Kim went to the bathroom, Cox told her mother he’d fallen in love with her. Kim’s mother, Mary, found him charming but says now she thought

the declaration of love was premature and “fishy.” “But I don’t think anything we would have said to her would have made her stop seeing him,” Mary says. “He pretty much had her under his control.” Mary had already noticed changes in her daughter. She seemed excessively concerned about Cox’s opinions, at first in small ways, like covering up a dress with a ratty old sweater because he thought it was too revealing, and then in larger ones. Like Sara and Benson, Kim felt that Cox was attempting to isolate her from her family and friends. When, in March 2009, Kim learned she’d gotten a job at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, she responded by bursting into tears. Cox had told her not to apply for the job, she explained to her mother, who was with her when she got the phone call, but she had anyway, and now he was going to be mad. He was. The fight moved from inside his apartment to the stairs leading down to his front door. “We struggled at the top of the stairs,” Kim remembers. “I ended up at the bottom unconscious for a few seconds.” Cox sat with her for a few minutes, then left to go to rehearsal. She walked home alone. The next day, Kim went to an urgent care facility where she says she was diagnosed with a mild concussion. She flew home to her parents in Omaha. Cox wrote her an e-mail a few days later, threatening to tell her friends in Chicago and her boss at the theater that she was a compulsive liar if she ever told anyone they’d ever been together. Or as he put it, “I will make my influence known.” Kim’s father consulted the family lawyer and wrote back to Cox telling him that he and Kim would file a restraining order if he ever came near her again. Cox responded with another e-mail. Kim was very sick, he wrote. She was a habitual liar and a manipulator. He’d only been trying to help her. He thought her parents should know. “i have to say it is so hard to write these things,” he wrote. “these things should be between two people. but, kim is clearly not in a place to help herself and i’m sending this in hopes that you can.” Kim has moved on. She has gotten married and left Chicago and

“When you’re watching [Cox], you feel like you’re watching something going on in real life. You don’t feel like he’s acting. You feel like you’re seeing something that you shouldn’t be seeing.” —Actor Tyler Gray

is working in theater again. But her mother observes that she’s more nervous and less confident than before. Meanwhile, former Profiles company members say, Cox entertained them with stories about “Crazy Kim,” how she drank too much, how she threw herself down the stairs. Allie was part of the audience for the “Crazy Kim” stories. She was a junior in high school when she first auditioned at Profiles. She’d been sent by her agent, who also represented Cox. She learned she’d been cast in her first show there the day after her 17th birthday. She played a teenage girl who had an intense flirtation with an older man, played by Cox. “He gave me special attention from very early on,” Allie remembers. He told her she looked sexy in her costume. Backstage, as she helped him do a quick change, he would say things to her like, “You’re easy to fall in love with, baby.” During one rehearsal, they were working on a scene where his character kissed hers. The script called for a kiss that was “sexy but simple . . . and over before either person can think better of it.” Instead, he told her, “I’m really going to kiss you, baby, OK?” “I felt like I had to be OK with that,” Allie says. “Joe [Jahraus] was sitting there. And Darrell kissed me and used his tongue. A lot.” In their dressing room, after she’d gotten dressed to go home, Cox would tickle her and lick her ear. He gave her advice about life. He told her that her then-boyfriend, who was her age, wasn’t good for her. He told her about his ex-girlfriends, including Kim, and said he attracted crazy women. After the show wrapped, Allie became a company member and continued to spend her free time at the theater. One night that summer, after she’d been hanging out with the rest of the company, Cox drove her home and told her he thought about her when he masturbated. “Does that turn you on, baby?” he asked. “Is that sexy to you?” Cox also told Allie that he and Jahraus had picked out a show for the next season specifically so he could perform with her. J

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

continued from 23 During that second show, Jahraus suggested Cox start giving her rides home every night. The attention made Allie feel confused, but also good. Soon, their relationship became more intimate. “I was made to think that the reason it was OK for us to be in a relationship, despite him being 24 years older than me and me being a teenager, was because I was so mature and because our connection was so unique,” Allie says now. Her mother says both she and Allie’s father had met Cox, but they thought the relationship was strictly actor and mentor. “They thought he had my best interest in mind,” Allie says, “and would help me as an actor.” After Allie became a company member, Cox encouraged her to come to rehearsals for other productions and give notes to the actors. This isn’t a common practice in the theater, and the actors didn’t look kindly upon it. But no one said anything about it to Allie. Allie felt her relationship with Cox began to change after she graduated from high school. He became more distant, then critical. In their third show together, Kid Sister, she played the title role, an unstable and manipulative young woman passionately in love with her much older brother, played by Cox. In retrospect, Allie feels that Cox’s treatment of her mirrored that of his characters. In this show, Cox was the stable voice of reason, idolized by everyone, who cared about Allie’s character but couldn’t stand to be around her. It was their ﬁrst antagonistic onstage relationship. Now, during rehearsal, he criticized her acting choices and complained that he wouldn’t be able to do his job as an actor if she didn’t seem more attracted to him onstage. “It seemed like that kind of thing where it’s like, ‘Act better, act better,’ but in this really scary way, like he was screaming at her,” remembers Jeremy Hersh, who was a company member at the time. Cox yelled at one of Allie’s castmates too, because she also didn’t seem attracted enough to him onstage. The other actress threatened to leave the production. Afterward Allie remembers running down the

24 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

“[Cox] would systematically break people and critique them to the point that it was hard to even do any acting onstage, because after every show, he would let you know all the things that you did that were horrible and how you were a terrible, terrible actor and person.” —Sara, an actor and Cox’s former girlfriend

street to ask her how she managed to stand up to him. The week before Kid Sister was scheduled to close, Cox took Allie aside after a performance and told her very angrily that she had “fucked everything up.” He had never spoken to her like this before, she says. In the middle of the tirade, he left to go say hello to someone else. Allie went home. Later, she got an e-mail from Jahraus berating her for not staying at the theater until the conversation was over. “That woke me up, because it was the first obvious signal of abuse,” she says. “Everything else had been very gradual, very insidious, and had only turned me against myself. This was the first time that he had pointed a finger at me directly.” Allie avoided Cox for the last weekend of the play’s run. On closing night, he took her aside. She told him he couldn’t talk that way to her ever again. He apologized and told her he’d yelled at her because he believed in her and held her to a higher standard. Then he gave her a hug and the necklace he’d worn as part of his costume. She didn’t see him after that. A few months later, she had her dad call Profiles and tell Jahraus she was leaving the company. Benson wasn’t able to make such a clean break. She continued her involvement with Cox, both inside and outside the theater, for several months after he beat her up onstage during Killer Joe. But during the run of Kid Sister, she began to suspect that Cox’s relationship with Allie wasn’t entirely platonic. She wasn’t angry with Allie. She was angry with herself for allowing it to happen. “I felt like I was the woman of the group, the big sister, that kind of role,” Benson explains. “The fact that I did not know what was happening right underneath my nose for so long, that I could not save her, or rescue her, or pick up on any cues of something happening between them, [was] because I didn’t know that I needed to be rescued, that I needed to be saved as well.” Benson appeared in one last show, LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty, in the spring of 2011. Her feelings toward Cox, however, had begun to shift. She started to speak up when she saw him berating another actress.

“You’re not her ally,” Cox told her. “You’re my ally.” But she no longer believed that. Benson was still a company member, but she learned that Proﬁles had planned the entire next season without consulting her. She insisted on a group meeting with Cox, Jahraus and two other company members, Maryann Carlson and Eric Burgher. It took place late on a Wednesday night in April 2011, after rehearsal. She planned to confront Cox about what she’d heard had happened between him and Allie. Instead, she says, everyone turned on her. “They’re all sitting there, and they all start telling me these things about how I’m difficult,” Benson recalls. “No one likes working with me. The interns don’t like me. This person doesn’t like me. The understudies. All these things. And I said nothing. I choked on my words, and I was too paralyzed to speak, and I listened to it all.” The other company members suggested she take a break and revisit the discussion after the next show. Instead, after two months of minimal contact during which, she says, Jahraus brushed off her e-mails, Benson resigned from the company that had dominated her life for the past eight years. “She felt like a failure,” says her mother. Like Sara, Benson felt like something had been taken from her. “The one thing that makes me so mad,” Benson says, “is [Cox], in my opinion—it’s, like, mind-rape acrobatics of what he does to infiltrate someone’s spirit and the core of who they are. And he has this way of choosing these incredibly divine individuals, such as Allie and Sara and Kim and other females and males that are these really good people, you know? . . . You start thinking like him and his thoughts are your thoughts, and you lose yourself and any critical thinking. I never could have imagined I would end up to be a person who just couldn’t speak up, who couldn’t say, ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘This is not OK’ or ‘This is wrong’ or ‘I’m not going to do the show if this continues,’ whatever the case may be.” Sara, Benson, Kim, and Allie all receive pro bono legal representation from attorney Sarah Marmor, a

partner at the Chicago firm Scharf Banks Marmor. “We have seen a lot in the news about how far behind the creative world can be on these issues,” she says in a statement, “and hopefully the impact of so many women and men coming forward in this matter, as well as the other high-profile stories we have seen in the last year, will be positive change and real, enforceable rules that make creative spaces a little safer.”

or nearly 20 years, actresses in Chicago have been warning one another not to audition at Profiles Theatre. But the word only trickled out to the larger community in bits and pieces, as rumors about something that had happened to “a friend of a friend.” Very few people had ever heard a Profiles story from someone who had experienced it firsthand, which made the rumors easy to ignore. Many young actors who were new to Chicago were attracted to Profiles by Cox’s talent and charisma, by the Jeff Awards and the good reviews, and by the promise that they could have a part in making great theater. There was a sense within the company that outsiders were not to be trusted. And because people on the inside never talked to people who had left, and because they were so inexperienced themselves, they thought that the way things were done at Profiles was the way theater was supposed to be. They weren’t paid because young artists were supposed to suffer for their art. They stayed up all night painting sets because young artists were supposed to be devoted. The interns worked full-time hours because Cox and Jahraus told them they were the “lifeblood” of the theater. The theater didn’t provide safety goggles or other gear because in a gritty place like Profiles, doing things the proper way was a luxury. One former tech director bought safety glasses and ear protection for the interns with his own money. “A big joke among my coworkers—a few of us who work together now still—is that there’s a Profiles way,” he says. “Like, if you don’t have

your eyewear, you better keep your eyes closed tight when you’re working.” If someone asked them to do something like break down a set in advance of the fire marshal’s visit or sign a nondisclosure agreement about a fake director, they would think, as Kelly O’Sullivan thought, “This is weird, but all right.” They had no contracts because Profiles was a family and family members were supposed to trust one another. If Cox wanted to spend time with them outside rehearsal, to build chemistry, they would. Actors found that Cox could change from amicable to adversarial without warning. He would yell at them backstage, often in private, for things they hadn’t even realized they’d done. “And because it was just me,” recalls one of his former costars, who in order to preserve her privacy asked not to be identified, “I couldn’t really turn to anybody else and say, ‘Am I being overdramatic about this?’” “I think that where a lot of the silence and secrecy comes from is that you don’t want to be seen that way, as not being able to handle something,” Claire Wellin says. “There are multiple company members, including myself, that quit via e-mail,” says Tyler Gray, “because we didn’t know how to do it to his face.” In the aftermath of Killer Joe, Wellin recalls getting a telemarketing call and seeing an unfamiliar number on her phone and feeling terrified. She was afraid it was Cox. Even now, more than five years later, even after moving to New York, she still fears him. “Do I realistically think he would come to New York and try and confront me?” she asks, rhetorically. “No, I don’t think so, but I have thought about it.” People within the theater who spoke up against Cox, like MaryEllen Rieck, the stage manager of Killer Joe, would find themselves isolated from the other cast members. “We all were having the exact same feelings,” she says, speaking of herself, Benson, and Wellin, “and all kind of taking it out on each other instead of the person that was actually generating those feelings.” From the beginning, Cox has had the support of Joe Jahraus. Jahraus

Veteran actors Lori Myers and Laura T. Fisher established Not in Our House last year. The group is writing a code of conduct for non-Equity theaters. ò DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

hasn’t been accused of misconduct, but former cast and crew members say he’s never attempted to put a stop to it either. “The more I think about it, the more I think that’s that sort of a complicit relationship,” says the former costar. “Joe turns the other way and Darrell takes over under the auspices of ‘This is how we do it.’” Or, as Allie puts it, “Darrell was in charge; Joe helped Darrell be in charge.”

ntil it joined Actors’ Equity in 2012, Profiles operated without any guidance or supervision from any governing body. In an Equity theater, actors and crew members are encouraged to report any problems to the union. In a non-Equity theater, the complaint path is murkier. Ideally, someone

who feels that something isn’t right should be able to complain to the stage manager, who would then pass on the complaint to the theatrical management. But at Profiles, the stage managers tend to be young and powerless, and Cox is the management. There’s also no outside board of directors to hold the theater accountable. Equity actors working in a non-Equity house still have the protection of the union, however, and two actresses, who have asked not to be identified, have brought complaints against Profiles. The first filed her complaint in the spring of 2012 after she was required to rehearse for 14 straight days, a violation of union rules. The union immediately contacted the theater, she says, and she received comp time and compensation pay. (Equity spokeswoman Maria Somma said that all complaints are confidential,

so she’s unable to comment.) The second actress quit a Profiles production in the spring of 2014 after Cox screamed at her for ten minutes during rehearsal. “I didn’t feel safe in that environment anymore, and so I wanted to express that to them,” she says. But when she called Equity, the person who answered the phone said her union rep was out of town, and she should call back the following week. After that response, the actress decided her concerns weren’t important to the union and decided to move on. Actors in Chicago, especially female actors, feel they’re in a vulnerable position. There are only a few roles to go around to begin with, and no one wants to have a reputation as being “difficult” or a complainer. “It’s really hard to break in, and it is a very tight-knit community,” says Sue Redman, an actress and producer who now lives in LA, “and so

having someone powerful say, ‘Yeah, your career is not going to happen if you say anything,’ I mean it’s a very real thing.” Redman met and became friends with Allie in 2010 when they worked on a film together. Early the following year, soon after the end of Kid Sister and her relationship with Cox, Allie confided the whole story to Redman. Allie was afraid of what Cox would do to her if she outed him, and she didn’t know who else she could tell. Redman was appalled. She invited some of her friends who also worked in theater to a meeting in her apartment to pool information. Many of them, it turned out, also had Profiles stories. As a group, they discussed various plans of action. They considered writing an open letter to the Sun-Times and Tribune, but they were too afraid of retribution from Cox and the greater theater J

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

continued from 25 community to go through with it. Allie didn’t see the point of going to the police because the relationship hadn’t been physically violent. The group did write to Oprah Winfrey and to advice columnist Dan Savage. Savage contacted a friend in the Chicago theater community to get more information before deciding that the situation was beyond the purview of his column. Winfrey didn’t respond. Then Redman moved to LA before anyone could figure out another plan, and the effort fizzled. Independently, Allie appealed to another authority: she reached out to three women with power and influence in the Chicago theater community to alert them about what was happening at Profiles and ask for their help. In June 2011, she wrote an e-mail to Martha Lavey, then the artistic director at Steppenwolf. She and Cox were both auditioning for a show there, and she wanted to let Lavey know that she felt it would be bad for her to work with Cox again after the way he’d treated her at Profiles. Lavey wrote back the same afternoon and told Allie that the matter would be handled “with discretion and care.” As it happened, neither Allie nor Cox was cast in the show. Coincidentally, two days later, Benson wrote an e-mail to Erica Daniels to let her know she’d left Profiles and was looking for work. Daniels had stopped coteaching the Profiles scene study class in 2007 (she’d been replaced by Rick Snyder and then Robert Breuler, both Steppenwolf ensemble members), and Benson was uncertain how much Daniels knew about what had allegedly happened at the theater. Daniels responded immediately with a sympathetic note. She and Benson met in April 2014, ostensibly to talk about possible gigs. But, Benson says, Daniels’s first question was, “Are you at liberty to speak about Profiles and Darrell? What happened?” Early in 2013, still troubled by her experiences, Allie asked her agent if there was anything the agent could do to protect young women at Profiles. Her agent said her hands were tied and suggested Allie contact

Lavey and Daniels. (Allie’s agent declined to comment for this story.) That August, Allie sent them an e-mail. She told them about her relationship with Cox and that she thought he was a dangerous man for young actresses to work with. “It is too painful for me . . . to come forward in the community and make a more public statement,” she wrote. “That means I don’t really know what I can do. I want to pass that information along to someone who might be able to help make a change.” Daniels and Lavey met after they received Allie’s e-mail to discuss it, both women conﬁrmed. But neither felt they could act on Allie’s behalf. “Without any substantial information of any kind, and there wasn’t, we had no way of ‘doing’ anything,” Daniels told the Reader in an e-mail. “No one has advocated MORE for actors in this community than Martha Lavey and me. If I had any information of ANY actor or actress being in an unsafe situation I would absolutely address it.” She declined to comment more broadly about her relationship with Proﬁles. Lavey says now that she felt constrained by Allie’s request that her name be kept out of it. “If she wanted her name out there, if she wanted to stand up,” Lavey says, “I would have stood behind her.” But Allie says she never received a response from either woman. Allie also attempted to contact Jahraus in January 2014, via Facebook message. “Joe, I don’t know your story,” she wrote. “I don’t know whether you know the extent of what is going on.” Cox, she said, took on a mentorship role with young women. Then he “traumatizes them into thinking they are completely isolated from everyone around them so that they stay with him.” Allie saw through Facebook that Jahraus had seen the message, but he never wrote back.

or Myers has never audiori ti tioned or performed at Profi files Theatre. Early in her ca career, in the mid-1990s, sh she saw a note on the bathroom wall of the Four Moon Tavern in Roscoe Village warning young actresses to stay away. So she did.

26 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

A scene from Proﬁles’s 2005 production of The Glory of Living. Cox’s character uses his teenage girlfriend to lure other young women back to his motel room in order to rape and murder them. ò PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: SUN-TIMES PRINT ARCHIVE

For years, she continued to hear rumors, but nothing from people who said they had been mistreated themselves. Then, in late 2014 and early 2015, she was cast in three plays in a row where she heard allegations from people who’d worked at Proﬁles ranging from sexual abuse and domestic violence to onstage violence and intimidation. “The reality became clearer, as hearing those stories kind of gets closer and closer to you,” Myers says now. “You’re like, ‘Whoa. He did what? And he did what?’ And I put up a Facebook post thinking, You know, why isn’t anything being done about this? I never named the theater, but I was instant messaged [by people] asking speciﬁcally, ‘Is it this theater?’ And I was like, something has to be done here. Because I think it’s such a rare case, a rare extreme in Chicago theater, but the fact that it’s been going on so long just was infuriating.” So many people responded to Myers’s initial post that in early February 2015 she set up a secret Facebook group called Not in Our House, which now has more than 700 members. The group immediately began discussing strategies for dealing

with sexual harassment, intimidation, violence, and discrimination within the community so that situations similar to those alleged at Profiles—which was always referred to as “Theatre A”—wouldn’t happen again. In April 2015, Myers arranged a closed-door meeting with Equity officials and Benson, Allie, Kim, and the actress who had called in 2014 to complain and was told to call back later. The women shared their stories and read supporting statements from Killer Joe stage manager MaryEllen Rieck, former company member Jeremy Hersh, and the Equity actress who’d ﬁled her complaint in 2012. It was very emotional, says Benson, and one of the Equity representatives was visibly moved. But aside from the actress who hadn’t been able to talk to anyone about her complaint, none of the women was a member of Equity, and most of the incidents had taken place before Profiles became an Equity theater. It was unclear, Benson says, what would happen next: “I remember Kim and I were feeling hopeless when we left.” (Equity spokeswoman Maria Somma declined to comment on the meeting.)

But Myers and her group were primarily concerned about Chicago theater in general. In early March 2015, more than 100 members of the group met for a panel discussion, led by Myers, to hash out the issues in person. It was decided that the purpose of Not in Our House was threefold: first, to provide a support group for those who needed it and a list of resources, including therapists, lawyers, and advocacy organizations; second, to establish a code of conduct for non-Equity theaters, so actors and crew members who found themselves in situations like the one at Profiles would know where to go; and third, to work with Equity to change the language it used to discuss sexual harassment, intimidation, and discrimination. “We’re making codes for everything,” Myers says, “from basic safety of, like, having a toilet, having Band-Aids, to ‘Hey, if you’re working in physical theater you got to make sure you’re not stomping on a concrete ﬂoor.’ If you’re being screamed at in front of the cast night after night, you don’t have to put up with that. That’s called intimidation. Here’s what you do if it’s happening

to you. And this is all for non-Equity theaters.” Laura T. Fisher, a veteran actress, volunteered to take charge of organizing the group of theater professionals to write the code of conduct. Much of it is based on existing codes of conduct from Equity and other organizations, and on established theatrical practices that are understood but have never been written down, for example, that all fight and sexual choreography should be documented, that everyone should show up on time to rehearsals and performances, and that the stage manager should be the first line of communication for complaints about onstage issues, followed by the management of the theater. “It’s sort of a pro-artist document,” Fisher says. “Actors tell stories that involve sexual content, nudity, violence. We take huge emotional and physical risks. We make ourselves very vulnerable to tell the stories that we tell. And we want it that way. So every code is kind of measured against ‘Does it enable more freedom and more risk, as opposed to the other way around?’ Nobody wants it to sterilize our environments or diminish the stories that are told.” Their efforts are part of a larger national movement to prevent harassment and provide accountability in the theater. Since January 2015, more than 500 actors, crew members, playwrights, and other theater professionals and activists from around the country (including Neil LaBute) have signed the statement on harassment created by the Lilly Awards Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes the work of women in theater. The statement reads in part, “The theater community has long whispered, laughed and written about harassment in its ranks, telling tales of the casting couch and out of control stars. It is past time we stopped ignoring or even encouraging abusive behavior and publicly recognize the existence of sexual discrimination, harassment, and gender-based violence within our community.” The code of conduct was unveiled to great enthusiasm at a general Not in Our House meeting on April 18. A dozen non-Equity theater compa-

nies across the city, plus one Equity company, two independent artists, and R&D Choreography (which did the fight choreography for Killer Joe in 2010), announced they were participating in a yearlong pilot program to test and revise the code, then mentor other groups that choose to adopt it later on; since the meeting, several more companies have joined them. All participants in each show will be required to sign a document stating that they’ve read and understood the code and will abide by its contents; but there’s no larger governing body on the scale of Equity to enforce it. Other types of performers, including improvisers and dancers, have expressed interest in the code as well; in the future, Fisher says, they may adopt their own versions of it. For Myers, one of the most important parts of Not in Our House has been educating theater professionals—especially young theater professionals—about their rights as workers. “We’re hoping for a citywide spread of education,” she says, “of ‘This is what you don’t have to put up with.’” She’s also hoping that education will break down the sort of fear that kept people at Proﬁles silent for so long. “What the Not in Our House organization has done, where they’ve really tried and succeeded, is acknowledging that this is a systemic issue,” says therapist Melissa Sanchez, who’s participated in NIOH panel discussions. “It’s not one person who has done a bad thing and his victims. The community role is to recognize when something’s not quite OK. It’s checking in with others, not being hypervigilant, just taking care of one another.” “What we’re trying to promote is sort of like, be in the room for people,” Myers explains. “If you see something happening with someone else, you have to make sure you speak up. I think for the whole thing with Killer Joe, if someone had just been there to say, ‘Whoa, something is really wrong here, you can’t be doing that,’ it would have maybe had a different outcome.” Or, in the case of Killer Joe, multiple someones, so no one would have had to stand up to Cox alone.

us ust after New Year’s, Proﬁles an announced it was holding auditi ditions for its next show, Jeru rusalem by Jez Butterworth. Th The play is about Johnny “Rooster” Byron, once an Evel Knievel-style daredevil, now a drunk who lives in a trailer in the woods outside a village near Stonehenge and hosts wild parties for the bored local teenagers. But the world is conspiring to destroy Rooster’s way of life: he’s been banned from all the village pubs, and the county has ruled that it has the right to bulldoze his woods and his trailer to build tract houses because he hasn’t paid taxes in years. Rooster is a classic antihero: he may be a drug dealer who neglects his son, but he lives a more authentic life than everyone around him. Mark Rylance played the role to great acclaim in London and on Broadway, and it must have seemed irresistible to Cox. Or as Chris Jones put it in his Tribune review: “Cox clearly has thought hard about this role—I suspect he finds echoes of himself therein. . . . Rooster is a lot of fun, a force for conservation in a twisted kind of way, an updating of the rudest of mechanicals. Of course he’s also an ogre lying await in the woods for young people who cannot know better.” (Jones says he only started hearing rumors about Profiles last year after Not in Our House organized. He doesn’t know Cox well, and he hasn’t spoken to anyone directly involved with the allegations. But, he says in an interview, “there were clearly resonances with what has been going on. Anyone who went to see the show who knew couldn’t miss those resonances, whether they were conscious or not. So writing my review, I noted them. I still don’t know exactly what happened. But I’m aware of the community’s outrage, and I’m deeply concerned by it.”) The audition list for Jerusalem included roles for three very young women and one small boy. Fisher and Myers felt it would be within the purview of Not in Our House to let women auditioning for those parts to know their basic rights. (As it happens, there’s an Equity rule that the theater must hire a youth performance supervisor for underage actors; according to Equity spokeswoman Somma, Profiles complied.)

“Actors tell stories that involve sexual content, nudity, violence. We take huge emotional and physical risks. . . . So every code is kind of measured against ‘Does it enable more freedom and more risk, as opposed to the other way around?’” —Actor Laura T. Fisher

So Fisher drew up a list of those basic rights with the header you have the right to be safe at this theatre and made a pile of copies. And on the night of callbacks this past February, she, Myers, and a half-dozen volunteers from Not in Our House head to Buena Park to distribute them to actresses coming in for auditions. Profiles sits on a quiet block of Broadway, on the first floor of a large apartment building. The street is mostly deserted, which is to be expected on a cold Wednesday night in early February. But even if it were crowded, the actresses going in for their auditions would be easy to spot—they’re the only ones walking around without hats and gloves and with their coats unbuttoned. Most are wearing short skirts with heels and pantyhose and low-cut shirts. (“Dressing up for an audition is a lot like dressing up to go on a date,” Myers observes.) They puff nervously on cigarettes. There are fewer of them than Myers expected. “I’m pleasantly surprised,” she says. Myers and Fisher circle the block around the theater, approaching women who’ve finished their auditions. (“When you prepare for an audition, you’re very focused,” Fisher explains. “That’s why we’re hoping to talk to women on their way out.”) Most of the women accept the flyers with polite interest; several stop for a longer discussion about workers’ rights. They’re aware of Not in Our House; the previous week, the Tribune had run a lengthy front-page story about sexual harassment in the improv community that briefly mentioned the group. But there is one young woman who has more complicated feelings. “I don’t want to let anyone down,” she tells Fisher and three other activists who have gathered around. “But I love this play and I want to be in it. This company does substantial work. It’s a shame the allegations are part of it. I want to work. But I don’t want to be complicit.” Fisher listens quietly. “This is just information,” she says, holding out the flyer. “Trust your instincts. Protect yourself.” The young woman takes the piece of paper and starts to cry. v

v @aimeelevitt JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

ARTS & CULTURE

Cliﬀ Chamberlain, Cora Vander Broek, Lindsay Stock, and Angela Reed

Soups doesn’t have Sign’s verbal or dramatic sophistication. A lot of Gilman’s strategies are standard-issue for this kind of earnest, issues-oriented play, quite literally set around a kitchen table. There’s a crusty, quirky, truth-telling old grandma manque named JoAnne, whose job it is to say all the stuff the others are too polite to mention, and a teenage daughter, Kelly, who’s reassuringly stable even as she experiences a traumatic rite of passage in the discovery that her parents are human. Kim and Kat are decent, loving, neighborly folks shadowed by a familiar anguish: Kat’s pregnancy forced them into marriage and a small-town, cheese-centered fate sans college, travel, sexual adventures, and whatever other exciting things you can think of. Kim’s choices throughout the play are explained, sometimes too simply, by his foreclosed options. And when temptation arrives, it assumes a familiar form in Elaine Marcus, the genially bored wife of Jeffrey, the new operations manager sent in by Consolidated to make Farmstead a leaner, meaner asset. What redeems these banalities—at least insofar as they’re redeemed—is the use to which Gilman puts them. Like Hansberry’s Sidney, Kim and Kat are seduced from themselves less by their weaknesses than by their virtues: generosity, trust, natural ability. Jeffrey singles Kim out for advancement at work because Kim can’t help being capable. Likewise, Kat befriends Elaine because she’s the welcome-wagon type, and absorbs Elaine’s pop-therapeutic self-improvement mantras because she’s smart and curious. This isn’t the brash, Carl Icahn-esque corporate blitz portrayed in works like Jerry Sterner’s 1989 Other People’s Money. This is something more like Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, where the devil arrives with wit, worldliness, and loads of sympathy. As JoAnne

ò LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

Spirits of ’76

By TONY ADLER

oodman Theatre has been social-consciousness central this spring. Intentionally or not, the most recent shows at its two spaces form an American diptych, exploring the seductions of capitalism and the responsibilities of communities in the second half of the 20th century. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was at Goodman’s Albert Theatre until June 5, telling the story of a Greenwich Village bohemian whose fancifully high-minded business ventures have left him broke and his wife pissed off. When Sidney takes yet another ﬂier, this time on a weekly neighborhood newspaper, he unexpectedly ﬁnds himself poised for a real payday, assuming he can suppress his scruples. The friend Sidney backed as an independent can-

didate for city council turns out to have been bought by the powers that be—powers who are willing to buy Sidney and his paper too, if he’ll only wise up and play ball with them. Now, at the smaller Owen Theatre, we’ve got Rebecca Gilman’s 2014 Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976, essentially reproducing Sidney’s dilemma in a narrative set 12 years later and 1,000 miles west. As Gilman’s subtitle suggests, it’s America’s bicentennial summer. We’re in Reynolds, a fictitious single-industry town located in south central Wisconsin, an easy drive from the Saturday-night polka dances in New Glarus. Jimmy Carter is the “presumptive” presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and 36-year-old Kim would be celebrating his 17th year at Farmstead, the local cheese processing plant, if (a) he didn’t despise working there and (b) it hadn’t just been sold to Consolidated Foods, a conglomerate “out of Chicago,” throwing everybody in Reynolds not only off balance but possibly out of work. “A fine note, isn’t it?” Kim says to his wife, Kat. “When you’re scared to death of losing something you never wanted in the first place.”

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says to Kat, hauling out her old-style dialectics for the occasion, “This is what the oppressor wants. Is for you to identify with him. Because if you identify with him, you will not resist him.” Both Sign and Soups succumb to liberal feel-goodism in the end, which is to say that they show us people acting entirely, even festively against their own self-interest. That result seems especially callow in the case of Soups, partly because Gilman goes out of her way to soften the consequences of those actions—but mostly because we watch Kim, Kat, Kelly, and the others from the vantage of 2016, knowing how completely the Consolidateds of the world dominated the next 40 years, with their union breaking, their offshoring, and the rest. But then I don’t think Gilman wrote this thing merely to portray a historical moment. I think she wanted to provide a template for the future. A case, however imperfectly stated, for the idea that we needn’t be in the world for ourselves alone. Robert Falls’s staging places that imperfect case in the best possible light. Cora Vander Broek is a great mix of everyday practicality and fun as Kat, Lindsay Stock of precocity and foolishness as Kelly, and Ann Whitney of principle and plain old querulousness as JoAnne. Cliff Chamberlain’s Kim is beautifully orchestrated between the low-affect weariness of his workaday angst, the defensiveness with which he approaches hope, and the bouts of playfulness that remind us he’s still young. As Elaine and a union steward/friend named Kyle, Angela Reed and Ty Olwin make excellent tests to put in Kim’s way. v SOUPS, STEWS, AND CASSEROLES: 1976 Through 6/19: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-4433800, goodmantheatre.org, $10-$40.

v @taadler

HUBBARD STREET + THE SECOND CITY The Art of Falling PERFORMANCES ADDED ★★★★/4 —Chicago Tribune

★★★★★/5 —Time Out Chicago

Performing at

MUST CLOSE JUNE 19 hubbardstreetdance.com/summer 312-334-7777 Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

28 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

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ARTS & CULTURE

Carisa Barreca, center, with Jesse Bechard, Alice Klock, Michael Gross, Emilie Leriche, and Jonathan Fredrickson in The Art of Falling ò TODD ROSENBERG

COMEDY/DANCE

Light on their feet

By BRIANNA WELLEN

econd City and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago first joined forces in October 2014 for the collaborative performance The Art of Falling, in which the comedians became dancers and the dancers became comedians. The visually stunning, seemingly effortless, and often hilarious show ran for only four days, but it was so well received that it hit the road for an LA run in November 2015. Now The Art of Falling is back in Chicago at the Harris Theater for a longer engagement. “A lot of time and effort went into putting the show together, and it would have been a shame if it had just been four days and been put to bed,” says Jessica Tong, a Hubbard Street performer reprising her role. Much of the show will stay the same—including the story and cast—but because the performers have had more time with the material, they’re able to incorporate subtle changes. “It’s nice because you have time to revisit things and make some modiﬁcations, whether it’s to embellish or edit,” Tong says. Hubbard Street’s short performance schedule creates what Tong calls a hit-itand-quit-it attitude, but this time around the

dancers are able to improvise, taking a page out of Second City’s book. “I get to watch and listen and see how the comedians are always riffing off each other and coming up with new stuff,” Tong says. “If we do a scene three or four times in a row, every time it’s done differently. It’s such a treasure trove of ideas that they come up with. I like sitting and watching and giggling to myself.” The extra time is also helpful for the comedians. When the show ﬁrst opened, they sometimes struggled to keep up with the dancers. Now, they’re comfortable with the choreography, Tong says. It’s the combination of slight alterations to the content and the performers’ increased conﬁdence that will breathe new life into the old show. “Even if people have seen it before, there are new elements and small changes to keep it current,” Tong says. “You get a pretty rounded experience of what theater is like in Chicago: creative and buzzing.” v R THE ART OF FALLING 6/9-6/19: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Harris Theatre, 205 E. Randolph, hubbardstreetdance.com, $57-$109.

v @BriannaWellen JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

ARTS & CULTURE

LIT

What to see at Printers Row Lit Fest

By AIMEE LEVITT

nce again, the Printers Row Lit Fest, the midwest’s largest literary festival, takes over Dearborn Street from Congress to Polk. There are books to buy, lectures to listen to, and autographs to obtain. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, here are some of our suggestions for the weekend’s best bets.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON IN CONVERSATION WITH MARY SCHMICH (Sat 6/11, 10 AM) Robinson, author of the classic Housekeeping and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, has, throughout her career, written about faith and spirituality honestly, without resorting to easy “inspirational” bromides. She’ll discuss her life and work with Tribune columnist (and fellow Pulitzer laureate) Schmich.

THOMAS FRANK, LISTEN LIBERAL (Sat 6/11, 10 AM) The former Chicagoan and Baffler editor takes on the decline of the Democratic Party in his latest, Listen Liberal.

HOW TO REPRESENT THE CONTEMPORARY WAR EXPERIENCE?: KIM BARKER AND MAXIMILIAN URIARTE IN CONVERSATION WITH COLIN MCMAHON (Sat 6/11, 10 AM) In her memoir The Taliban Shuffle, Hollywoodized as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Kim Barker provided a distinctly unheroic view of life as a foreign correspondent during her stint in Afghanistan for the Tribune. Uriarte did a tour of duty as a U.S. marine in Iraq and now draws the comic Terminal Lance. McMahon, another former Tribune correspondent, now an editor, moderates the conversation.

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD (Sat 6/11, 10:30 AM) Five writers tell stories about their neighborhoods for Paul Dailing and Rachel Hyman’s continuing itinerant live-lit series.

JUSTIN ROBERTS AND THE NOT READY FOR NAPTIME PLAYERS (Sat 6/11, 11 AM and 2 PM) Two

30 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

The Monster Gasped, OMG!; Rebecca Traister; Buzz Aldrin ò COURTESY 826CHI; DANA MEILIJSON; GETTY

years ago, Roberts’s Grammy nomination for Best Children’s Album for his record Recess (he lost) sparked a spirited debate in this very newspaper about the necessity of music written especially for children. Go see them and draw your own conclusions. JUSTIN PETERS IN CONVERSATION WITH OWEN YOUNGMAN (Sat 6/11, noon) Slate correspondent Peters discusses his book The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet with former Tribune editor and current Medill prof Youngman. KISSCON (Sat 6/11, 12:30 PM) If you adore romance, here’s your chance to chat with an all-star panel of writers, amid lots of love and laughter. R.L. STINE (Sat 6/11, 12:30 PM) If any adult in your life ever gave you crap for compulsively devouring Stine’s Goosebumps series, the Tribune has now provided you with an airtight justiﬁcation for your reading habits: Stine is this year’s Chicago Tribune Young Adult Literary Award winner. That makes Goosebumps officially Literature, and award-winning literature at that. Stine will accept his award and then discuss scary things with the Tribune’s Stevens. THE MONSTER GASPED, OMG! (Sat 6/11, 2 PM) Students at Brentano Math and Science Academy read from their new collection of monster stories, published in collaboration with 826CHI. If you’d like to give money to this worthy cause and also meet NPR’s Peter Sagal, you can attend Prologue, 826’s literary cocktail party, on Friday night. SEYMOUR HERSH IN CONVERSATION WITH RICK PERLSTEIN (Sat 6/11, 2 PM) Chicago journalist and historian Perlstein interviews reporting legend Hersh about his latest book, The Killing

of Osama Bin Laden, an investigation of what really happened, on the ground and behind the scenes at the White House, on the night in 2011 when Bin Laden was killed. ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE AND ANDI ZEISLER (Sat 6/11, 2:15 PM) Feminist authors and publishers Moore and Zeisler discuss who creates visual culture and who profits from it, one of the themes of both their new books, Threadbare: Sex, Clothes, and Trafficking and We Were Feminists Once, respectively. MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA FLASH FICTION CONTEST (Sat 6/11, 3 PM) Can you create a mystery based on a prompt from the Mystery Writers of America and solve it in 500 words and impress Sara Paretsky and Lori Rader-Day with your dramatic reading? Now’s your chance to give it your best shot. LASHONDA KATRICE BARNETT, REBECCA TRAISTER, AND LINDY WEST IN CONVERSATION WITH GRETA JOHNSEN (Sat 6/11, 4 PM) Among feminist writers, West, author of the new memoir Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, is a folk hero; Barnett, playwright, author of the novel Jam on the Vine and a prof at Northwestern, is a force to be reckoned with; and Traister, author of the history All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, is a rock star. With Hillary Clinton poised to become the ﬁrst female presidential nominee from a major political party, this seems like an auspicious time for a stateof-the-union conversation, with Nerdette’s Johnsen, about women in America. RUTH REICHL IN CONVERSATION WITH BILL DALEY (Sun 6/12, 11:45 AM) Reichl’s ﬁrst memoir, Tender at the Bone, is one of the most charming books ever written about learning to eat. Now she’s got a cookbook out, My Kitchen Year, a collection of the recipes she cooked

during the year after she was laid off as editor of Gourmet, and she’s here to demonstrate her kitchen skills with the Tribune’s Bill Daley. “IF I CAN’T TIMEJUMP, I DON’T WANT TO BE IN YOUR REVOLUTION”: CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, KAMERON HURLEY, ANNALEE NEWITZ, AND DAN SINKER (Sun 6/12, 12:30 PM) Remember Sinker’s @MayorEmanuel Twitter account, and how it said more about both Rahm and the 2009 mayoral election than most conventional news reporting? Now Sinker joins science and science ﬁction writers Newitz, Anders, and Hurley for a discussion about all the ways speculative ﬁction can capture the bizarre world we live in. MARCIA CLARK, MICHAEL HARVEY, AND DAVID SWI NSON I N CONVE RSATION WITH DAVI D HEINZMANN (Sun 6/12, 1:30 PM) Yes, that’s the Marcia Clark, once a prosecutor, now a mystery author, in conversation with local authors Harvey, Swinson, and Heinzmann. ETHAN MICHAELI AND NATALIE Y. MOORE IN CONVERSATION WITH LOLLY BOWEAN (Sun 6/12, 2 PM) Leave Printers Row, walk two miles south, and you’ll be in Bronzeville. Journalists Michaeli and Moore discuss their new books, respectively, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America and The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, and the history and future of the south side and Chicago’s African-American community. BUZZ ALDRIN IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINA KORP (Sun 6/12, 2:30 PM) Because how can you pass up the chance to see a man who walked on the moon? v R PRINTERS ROW LIT FEST Sat 6/11-Sun 6/12, 10 AM-6 PM, Dearborn between Congress and Polk, printersrowlitfest.org, fest passes sold out, single events $3.

v @aimeelevitt

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DHEEPAN sss Directed by Jacques Audiard. R, 115 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, 2828 N. Clark, 773-248-7759, landmarktheatres.com/chicago/century-centre-cinema, $12.50 Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

MOVIES

Eye of the Tiger By TAL ROSENBERG

acques Audiard is perhaps the only filmmaker in France who makes arthouse films that could and should be successful Hollywood blockbusters. In his 2009 movie A Prophet, a green newly convicted felon is forced to commit a murder and from there gradually works his way up the ranks of the prisoners—it would fit perfectly on AMC daytime programming, right between First Blood and The Matrix. Rust and Bone (2012) is one of the most moving love stories of the past decade, and it stars trendy A-listers Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. And his latest work, Dheepan, is about a former soldier for the Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (aka the Tamil Tigers) who immigrates to France along with a woman and child, only to end up in a rural housing project that doubles as an open-air drug market—on paper, it’s like a prestige war picture meets an immigration saga crossed with the first season of The Wire. But Audiard’s movies all have twists that keep them in the art-house realm. The hero of A Prophet is Muslim, and the film is in some ways about Arab-Europeans triumphing over white Europeans who treat them poorly. Yes, Cotillard stars in Rust and Bone, but she loses her legs in the first 20 minutes; though the setting is beachside France, the protagonists ssss EXCELLENT

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Antonythasan and aware of Dheepan’s past, helps place them Jesuthasan in a rural housing project and lands the patristars as the title arch a job as its caretaker. character in The first two-thirds of Dheepan operates as Dheepan. a subdued, subtle art film about the struggles of this misbegotten family in their new home. Dheepan and Yalini endeavor to learn French and behave as a couple. Illayaal acts out in school, understandable considering what she’s been through, yet Dheepan and Yalini don’t know how to be parents. On the periphery, the housing project has been taken over by gangs and drug dealers, and Yalini becomes a housemaid for a resident whose son (Vincent Rottiers), recently released from prison, appears to be the kingpin. Audiard films all of this tenderly, and at times rapturously—in one scene the camera follows Dheepan as he prepares to sweep the courtyard, then glides upward to reveal the colorful autumn trees and the landscape behind the apartment towers; for a brief moment the location is peaceful, even idyllic. Audiard secures outstanding performances from his cast, who are at least partially responsible for Dheepan’s tonal success. In real are relatively poor and have bizarre careers life, Antonythasan was a Tamil Tiger (before (a whale trainer at a Sea World-style park; the faction turned violent) who immigrated an amateur bare-knuckles boxer). And both to France, where he became a successful auefforts feature the kind of understated, albeit thor—his novels, which are unrelated to the rich, handheld camerawork that’s become film, mostly address the civil war in Sri Lanka. ubiquitous in the past ten to 15 years, from Though Dheepan is only his second screen Olivier Assayas’s oeuvre to the Romanian role, his performance is exceptionally natural, New Wave to the Amazon series Transparent. easy to empathize with despite Dheepan’s In other words, Audiard addresses issues in conflicted origins. Srinivasan’s portrayal of present-day France obliquely—in a manner Yalini is just as formidable and perhaps more that can be, to his detractors, frustrating and complex—the character’s origins are never noncommittal—and Dheepan continues this relayed, yet her impetuousness and confitrend, with some significant departures. dence make her personality more textured and Dheepan opens with Sivadhasan (Antony- comprehensible. And Rottiers contributes a thasan Jesuthasan), a former Tamil soldier, strong supporting turn as the drug lord whose burning his uniform on a pile of palm fronds, charms are always cut with just the right which not so artfully obscure human remains. amount of menace. He puts on civilian clothes, presumably from Dheepan won the Palme d’Or at last year’s one of the corpses, and finds a woman (Ka- Cannes film festival, but you’d hardly know lieaswari Srinivasan) who’s trying to leave reviewers enjoyed it, judging from film-critic Sri Lanka, who in turn scares up a young girl Twitter (sample tweet: “DHEEPAN, a perfectly (Claudine Vinasithamby) who lost all her im- fine, unremarkable drama, is the most surmediate family in the war. They are given the prising Palme d’Or winner in recent memory, real passports of a deceased family and assume and certainly the least deserving” ); or the line their identities: father Dheepan, mother Yalini, from The Independent that says that the victoand daughter Illayaal. After fleeing to France, ry “left some critics scratching their heads”; they’re temporarily placed in an immigration or a mostly laudatory Indiewire review David holding center (Dheepan illegally sells trinkets Ehrlich leads off by writing, “No, ‘Dheepan’ on the streets of Paris to support them), where probably shouldn’t have won the Palme d’Or at a Tamil translator, sympathetic to the Tigers last year’s Cannes Film Festival.”

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

ARTS & CULTURE

Most of the disagreement hinges on a significant narrative decision made by Audiard and co-screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, and having seen Dheepan twice with different people each time, I’d say that this aspect of the film is a love-it-or-hate-it pivot point for audiences. (Minor spoilers ahead.) In its third act, Dheepan jarringly mutates into a bullet-filled hybrid of Taxi Driver and A History of Violence as Dheepan takes on the drug dealers who’ve trapped Yalini in the apartment of the invalid she assists. This imbalance between the two parts of the movie is unusual for Audiard, who executed the complicated story lines of A Prophet and Rust and Bone with remarkable fluidity. Because of the deftness with which Audiard handled his prior efforts, the dissonant final third of Dheepan is ostensibly deliberate. The movie is an extension, and in some ways a combination, of the narratives in A Prophet and Rust and Bone. As with A Prophet, the hero of the story is an outsider, both his immediate surroundings and in France generally, who gradually takes back his agency by exacting revenge on people who’ve wronged him. And like Rust and Bone, Dheepan is a melodrama in which sudden plot shifts mirror the tumult of the protagonists’ situations. And similar to Audiard’s recent films, the director’s experiments with narrative control reflect the main characters’ attempts to take control of their own lives. Joel and Ethan Coen headed the jury that awarded Dheepan the Palme d’Or, which makes sense: like Audiard, the Coens make commercial films with art-house tendencies. But whereas the Coens at times mock their characters or certain social classes or ethnicities, Audiard doesn’t attempt to generalize about or caricature anyone—he simply provides opportunities for actors that are generally unavailable to them. Dheepan isn’t as focused or invigorating as A Prophet or Rust and Bone—and it doesn’t have very much to say about Sri Lanka or even immigration in France, its purported topical concerns. Yet while there are many movies like the Coen brothers’, ones like Audiard’s are rare. His films are never as predictable or familiar as most commercial fare or the arty sort of cinema that generates buzz on the festival circuit. Dheepan occupies that rare, often enjoyable space in between. v

v @talrosenberg

WORTHLESS

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 33

34 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

Irma Thomas plays at Petrillo on Saturday evening; she’s pictured here at last year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. ò BARRY BRECHEISEN

Our guide to the

Chicago Blues Festival The world’s largest free blues fest bustles with a diversity of traditions and talents—including Irma Thomas, Lazy Lester, Wee Willie Walker, John Primer, and tributes to Otis Rush and Otis Clay.

By DAVID WHITEIS AND BILL DAHL THE CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL, like many such festivals these days, often has a valedictory feel—and this year’s edition is no exception. Two sets honor artists who’ve died or retired (Otis Clay, who was felled by a heart attack in January, and Otis Rush, who suffered a stroke in 2004), and the headliners at Petrillo skew heavily toward well-seasoned veterans. The other bookings remain relatively conservative as well: guitar-heavy boogie-shuff le blues and old-school soul dominate. On the other hand, the Petrillo sets on Friday night pay tribute to Alligator Records, which remains strong and forward-looking— headliner Shemekia Copeland has grown into an eloquent stylist of roots music and Americana. And the side stages showcase plenty of younger artists.

The bookings on those stages seem to rely more heavily than normal on the usual suspects from around town, but they’re augmented by enough extraordinary talents to keep most traditionalists and even some progressives satisﬁed—including John Primer, Lazy Lester, Teeny Tucker (daughter of Tommy Tucker of “Hi-Heel Sneakers” fame), Delta folklorist James “Super Chikan” Johnson, Texas vocal powerhouse Diunna Greenleaf, saxophonist Eddie Shaw and his Wolf Gang, and Mississippi stalwart Eddie Cotton. We’ve singled out six festival sets—Primer, Lazy Lester, Irma Thomas, Wee Willie Walker, and the tributes to Rush and Clay—for special attention. They represent much of the lineup’s diversity in style and era, and every one belongs on your list of the weekend’s must-see performances.

The layout of the grounds hasn’t changed since last year. The Crossroads Stage is in the rose garden south of Jackson, near Lake Shore Drive. The Jackson Mississippi Rhythm & Blues Stage is near the intersection of Columbus and Harrison. The Petrillo Music Shell, where most of the bigger names play, is just northeast of Columbus and Jackson. The Front Porch Stage, which features mostly acoustic artists and smaller bands, is on the lawn south of Jackson and east of Columbus. On Columbus between Jackson and Monroe, nonproﬁt organizations that sponsor or support the blues will set up tents, and two of them—the Windy City Blues Society and Fernando Jones’s Blues Kids Foundation—will present live blues all weekend. All music is free. —DAVID WHITEIS

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The Louisiana native’s Blues Festival appearance is a historic occasion. 1W3 %J% I< #A\

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By DAVID WHITEIS LOUISIANA-BASED GUITARIST and harpist Leslie Johnson got the nickname “Lazy Lester” in 1957, ostensibly because Excello Records producer Jay Miller thought it suited Johnson’s relaxed style, influenced by Chicagoan Jimmy Reed. But as primitive (or “lazy”) as that style might’ve seemed to opportunistic whites such as Miller (who also released virulently racist music on his Reb Rebel label), it proved commercially viable and artistically signiﬁcant.

In the hands of Lester and his contemporaries (including Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lonesome Sundown), it evolved into the regional subgenre eventually dubbed “swamp blues.” Though it never caught on nationwide, it became extremely popular in the south, especially in the Gulf Coast area. Later, its meld of atavism and vivacity caught the attention of collectors and folklorists—aﬁcionados now revere its progenitors alongside the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

Lester’s 15-year tenure at Excello resulted in some of the genre’s most significant recordings, among them the Reed-like “Whoa Now” (spiced with urban-sounding horn work), “I’m a Lover, Not a Fighter” (with a deep-twanging guitar line reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s signature honky-tonk boogie), and 1967’s rollicking “Pondarosa Stomp” (which has since lent its name, with the spelling ﬁxed, to one of the nation’s top rootsmusic festivals, held annually in New Orleans). He also worked as a sideman for other Excello artists, contributing guitar, harmonica, and percussion (including drums, wood blocks, cardboard boxes, folded-up newspapers, and even the studio walls). He mentored some of the label’s white country artists behind the scenes—he’s a lifelong lover of the genre—but predictably, Miller balked at allowing him to participate in their sessions. After leaving Excello in the mid-60s, Lester drifted away from music. It wasn’t until the early 80s that he staged a full-scale comeback, recording Lazy Lester Rides Again for British label Blue Horizon (released on King Snake in the States). It won a W.C. Handy Award for Contemporary Blues Album of the Year, and over the next decade or so, Lester followed it with releases on Flyright, Alligator, and several other imprints. He was inducted into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 1998, and he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 2004 concert ﬁlm Lightning in a Bottle. It’s unclear why Chicago guitarist Rockin’ Johnny is paired with Lester for his festival set, since he has no apparent connection to the swamp-blues tradition (though he can turn in a decent Jimmy Reed imitation). That hardly matters, though. Lazy Lester is the sole surviving representative of an important and often underrecognized generation of postwar blues stylists, and his appearance at this year’s Blues Fest is more than a highlight—it’s a historic occasion. v

Lazy Lester (with guest Rockin’ Johnny) performs Saturday, June 11, at 3 PM on the Front Porch Stage.

CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL

Otis Clay recorded some of the world’s most enduring deep soul and gospel

This tribute set, anchored by his ﬁnal working band, features Cicero Blake, Theo Huﬀ, Willie Rogers of the Soul Stirrers, and more. By DAVID WHITEIS Otis Clay in 1988

ò SUN-TIMES’S PRINT COLLECTION

OTIS CLAY’S EARLY CAREER spanned two golden eras of modern black music—gospel in the late 50s and early 60s and deep soul in the 60s and 70s—but he didn’t stop building on his legacy when those decades had passed. His version of Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” the title track of a 2007 album he released on his own Echo label, was nominated for a Grammy. In 2013 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. And this May, a few months after his death on January 8, he won two Blues Music Awards—Soul Blues Male

Artist of the Year and Soul Blues Album of the Year, the latter for This Time for Real, his 2015 collaboration with Billy Price. Born in Waxhaw, Mississippi, in 1942, Clay moved to Chicago in the mid-50s and began singing gospel with groups around town. Thanks to his muscular baritone and emotionally fraught delivery, by 1964 he’d been recruited by the nationally renowned Sensational Nightingales—even though he was already contemplating a “crossover” to secular music. He signed with the Chicago-based

One-derful! label, for which he began to record in 1965. His One-derful! output is uniformly excellent, but it wasn’t until 1967’s “That’s How It Is (When You’re in Love)” that he charted nationally. Over the next decade or so, he continued to chart sporadically, six times in all—the 1972 Hi Records single “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” which peaked at number 24 on the R&B charts, was his best-selling. Despite that relatively meager commercial success, though, Clay’s early sides are among the most praised in the deep-soul canon. And neither his prowess nor his commitment diminished over the years, which he proved with latter-day outings such as the aforementioned “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” “I Can Take You to Heaven Tonight,” and a torrid remake of O.V. Wright’s “A Nickel and a Nail,” as well as gospel gems such as “Sending Up My Timber,” “When the Gates Swing Open,” and his trademark “If I Could Reach Out (And Help Somebody).” Clay continued to record and perform spiritual material until the end, and he could be ﬁerce in his denunciation of what he saw as the moral and aesthetic corruption of modern R&B and southern soul. But he never gave up the show lounge for the pulpit: with outings such as “Steal Away to the Hideaway,” a 2011 duet with Saint Louis songstress Uvee Hayes, he showed that even the godliest soul man could strut his rakish side, as long as he did so with class and style. Featured vocalists at this tribute set, anchored by Clay’s ﬁnal working band, include his contemporary Cicero Blake and 28-yearold Theo Huff, one of the most promising (and youngest) straight-ahead soul vocalists on the contemporary scene. As a special treat, gospel legend Willie Rogers of the Soul Stirrers will make a rare appearance, providing a celebratory spiritual context in keeping with Clay’s musical and personal legacies. v

The Otis Clay Tribute Band performs Saturday, June 11, at 4:15 PM on the Crossroads Stage. The lineup consists of guitarist Kenneth “Hollywood” Scott, drummer Mark Clay, bassist Joe Pratt, trumpeter Darryl Thompson, saxophonist Ernest Thomas, trombonist Fred Johnson, keyboardist Dedrick Blanchard, and singers Teresa Davis, Diana Simon, and Diane Madison. The guest vocalists are Cicero Blake, Theo Huff, New Orleans Beau, and Willie Rogers.

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

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Twin Cities soul veteran Wee Willie Walker makes his overdue Chicago debut His newest album, If Nothing Ever Changes, has ﬁnally earned him the acclaim to match his talent. By BILL DAHL AS HE NEARS THE 50TH anniversary of his first recording session, Wee Willie Walker is hotter than ever. Long the top soul singer in the Twin Cities, Walker is basking in the acclaim that greeted his 2015 album, If Nothing Ever Changes (Little Village Foundation), which was nominated for a Blues Music Award. On Saturday he and his band We “R” will heat up the stage at Petrillo. Produced by veteran blues harpist Rick Estrin and guitarist Kid Andersen, the album has given his career a welcome boost. “It has made a big difference. Otherwise I wouldn’t be in Chicago,” Walker says. “That’s a big festival, and without that CD I never would have even been mentioned for that.” Though born in 1941 in Hernando, Mississippi, Walker is a product of Memphis,

where his schoolmates included future soul stars Spencer and Percy Wiggins as well as Ovations lead singer Louis Williams. In his early teens, Walker joined gospel group the Redemption Harmonizers, but he was soon ready for new vistas. “Every summer we would travel together,” he says. “They showed up in Minnesota once too often, because I fell in love with it the ﬁrst time I got there. And when they brought it up again and asked everybody if they wanted to go back there, I told them, ‘Yes, I want to go back. And if you do go back, I’m not coming back to Memphis!’” Walker settled in the Twin Cities in 1959 and joined another sanctified outfit. Then a chance encounter in a Laundromat with fellow singer Tim Eason pulled him into

the secular Valdons, and he didn’t return to Memphis until the mid-60s. There Walker met successful R&B songwriter Roosevelt Jamison, who introduced him to an even more proliﬁc songwriter, George Jackson. “They dragged me over to Goldwax Records so that [label owners] Quinton Claunch and Doc Russell could hear me. I had three weeks of vacation time in Memphis, and they signed me to a contract that same day. And for that whole three weeks I was in the studio, trying to come up with some material to release. I never really visited my family.” Walker was in good company: his Goldwax labelmates included James Carr, Spencer Wiggins, and the Ovations. Walker’s 1967 debut single paired a stunning remake of O.V. Wright’s “There Goes My Used to Be” and a soulful reworking of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” “They chose them. I had nothing to do with it,” he says. “Whatever they wanted me to do, that’s what I did.” Instead of issuing Walker’s ’68 encore, which paired another stirring ballad, “You Name It, I’ve Had It,” with the surging “You’re Running Too Fast,” Goldwax licensed it to Chicago’s Checker label. “I didn’t know it, but they were actually doing their very best to get me the exposure that they thought I needed,” says Walker. “They wanted me to come back to Memphis to pursue my career, and I couldn’t do it because I had a job and a family.” Checker also released the pounding “A Lucky Loser,” cut in Muscle Shoals and featuring Duane Allman on lead guitar. Walker delivered a bone-chilling rendition of the country ballad “Warm to Cool to Cold” on the ﬂip. From the 70s onward, Walker sang with a series of popular Minneapolis R&B bands. In the 2000s, he recorded one album of his own and three more with the Butanes. But thanks in large part to the success of If Nothing Ever Changes, Walker’s long-overdue Chicago debut will take place in front of tens of thousands of people. Asked how that feels, he replies, “How can you ever begin to imagine?” v

Wee Willie Walker & We “R” perform Saturday, June 11, at 5:30 PM at the Petrillo Music Shell.

CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL

Irma Thomas at the 2007 Chicago Blues Festival ò CHRIS SWEDA/SUN-TIMES

Irma Thomas extends her benevolent reign

The Soul Queen of New Orleans has been recording for almost six decades—and singing at the Blues Festival since 1989.

By BILL DAHL A CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL favorite who ﬁrst costarred at Petrillo in 1989 and headlined most recently in 2013, Irma Thomas radiates soulful onstage goodness. And our city’s capricious climate has taught her to arrive carrying several changes of wardrobe. “A couple of times before, I wound up having to go and buy an outﬁt because it was too chilly for what I had,” she says. “I didn’t bring anything warm enough!” The Soul Queen of New Orleans, now 75, has remained relevant and contemporary throughout 57 years of recording. Thomas made a series of acclaimed albums for Round-

er in the 90s and 00s, and her most recent release, 2008’s Simply Grand, paired her with 13 high-proﬁle Crescent City pianists. “I pay attention. That’s all I can do,” says Thomas, whose longtime producer, Scott Billington, played a large role in her Rounder output. “He listens to the artists,” she says. “He’s been blessed with that ability to be perceptive of what the artist is capable of doing.” Thomas’s vocal approach is an uplifting hybrid of the gospel she sang as a child in her Baptist choir and the blues she absorbed around the house. “My dad used to play a lot

of Percy Mayﬁeld stuff,” she says. Thomas became pregnant at age 14 but kept singing. In 1959, when she sat in with Tommy Ridgley’s band while waitressing at the Pimlico Club in New Orleans, her boss didn’t appreciate it. “They started asking for the singing waitress. He found that disturbing,” Thomas says. “He said if he caught me singing again, he was going to ﬁre me.” She sang anyway and got canned, but Ridgley secured her an audition with local label Ron Records. “He saw something in me that I didn’t even recognize I had,” Thomas says. Her sassy debut, “Don’t Mess With My Man,” was a national hit in

spring 1960: “The same day I auditioned, I was given the song.” From there, Thomas hooked up with Minit Records, where her labelmates included Ernie K-Doe and Aaron Neville. Proliﬁc young pianist Allen Toussaint handled A&R. “He was the writer and he was also the producer, so we would all gather in his parents’ living room on Earhart Boulevard and he would teach us the various songs that he wanted each one of us to record,” she says. “It was like one big happy family.” Toussaint wrote the wistful “Cry On” and “It’s Raining” for Thomas in 1961. She encored the next year with Toussaint’s “Ruler of My Heart,” transformed by Otis Redding into his hit “Pain in My Heart.” “I opened for him in a little town called Slidell, Louisiana, at a club called the Branch Inn,” says Thomas. “He heard me singing it. He said he was going to do it. I didn’t think he was going to change the lyrics, but he did.” Thomas wrote her anguished 1964 smash “Wish Someone Would Care” from personal experience. “I was kind of mad at the man that I was with at the time,” she says. By then, she was with Imperial Records and recording in Los Angeles. “Everybody worked with me, just like Allen had worked with me,” she says. “I learned the songs and I listened to the arrangements, and we went into the studio and recorded them.” One of Thomas’s Imperial follow-ups was the Jerry Ragovoy anthem “Time Is on My Side” in 1964. The Rolling Stones’ smash cover quickly killed her version, and Thomas dropped the song from her repertoire for more than 30 years. Now she’s philosophical about that misfortune. “All you can do is record the songs,” she says. “You don’t know what’s going to be a hit or not.” More than a half century later, Thomas continues to take an undiminished joy in performing—selling records is a different undertaking. “When it stops being fun,” she promises, “I’ll quit!” v

Irma Thomas performs Saturday, June 11, at 6:30 PM at the Petrillo Music Shell.

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

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John Primer sustains the living heritage of the blues

The Chicago guitarist honors his mentors—including Muddy Waters and Magic Slim—by serving as a role model for young musicians. By DAVID WHITEIS NOW IN HIS EARLY 70S, John Primer continues to deliver high-quality sets rooted in postwar blues but spiced with originality. He’s an eloquent songwriter, and even when he plays other people’s material, he avoids the overcooked chestnuts (“Sweet Home Chicago” et al.) that cliche-weary fans have

taken to calling the “set list from hell.” To say that Primer stands on the shoulders of giants isn’t empty rhetoric—his list of early mentors and associates reads like a partial roll call for the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame. His ﬁrst major gig, in the early 70s, was at Theresa’s Lounge, home base of harp leg-

end Junior Wells. The house band also included Muddy Waters alumnus Sammy Lawhorn, a versatile guitarist Primer has credited with inspiring him to take up the slide—now one of his trademark techniques. He remained at Theresa’s, listening and learning and honing his chops, till Waters recruited him in 1980. After Waters became too ill to perform in ’82, Primer hooked up with yet another Chicago blues master, the incendiary Magic Slim, with whom he played for about 13 years. Primer’s debut recording under his own name was on a blues anthology issued by Austrian label Wolf in 1991; in 1993, he released Stuff You Got to Watch, his ﬁrst full-length, on Chicago’s Earwig imprint. By 1995, when he recorded The Real Deal, he knew it was time to establish himself on his own. “I hated to leave [Magic Slim],” he told me in a 2009 interview for Living Blues. “We had such a good thing going for us. But . . . be there so long as you can, then you gotta go. Let somebody else learn.” That’s not a casual statement coming from Primer. Having had his own career enriched so deeply by mentors, he takes very seriously his responsibilities as a role model for young musicians. “We’re teachers now,” he explained in that same Living Blues article. “Teach you ’bout the blues. Somebody wanna move along—think you’ll make more [money on your own]? Go ahead. Somebody else [comes in], teach them how to play it. Keep the blues goin’.” That’s exactly what Primer has done through the years. His recorded output has included original material, imaginatively chosen covers, and tributes to the likes of Waters and slide master Elmore James. Primer’s slide work is supple and intense; his singlestring leads balance precision with dexterity as they dance through his sidemen’s straightforward boogie shuff les; and his sensual, earthy vocals are toughened with aggression. It’s a blend of roots and innovation, in other words, and it exempliﬁes what the term “living heritage” should mean. v

John Primer & the Real Deal Blues Band perform Sunday, June 12, at 3 PM on the Front Porch Stage.

CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL

Otis Rush in 1995 ò SUN-TIMES’S PRINT COLLECTION

Otis Rush recorded the harrowing blues that established his legacy 50 years ago in Chicago He’s been sidelined by a stroke, but more than 25 musicians will pay tribute to him at this year’s festival. By DAVID WHITEIS OTIS RUSH RELEASED some of the most harrowing, emotionally intense blues ever recorded during his late-50s tenure at Chicago’s Cobra label. Though he continued to perform and record, sometimes brilliantly, until his 2004 stroke, those early sides remain the cornerstone of his legacy. Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1934, Rush moved to Chicago in 1948. At ﬁrst, he considered himself primarily a harmonica player, but he honed his guitar chops, incorporating progressive, jazz-inﬂuenced ideas he absorbed from the recordings of T-Bone Walker. By the mid-50s, he was leading his own band (as “Lit-

tle Otis”), and in 1956, Willie Dixon brought him to the west-side recording studio owned by Cobra proprietor Eli Toscano. There, along with fellow young lions Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, Rush helped develop a high-energy sound that emphasized guitar dexterity and emotional fervor, soon to be known as the “west side” style of Chicago blues—something of a misnomer, since the artists themselves performed all over town, and they didn’t live just on the west side. “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” Rush’s ﬁrst recording and Cobra’s debut, made it to number six on the R&B charts in 1956. Rush never charted

again, but he’d continue to build on the approach he used for that song: he delivered Willie Dixon’s lyrics in a tremulous wail pitched somewhere between anguish and terror, and his guitar work (though somewhat muted by the production) achieved a similar intensity. Subsequent outings, especially minor-key masterpieces such as “Double Trouble” and “My Love Will Never Die,” delved into realms of emotional devastation that few blues artists before or since have dared explore. After Cobra folded in 1959, Rush soldiered on (the 1960 Chess single “So Many Roads, So Many Trains” is a highlight), but it wasn’t till the mid-60s that he was “rediscovered” and canonized by a new generation of fans. His output over the next several decades was uneven, but at his best (1976’s Right Place, Wrong Time, 1994’s Ain’t Enough Comin’ In) he summoned enough of his genius to further his reputation, even among newcomers unfamiliar with his early work. This tribute to Rush features more than 25 musicians and singers, among them several of his Cobra-era contemporaries and younger players who carry a torch for his style. Keeping such a massive revue on track will require such logistical finesse that the show seems likely to maintain a perilous balance between inspiration and catastrophe—but in a way, that’s appropriate. Rush’s music is a front-line dispatch from psychic battleﬁelds where inspiration and catastrophe feel simultaneously imminent. It’s unclear whether the man himself will be able to attend, but friends and admirers are hoping for the best—after a life too often rocked by “double trouble,” he deserves to bask in the love and recognition of as many admirers as Grant Park can hold. v

The Blues Festival’s Otis Rush Tribute takes place Sunday, June 12, at 8 PM at the Petrillo Music Shell. Participants include Jimmy Johnson, Abb Locke, Brian Jones, Carl Weathersby, Bob Stroger, Sumito Ariyoshi, Big Ray, Eddy Clearwater, John Kattke, Mike Welch, Rawl Hardman, Harlan Terson, Bob Levis, Billy Flynn, Mike Wheeler, Lurrie Bell, Shun Kikuta, Mike Ledbetter, Eddie Shaw, Sam Burton, Willie Henderson, Diane Blue, Ronnie Earl, Anthony Palmer, Kenny Anderson, Leon Allen, Henri “Hank” Ford, and Willie Wood.

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 41

CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL

Toronzo Cannon plays Friday at SPACE in Evanston as part of a tribute to Alligator Records. ò CHRIS MONAGHAN

The blues don’t quit when Grant Park goes dark

Chicago’s blues clubs are in high gear all weekend—and some neighborhood spots are getting in on the action.

By DAVID WHITEIS

THE BLUES FESTIVAL hasn’t spawned as many satellite events around town this year as it has in years past, but for the most part that will just mean you won’t have to skip ﬁve for every one you attend—there should still be lots of memorable moments. On Wednesday, June 8, Firecat Projects hosts a Blues Fest kickoff reception for the photo exhibit “Women of the Blues: Coast to Coast Collection,” which opened May 27 and runs till June

42 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

18. The exhibit features more than 60 photographs of blueswomen, mostly shot in performance at venues in the U.S. and overseas; a percentage of the sales of prints and signed posters goes to the Koko Taylor Celebrity Aid Foundation and new affiliate Sisters of Royalty, which provides outreach, support, and networking for blueswomen. Photos from the exhibit will be displayed on the Jumbotron at Petrillo during evening events at Blues Fest.

This is always a big weekend for the city’s blues clubs, of course, and a few shows merit special attention. SPACE in Evanston honors two of Chicago’s most important blues labels: Thursday night’s Delmark Blues Bash features club owner Dave Specter and his band with special guests including Jimmy Johnson and Omar Coleman, while Friday is dedicated to Alligator Records, with headliners Toronzo Cannon and Curtis Salgado. On

Friday, Reggie’s Rock Club hosts its annual Chicago Women in the Blues Festival, featuring Holle Thee Maxwell, Mz. Peachez, Liz Mandeville, Rambling Rose, and others; next door at the Music Joint is a “Chicago blues super session” with Jimmy Johnson, Jimmy Burns, Lurrie Bell, Bob Stroger, and more. On Saturday, Lazy Lester plays the Music Joint with Eddie Taylor Jr. and the Rockin’ Johnny Band. Rosa’s Lounge has shows booked all week and weekend, but Sunday’s main attraction is especially noteworthy: Mighty Mo Rodgers, whose eclectic music and socially conscious, sometimes confrontational lyrics make him a uniquely important ﬁgure in contemporary blues. Some neighborhood venues that don’t advertise widely also deserve a mention. Hot City Lounge is again booking blues on Thursday nights, and longtime favorite Jo Jo Murray has reclaimed the gig. At the Water Hole on Thursday, a vocalist named Mississippi, who sings in the style of Howlin’ Wolf, will hold forth. On Friday night, Mzz Reese with Joe B. & the Shotgun Band headline at Dr. J’s Place. And a Saturday-night birthday party at the JLM Abundant Life Center, featuring Willie White, Westside Slick Rick, Mzz Reese, Theo Huff, and others, is open to the public (for a $15 cover). B&B Madison Entertainment presents Little Harvey on Friday, Larry Taylor (son of famous guitarist Eddie Taylor) on Saturday, and soul-blues singer Willie White on Sunday. Friday and Sunday at the Odyssey East, vocalists Sydney Joe Qualls and New Orleans Beau are backed by the Source One Band, anchored by bassist Joe Pratt and featuring the esteemed Sir Walter Scott on guitar. (On Sunday, Pratt oversees the dedication of the Otis Clay VIP section, which will accommodate special parties and events.) Also on Sunday, lead guitarist “Killer” Ray Allison (former drummer for Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Buddy Guy, among others) performs at For the Good Times Lounge. As always, call ahead to make sure the show is really happening. v

CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL

Lurrie Bell plays Friday at Reggie’s Music Joint. ò COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

WEDNESDAY8 Blues Fest kickoﬀ reception for the exhibit “Women of the Blues” 7 PM, Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen, regular hours Mon-Sat 10 AM-4 PM, 773-3425381, free, all ages

THURSDAY9 Jo Jo Murray 9:30 PM, Hot City Lounge, 7432 S. Racine, 773-2249583, free, 21+ Mississippi 9 PM, the Water Hole, 1400 S. Western, 312-243-7988, free, 21+ Dave Specter with guests including Jimmy Johnson and Omar Coleman 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, 847-492-8860, $15-25, all ages

FRIDAY10 Toronzo Cannon, Curtis Salgado 10 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, 847-492-8860, $15-$25, all ages Chicago blues super session

with Jimmy Johnson, Jimmy Burns, Lurrie Bell, Bob Stroger, and others 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, 312-949-0120, $15, 21+ Chicago Women in the Blues Festival with Holle Thee Maxwell, Mz. Peachez, Liz Mandeville, Rambling Rose, and others 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2109 S. State, 312-949-0121, $15, $10 in advance, 17+ Little Harvey 9 PM, B&B Madison Entertainment, 4422 W. Madison, 773-398-3040, $10, 21+ Sydney Joe Qualls and New Orleans Beau with the Source One Band 9 PM, Odyssey East, 9942 S. Torrence, 773-530-7543, free, 21+ Mzz Reese with Joe B. & the Shotgun Band 9:30 PM, Dr. J’s Place, 3241 W. Chicago, 773-8362140, free, 21+

SATURDAY11 Lazy Lester, Eddie Taylor Jr., the Rockin’ Johnny Band 9:30 PM,

Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, 312-949-0120, $15, 21+ Larry Taylor 9 PM, B&B Madison Entertainment, 4422 W. Madison, 773-398-3040, $10, 21+ Willie White, Westside Slick Rick, Mzz Reese, Theo Huﬀ, and others 8:30 PM, JLM Abundant Life Center, 2622 W. Jackson, ticket info 312-945-2503, venue 773-658-3679, $15, all ages

SUNDAY12 “Killer” Ray Allison 9:30 PM, For the Good Times Lounge, 5545 S. Damen, 773-498-3313, free, 21+ Mighty Mo Rodgers 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge, 3420 W. Armitage, 773-342-0452, $10-$15, 21+ Sydney Joe Qualls and New Orleans Beau with the Source One Band 8 PM, Odyssey East, 9942 S. Torrence, 773-530-7543, free, 21+ Willie White 9 PM, B&B Madison Entertainment, 4422 W. Madison, 773-398-3040, $10, 21+

NOVEMBER 16

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12A SIDEO’CLOCK TRACK SERIES OF JAM WITH YOUR LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

THEBLEADER.COM JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 43

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of June 9

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

Monstrous and fragile, Nothing’s new Tired of Tomorrow writhes with apathy

Gregory Porter ò SHAWN PETERS

THURSDAY9 Chris Cohen Deeper and Blind Moon open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N, Western, $10. After years of pinging between bands as a sideman while leading Cryptacize, his own great combo with singer Nedelle Torrisi, Chris Cohen has found a sweet spot by going it all alone. The new As if Apart (Captured Tracks) is his second lovely solo effort—he plays and sings everything—filled with insinuating, soothing pop melodies that recall the glory days of 70s AM pop radio. His nasal croon resembles the Kinks’ Ray Davies at times, but there’s a decidedly modest, homemade vibe to the proceedings that seems to suggest a hesitance to rock out. The songs are all strong enough to survive a full-band treatment in a club, and I remain charmed by Cohen’s narcotic delivery, a kind of Laurel Canyon fantasy soured by a deliberate lack of resolution. —PETER MARGASAK ò BEN RAYNER

NOTHING, ABUSE, WRONG

Fri 6/10, 9 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $18, $16 in advance. 17+

SHOEGAZE WAS ALREADY PLENTY NIHILISTIC during its inception a couple of decades ago—what with the towers of deafening, solemn guitar and the wandering paths of doleful, detached vocals—but the revivalists in Philadelphia’s Nothing are much grimmer than your average Ride and more demoralized than Slowdive (with whom they brieﬂy sparred on Twitter a couple years back). The new Tired of Tomorrow (Relapse) says it all right there in the title, and front man Dominic Palermo—who no doubt experienced the drearier side of the planet during the couple of years he spent in prison for stabbing someone—writes tracks that sound like they’re bleeding out, the monolithic melodies carrying a sense of dread rather than tempered zeal. Guitar leads writhe out of the turmoil on tracks like “The Dead Are Dumb,” while “Vertigo Flowers” plays like a sad-sack melodic pop song until Palermo rips the cord and the whir becomes a trudge of ringing cymbals and contorted guitar accents. One of Tired of Tomorrow’s best tracks, the notso-subtle “Eaten by Worms” is simultaneously monstrous and fragile—not unlike much of the record—but it’s also one of the more explicit lessons in how Palermo uses apathy and detachment to actually get to the crux of his torment. Nothing also plays a free in-store at Reckless Records in Wicker Park (1379 N. Milwaukee) today at 5 PM. —KEVIN WARWICK

44 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

Rock, Pop, Etc As Is, Surrenderson, Ferns, Impulsive Hearts 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Johnny Azari 10 PM, Jerry’s Barenaked Ladies, OMD, Howard Jones 6:30 PM, Ravinia Festival Big Something, Liquid Soul 8 PM, Martyrs’ Blasters, Chicago Blues Angels 8 PM, FitzGerald’s Broken Cycles, Mawrcrest, Mr. Phylzzz, 521 Briar 7 PM, Subterranean Cold Country, Chris Coleslaw 9 PM, GMan Tavern Gigi D’Allesio 7:30 PM, Arcada Theatre b Fire It Up, Gallery 81, Fifty-One Lincoln, Looms, Big Black Bird, Phonographs 7 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Future Laureates, Hollows, Stampy 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Harvey Fox, Iverson, Trash Babies, Lever 8 PM, Township Jmsn, Tiﬀany Gouche, Drea Smith 8 PM, Double Door, 18+ Jason Lescalleet, Hive Mind, Circuit Des Yeux 9 PM, Burlington Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Flavr Blue 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Oxford & Co., Caleb Groh, Fleeting Suns 8 PM, Schubas

ALL AGES

Rendezvous 8 PM, Cubby Bear Son Mute, Redline Messiah, Propane! Propane!, Brain Vacation 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Tame Impala, Benjamin Booker 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion Trainwreck Symphony, Marky McFly, Jeshawn & Million Dollar Smile 8 PM, Red Line Tap Twilight Sad, Wingtips 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Dance DJ SJ, Jena Max, Mutilato 10 PM, Smart Bar F Graves, Edamame, Karol Fox, Ricky One Time, Composure, Solaris Hilton 9 PM, East Room Switches of Eastwick: Jarvi, Sold 9:30 PM, Whistler F Tommy Trash 10 PM, the Mid Folk & Country Sam Bush, Grahams 8 PM, City Winery b Devil in a Woodpile 6 PM, Hideout Jeﬀ Givens & the Mugshot Saints, Clay Parker & Jodi James, Laura Joy 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Blues, Gospel, and R&B Lee Fields & the Expressions, Makaya McCraven 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park F b Marty Sammon Noon, PianoForte Studios F b Dave Specter, Jimmy Johnson, Omar Coleman, Corey Dennison, Demetria Taylor 8 PM, SPACE b Mike Wheeler, Marty Sammon 8 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Jazz Katie Ernst & James Falzone 7:30 PM, Comfort Station F b Dustin Laurenzi, Lane Beckstrom, and Matt Carroll; Bowlcut 9 PM, Elastic b International Devon Brown & Love This 9 PM, Wild Hare Los Amigos Invisibles 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Alfonso Ponticelli & Swing Gitan 9:30 PM, California Clipper

FRIDAY10 The Notations 8 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $10-$20. b Chicago wasn’t lacking for vocal groups in the 60s and 70s. The Notations, for one, formed in high school in 1965 and in late 1970 broke through nationally with their quintessential soul ballad for the Twinight label, “I’m Still Here.” They stayed together for about seven more years, releasing an album on the Curtis Mayfield-owned Gemigo imprint, and though they only had one other soul Top 40 hit (1975’s “It Only Hurts for a Little While”), they continued to release classic records that defined Windy City soul—on the funky “Super People” lead singer Clifford Curry duplicates Mayfield’s falsetto down to the last syllable. A re-formed version of the Notations has been performing sporadically since the 90s, including a highly successful 2009 appearance at Park West as part of the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul Revue, where they joined Syl Johnson, Renaldo Domino, and a score of others from the Twinight stable. Here they’ll strut their stuff for a full set. Seemingly the only Chicago vintage soul singers who still gig regularly are the ones who are partially blues influenced. This is good for veterans like Holly Maxwell and the recently departed Otis Clay, but we haven’t seen enough of the sweet harmony groups around town.

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

For that reason, this Notations show is an Event. Prior to tonight’s performance, a meet and greet with the group will take place at 3 PM at Hyde Park Records (1377 E. 53rd). —JAMES PORTER

Nothing See Pick of the Week. Abuse and Wrong open. 9 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $18, $16 in advance. 17+ Gregory Porter Marquis Hill Blacktet open. 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $25$85. A Singer Gregory Porter achieved remarkable success with his fine 2013 debut for Blue Note, Liquid Spirit. The hard-hitting collection found an impressive new junction between 70s R&B and jazz—driven by a clear sense of righteousness, a la Bill Withers—and sold more than a million copies worldwide, netting the vocalist a Grammy. I’m not a big fan of contemporary jazz vocals, but Porter made me a believer, especially after a dynamite performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival later that year. He and his longtime producer, Kamau Kenyatta, clearly enjoyed the taste of success, because his new album Take Me to the Alley aims for a wider audience, edging away from jazz and even vintage soul toward a much more contemporary R&B sound. In fact, two tracks, “Holding On” and “Insanity,” are reprised at the end of the album with radio-friendly mixes featuring vocal cameos by, respectively, Kem and Lalah Hathaway. Porter isn’t solely concerned with his mass appeal, however: the empathic “Don’t Lose Your Steam” backs up its inspirational message with churning energy, while “Fan the Flames” swings like an Oscar Brown Jr. protest theme (rather than lighting a fuse he asks listeners to “raise your fists in the air and be sweet”). Porter sounds terrific throughout, employing his rich depth with gravitas and a killer sense of pitch, but many of the compositions fall flat, relying more on their intimate mood than on anything distinctive melodically or dynamically. Still, I’d put my money on Porter finding a way to make even those weaker songs connect from the stage. —PETER MARGASAK

Joey Purp Sonny Digital, Lakim, and Lucki open. 7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $17 in advance. b Chicago rapper Joey Purp rolled out the big guns for his proper solo debut mixtape, the new iiiDrops. It’s stacked with immaculate instrumentals by some of the brightest beat makers in town (Knox Fortune, Peter Cottontale, Thelonious Martin, OddCouple) and some of the most gifted Chicago MCs of this generation (Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, Mick Jenkins, Saba). But Purp is undoubtedly in command of the blockbuster lineup. He balances world weariness and braggadocious playfulness with aplomb, giving credence both to his boasts about rap’s peak and his memories of a time when ﬁnding handguns and navigating dilapidated projects clouded whatever visions he could form of his future. Purp’s approachable swagger especially elevates iiiDrops. His performances on “Girls @,” “Photobooth,” and “Cornerstore” are so alive

FRIDAY, JUNE 10 8PM

and unmeditated it feels like he’s performing right in front of you, vigorous and vital. He’s got chameleon-like qualities with his energy too, doubling down on nonchalance for the drowsy “Deja Vu,” a recent collaboration with opener Lucki, the rapper-producer formerly known as Lucki Ecks. On his March EP, Son of Sam, Lucki wades through mucky lo-fi instrumentals, emerging with sinister pluck and charm on “Syrup Talk.” —LEOR GALIL Rock, Pop, Etc Daniel Bachman, Jim Becker 9 PM, Hideout Bambi Raptor, Markit Eight, Blue Mud, Wired Minds, Cassettes on Tape 8 PM, Double Door Cults, Mrs. Magician, Fee Lion 9 PM, Cubby Bear Dead Persona, JD’s Revenge, Dark Heart News 6 PM, Red Line Tap Horrible, No Men, Roach Beach, Beachoven 8 PM, Burlington Jevon Jackson 10 PM, Jerry’s Marah 8 PM, also Sat 6/11, 8 PM, Schubas Mothxr, Shah Jahan 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ New Canyons, Alter Der Ruine, Twilight Idols 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Sam Pace & the Gilded Grit, Rocket Cathedral, Alibi 9 PM, Martyrs’ Red Elvises 9 PM, FitzGerald’s Santah, Kickback, Archie Powell & the Exports, Glam Camp, Congregation 8 PM, 1st Ward Silver Abuse, Hymen Moments 9 PM, Liar’s Club Swim Deep, Vista Kicks, Strangers You Know 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Vamos, Pearly Early, Abcaba 10 PM, Cole’s F Victory Halls, Between California and Summer 7:30 PM, Wire The Weight 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery b Whitesnake 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino Wizard Rifle, Barren Heir, Den 9 PM, Empty Bottle Hip-Hop Neak, Scienze, Rashid Hadee, Chris Crack 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Dance Cosmin TRG, Jeff Derringer 10 PM, Smart Bar Dangerwayne, Joes Domingo, Nikho, Gabriel Blu, Richie Olivo, Sendin, Bentley Dean 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Guy J, Lost & Found 10 PM, Sound-Bar Paco Osuna 10 PM, Spy Bar Folk & Country Susie Blue & the Lonesome Fellas 8 PM, PianoForte Studios b Scott Hamilton 8 PM, Joe’s Blues, Gospel, and R&B Toronzo Cannon, Curtis Salgado 10 PM, SPACE b Jimmy Johnson, Jimmy Burns, Lurrie Bell, Bob Stroger, Brother John Kattke, Dave Katzman, David Sims, Melvin Smith 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Larry McCray, Ronnie Hicks, Guy King 6 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Carl Weathersby Band 9:30 PM, also Sat 6/11, 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jazz Joel Paterson Organ Quartet 9 PM, Green Mill Experimental Katinka Klejin & Bill MacKay 8 PM, Experimental Sound Studio b Daniel Wyche, Akosuen, Ape Forward 9 PM, Elastic b

Maxence Cyrin SUNDAY, JUNE 12 5 & 8:30PM

Béla Fleck & The Flecktones at Thalia Hall • 1807 S Allport Ave

FRIDAY, JUNE 17 8PM

Mark Lanegan FRIDAY, JUNE 24 8PM SATURDAY, JUNE 25 8PM

Spring Awakening ò ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

Bob Schneider

with special guest Steve Dawson

SUNDAY, JULY 10 5 & 8PM

FESTIVALS

Slam some ribs and get down in dubstep

Sarah Jarosz SATURDAY, AUGUST 13 7 & 10PM

Hot Tuna Acoustic SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 8PM

Ribfest Headliners Ivan & Alyosha, Coin, and Jukebox the Ghost will have to compete with smoked pork, which might be the main draw of this North Center staple. 6/10-6/12, Lincoln between Irving Park and Berteau, ribfest-chicago.com, $5 suggested donation. Chicago Blues Festival See page 35 for our full coverage. Headliners include Shemekia Copeland, Fred Wesley, and Diunna Greenleaf. 6/10-6/12, Grant Park, chicagobluesfestival.us. F Spring Awakening The massive celebration of electronic music just keeps growing, and this year it’s booked Kaskade, Crystal Castles, Deadmau5, Jamie XX, Flying Lotus, Claude Von Stroke, A-Trak, and Flux Pavilion, among many others. 6/10-6/12, Jackson Park, springawakeningfestival.com, $199-$250. 18+ Remix Chicago All sorts of remixed, reused, and recycled materials are hawked at this green festival. Bands paired with the festivities include Cults, Moving Units, and Shannon & the Clams. 6/11-6/12, Milwaukee and Fullerton, remixchicago.com, donation requested.

Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

6/10 Global Dance Party: David Antonio y su Orquesta 6/11 Melanie Budd / Kathy Greenholdt 6/12 Richard Shindell 6/17 Global Dance Party: Peruvian Folkdance Center

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

6/15 House of Waters 6/22 La Chispa & Compañia

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG MUSIC • CRAFT BEER • LOCAL FOOD

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JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC continued from 45

The ensembles that multi-instrumentalist Ben Vida played in during his sojourn in Chicago varied so drastically in sound and methodology that you had to wonder what he was up to. He played folktinged minimalist compositions in Town & Country; quiet, freely improvised music in Pillow; Steely Dan-like pop in Central Falls; and ecstatic, electro-acoustic psychedelia in his mostly solo project Bird Show. In a recent interview published by Blouin Artinfo, he recalls that time as a series of investigations. “I was always interested in sound, in form and content—and concepts, too, frameworks that you would improvise within or compose within.” Since Vida left town in 2008, the sound of his music has changed, but his interests in form and concept persist. His recent works combine analog electronics with wordless voices; Reducing the Tempo to Zero, the one he’ll present today, explores the boundary between performance and installation art. The fourhour-long composition combines fixed electronic sounds with the utterances of Vida, Dan Mohr, Nina Dante, and Melina Ausikaitis, who sometimes join in with the prerecorded elements, and sometimes drop out. Since the audience can wander in and out at will, each member could potentially experience a diﬀerent beginning and ending. This is the ﬁnal concert of Lampo’s spring season; note the early start time. —BILL MEYER

International David Antonio y su Orquesta 8:30 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Indika 9 PM, Wild Hare Radio Free Honduras, Quin Kirchner Group 9 PM, California Clipper Classical Andrea Bocelli 8 PM, Allstate Arena Maxence Cyrin 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Shani Diluka Piano. 6 PM, Ravinia Festival b Los Angeles Master Chorale 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival b Fairs & Festivals Chicago Women in the Blues Festival: Black Cat Joan Gand, Hollee Thee Maxwell, Liz Mandeville & the Blue Points, Countess, Mz. Peachez, Tracee Adams, Ivy Ford, Donna Herula, Dia Madden, Ramblin’ Rose, Ellen Miller 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+

SATURDAY11 Hot Mix 5 Festival Noon, McCormick Place, 2301 S. King, $50-$150. b Legendary Chicago club the Warehouse—as well as informal parties throughout the south side—acted as house-music incubators, but early 80s DJ team the Hot Mix 5 helped the sound become an inextricable part of Chicago culture. Founding members Farley Keith (aka Farley “Jackmaster” Funk), Mickey “Mixin” Oliver, Ralphi Rosario, Kenny “Jammin” Jason, and Scott “Smokin” Silz had a secret weapon: radio. The Hot Mix 5 team first held it down in 1981 on the Saturday-night mix show on now-defunct radio station WBMX, and their embrace of house music led the listening public to embrace them. (As DJ International founder Rocky Jones told Greg Kot in a Tribune 1990 feature on house music, the Hot Mix 5 “took house to the people in a major way.”) You don’t have to dig far to find a litany of examples of the collective’s influence—techno originators Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson would drive in from Detroit just to get the Hot Mix 5’s radio signal, for instance, while contemporary Evanston success Kaskade grew up listening to the program. The original five, their acolytes and later-generation members, and handfuls of Chicago house heavies—including Marshall Jefferson and hip-house originator Fast Eddie—celebrate the DJ team’s 35-year anniversary with a single-day festival at McCormick Place. It’s spread out over six stages and 12 hours, and organizers expect to attract 40,000 attendees—though that number feels small in comparison to the untold number of Chicagoans who consumed all things Hot Mix 5 during their heyday. —LEOR GALIL

Nick Millevoi’s Desertion Trio Katie Young and Michael Vallera open. 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b On most recordings I’ve heard by Philadephia guitarist Nick Millevoi his playing is unapologetically aggressive and noisy, unleashing jaggedly lac-

46 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

erating outbursts that ﬁt neatly within the general brutal prog milieu (see: his long-running trio Many Arms). Millevoi’s playing is no less furious with free-jazz quartet Haitian Rail or when he teams up with improvisers like Toshimaru Nakamura or Dead Neanderthals. So I was pretty shocked the first time I heard the new Desertion (Shhpuma), an often melodic quartet album that showcases a reserved, atmospheric side of his music. Deftly supported by keyboardist Jamie Saft, drummer Ches Smith, and Many Arms bassist Johnny DeBlase, Millevoi carves out enough space to turn American music into one sprawling cosmic jam, balancing country with a kind of denatured funk. It’s not all chill, as opening cut “Desertion and the Arsonist’s Match” draws upon classic prog gestures, with massive organ swells from Saft, overdriven beats by Smith, and needling, upper-register leads from the guitarist—all

before segueing into one of many passages that evoke post-Morriccone renderings of the American southwest. “Just for a Moment, I Stood There in Silence” most surprised me: the tender, twangy waltz features lyric violin ﬁlls by guest June Bender and eventually veers into straight Crazy Horse territory with a luxuriantly stomping groove. On “Where They Do Their Capers,” Millevoi hovers within clouds of reverb and texture, waiting for a resolution that never arrives. His touring lineup includes DeBlase and drummer Kevin Shea of Haitian Rail and Mostly Other People Do the Killing. —PETER MARGASAK

Ben Vida 6 PM, Graham Foundation, Madlener House, 4 W. Burton, free with RSVP at lampobenvida.eventbrite.com. b

Rock, Pop, Etc Sam Bean & Jesca Hoop, Marlon Williams 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Cheap Girls, Dion Lunadon 9 PM, Empty Bottle Cuddle Riot, Dead On, Alpina Noise 8 PM, Township Empty Houses 9 PM, Metro Monkees 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino Mrs. Magician, Peekaboos, Mr. Ma’am 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Nnamdi’s Sooper-Dooper Secret Side Project, Shmu, Secret Means of Escape, Morimoto 7:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Nucleus, Test, Paucities, Pig Champion 8 PM, Burlington Alice Peacock, Ralph Covert 8 PM, City Winery b Reuben & the Dark, Cheerleader 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Shannon & the Clams, the Rubs, Soft Candy 9 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 17+ Skippin Rocks, Brandon James, Kips, Mike P. 9 PM, Cubby Bear Sneezy, Fersher, New Obsidian 6 PM, Red Line Tap Speed Babes, Mawrcrest 10 PM, Cole’s F Steely Dan, Steve Winwood 7:15 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Stoop Goodnoise, Alright Junior, Kodakrome 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Taught Abroad 9 PM, Hideout Paul Thorn, Kelsey Waldon 8 PM, SPACE b Sam Trump, Akenya 11 PM, California Clipper Hip-Hop Azizi Gibson, High Five, Brentrambo 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Martin $ky, Dally Auston, Qari, Ju, Security Culture 5:30 PM, Metro b Dance Aazar 10 PM, Sound-Bar Alpe Lusia 10 PM, Spy Bar Jimmy Edgar, Chrissy 10 PM, Smart Bar Inphinity, Phil Rizzo, My Boy Elroy, Cinna 10 PM, Primary Nightclub

JONATHAN & PAUL & COULTON STORM

FRIDAY, JUNE 17 • PARK WEST 8:00pm • All Ages

WITH JO MERSA MARLEY • RICA NEWELL RANOY GORD0N • ROCHELLE BRADSHAW • NICHOLAS LARAQUE

SATURDAY, JUNE 18 • VIC THEATRE 8:00pm • 18 & Over

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 • PARK WEST 8:00pm • All Ages

SATURDAY, JUNE 25 • PARK WEST 8:00pm • 18 & Over

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MUSIC continued from 46

Folk & Country Melanie Budd, Kathy Greenholdt 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Dan Whitaker & the Shinebenders 6 PM, Cole’s F Blues, Gospel, and R&B Chris Cain, Joe Moss, Smiley Tillmon 6 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Jimmy Johnson & Rico McFarland 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Lazy Lester, Eddie Taylor Jr.’s Westside Guitar Showcase, Rockin’ Johnny Band 9:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Carl Weathersby Band 10 PM, also Fri 6/10, 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jazz Geof Bradﬁeld’s Our Roots 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Eric Schneider Sextet 8 PM, Green Mill International Irie Trinity 9 PM, Wild Hare In-Stores Nones, Cafe Racer 5 PM, Bric-a-Brac Records F b Silver Abuse, Hymen Moments 3 PM, Logan Hardware F b Fairs & Festivals 20 Bands of Summer: Craig Owens, Mark Rose, Rookie of the Year, Daisyhead, When We Was Kids, Flight Plan, Cup Check, Favorite Record, Fromps, Life Lessons, Northsiders, Glory Days,

Other Siblings, I Made You Myself 2 PM, Wire b

SUNDAY12 Rock, Pop, Etc Caught on Cline, Cosmic Playboys 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Robert Ellis, Tom Brosseau 8 PM, Schubas Florence & the Machine, Of Monsters & Men 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre Group Conversation, Ocean Glass, Pedestrians, Caroline & the Priority, Browns 5 PM, House of Blues b Guantanamo Baywatch, Flesh Panthers, Jollys 9 PM, Empty Bottle Hobo & Boxcar, Water Witches, Psychic Nurse, Terroir 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Tony Manno, Fattenin’ Frogs 8 PM, Township Purple Door, El Stoppers, 4th Rail, World’s Okayest Band 6 PM, Lincoln Hall b Rakunk, Vigil & Thieves, Lever 9 PM, Burlington Richard Shindell 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Tancred, Supreme Nothing, T-Rextasy, Pinto 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons 8 PM, Ravinia Festival Jimmy Webb, Robin Spielberg 8 PM, City Winery b

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48 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Folk & Country Wild Earp & the Free-For-Alls 10 PM, California Clipper Blues, Gospel, and R&B Lila Ammons & Ben Waters 7 PM, SPACE b John Primer, Lil Ed, Corey Dennison 6 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Mighty Mo Rodgers 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jazz Gene Knific Trio 9 PM, Whistler F Mark Shippy 9 PM, the Owl F Adam Thornburg Quartet 6 PM, Red Line Tap Mars Williams Group 9 PM, Hungry Brain International Gizzae 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Classical Revolution 10 PM, Jerry’s Yo-Yo Ma with musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 3 PM, Symphony Center Spektral Quartet 8:30 PM, Constellation Fairs & Festivals A Day in the Country: Cochino Y Los Pistoleros, Coyote Riot, Lady Parts, Lawrence Peters Outfit, Oak Street Ramblers, Gin Palace Jesters, Tim Menard, Glass Mountain, Kent Rose, Girls of the Golden West, Big Sadie, Mountainaires 2 PM, Hideout 20 Bands of Summer: Reflections, By the Thousands, VCTMS, Pterodactyl King, Atlas, Capital Vices, Lycvns, False Humans, Contra., Church

Kevin Morby ò DUSDIN CONDREN

Tongue, After Hour Animals 2 PM, Wire b

MONDAY13 Leyla McCalla Rodrigo Amarante headlines. 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. F b Haitian-American cellist and singer Leyla McCalla grew up in New York and spent a few years in Accra, Ghana. But she connected with her roots when she relocated to New Orleans in 2010, sparking an ongoing creative burst that charmingly

combines folk sounds from around the Caribbean with Creole influences from her adopted hometown. She ﬁrst gained a broad following when she appeared on the popular 2012 Carolina Chocolate Drops album Leaving Eden, then toured with the band in support of it, but her own solo records speak louder and with greater power—especially the new A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey (Jazz Village). The album’s affecting title track, which takes its name from a Haitian Creole proverb, is a salute to Haitians who’ve soldiered on through brutal conditions, both environmental and political. She evokes Crescent City’s past on her trad-jazz stomper “Far From Your Web,” but most of the songs are artful adaptations: “Les Plats Sont Tous Mis Sur la Table” comes from the great Creole ﬁddler Canray Fontenot, “Little Sparrow” is an empathetically tender Ella Jenkins classic, and “Vietnam” is an obscurity by quirky bluesman Abner Jay that’s little more than a lament from a narrator who might well be leaving his home and his lover forever. The release also includes a slew of traditional tunes from Haiti featuring nifty adaptations for thrumming cello. Brazilian singer Rodrigo Amarante headlines. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Benjamin Clementine 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Elk Walking, King of Mars, Warik 9 PM, Burlington

MUSIC Greyhounds 9 PM, Hideout Homme 10 PM, California Clipper F Gregory Alan Isakov & the Ghost Orchestra, Andrea Gibson 8 PM, also Tue 6/14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b The Kid, Diana & the Dishes, Jess Godwin 8 PM, Schubas The Owls Seem What They Are Not, Baby Kid, Horse Massage 8 PM, Martyrs’ Pack A.D., Kitten Forever, Beat Drun Juel 9 PM, Empty Bottle Folk & Country Chicago Barn Dance Company Barn dance featuring Cosmic Otters with caller Clinton Ross. 7 PM, Irish American Heritage Center b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Rhello, Aycee Lovely, DJ Dr. McCoy 8 PM, the Promontory Jazz Nick Broste Trio 9:30 PM, Whistler F Nick Mazzarella, Jason Adasiewicz, Wayne Montana, and Tim Daisy 9 PM, Elastic b Experimental Christopher Riggs & Carl Testa 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio b Classical Emily Beisel Clarinet. 9 PM, Hungry Brain Picosa 7 PM, PianoForte Studios b In-Stores Skyler Rowe 7:30 PM, Myopic Books F b

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 49

MUSIC continued from 49

TUESDAY14 Immortal Bird Theories headline; Immortal Bird, Abhorrent Deformity, Perihelion, and Warforged open. 8 PM, Livewire Lounge, 3394 N. Milwaukee, $12. The four members of local outfit Immortal Bird have their ﬁngers in a lot of pies. Front woman Rae Amitay can often be heard playing drums for Eight Bells, Castle, and the very underrated Thrawsunblat, while others spend time in Roman Ring, Air Raid, and Wilderun. That’s a diverse list, and Immor-

tal Bird have never been easy to pin down either— sure, you could say “crusty blackened deathgrind,” but what does that really mean? In the case of last year’s debut full-length Empress/Abscess (Broken Limbs), it means the ability to move from surprisingly anthemic punk-inflected numbers like “The Sycophant” into droney ten-minute morasses of despair like “And Send Fire.” According to a recent interview with Metal Insider, guitarist Evan Berry will be less involved in songwriting moving forward, instead focusing more on his folk-metal outfit Wilderun. The new material should reﬂect that along with the year the band has spent honing its sound during a grueling schedule of tours and festivals that’s frankly impressive. —MONICA KENDRICK

Leyla McCalla ò SARRAH DANZINGER

1 5 - 1 7 J U LY 2 0 1 6

U NION PARK

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50 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

pitchforkmusicfestival.com

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC

Rock, Pop, Etc Black Pussy 9 PM, Cobra Lounge Blue State Cowboys, Karen Salmon, Gerald Dowd 7 PM, Martyrs’ Cub Sport, the Mile 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Dwarves, Queers, Ghost Sector, Teenage Rehab, Hotlips Messiah, Decent Criminal 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Gregory Alan Isakov & the Ghost Orchestra, Andrea Gibson 8 PM, also Mon 6/13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Mrch, Masses, Tiny Fireﬂies 8 PM, Schubas Oshwa 10 PM, California Clipper Shaun Peace, J Bambii, Solarﬁve 9 PM, Burlington Haley Reinhart, James & the Drifters 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

T-Rextasy, Glamour Hotline, Supermagical, Slayerkitty 9 PM, Empty Bottle Hip-Hop Chris Melrose, Rogizz, Chris Crack, Paypa 8 PM, Double Door Folk & Country Mudflapps 9:30 PM, Red Line Tap F Weepin’ Willows, Kate Adams 9 PM, Hideout Jazz Matt Ulery’s Nonet with Eighth Blackbird 5:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art F b F b Greg Ward Quintet 9:30 PM, Whistler F Experimental Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Andy Ortmann, Lonberg-Holm/Giallorenzo/Billington 9 PM, Elastic b International Ifficial Reggae Movement 9 PM, Wild Hare

6446 >>>D4>>>

Robert Mirabal, Kayila 8:30 PM, Joe’s

WEDNESDAY15 Kevin Morby Jaye Bartell opens. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, sold out. On his recently released third solo album, Singing Saw (Dead Oceans), the onetime Woods bassist Kevin Morby has truly come into his own, eclipsing the accomplishments of his old band. While his vocal limitations remain—he cleaves to a kind of post-Dylan speak-sing style rather than tripping things up with faulty pitch—his arrangements are blossoming, bringing masterfully applied splashes of color to lean grooves. On the title track Morby

evokes the spooky vibe of his neighborhood in the evenings: coyotes howl and imagined singing saws fell trees, while the instrumentation, built around a single chiming chord, is appropriately hypnotic. But he can get angry too. The remarkable “I Have Been to the Mountain” is a response to the endless police violence against blacks in recent years, as exempliﬁed in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. The track’s thrumming groove is powerfully ornamented by a clarion trumpet line and a chorus of wordless female vocals, as if to lend some heavenly righteousness to the agitated plaints. The back half of the album ruminates on relationships and how they change us, whether it’s the way we drift away even from people who’ve been constants in our lives, or the way meeting someone new can be transformative. Morby keeps his lyrics bare and elliptical, J

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JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 51

WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC continued from 51

but there’s no missing the tenderness in his pinched delivery, expertly complemented by subtle instrumental ﬂourishes. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc All Eyes West, Broken Gold, Moses Gun, Big Baby 8 PM, Burlington Bingers, Colfax Speed Queen, Holy Motors, Son of a Gun 9 PM, Empty Bottle Blood People 8:30 PM, Township Vinnie Caruana, Brandon Reilly, Jason S. Thompson 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Fake Limbs, Greys, Lasers and Fast and Shit 7:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ House of Waters 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b My Pet Monster, Kaleidoscope Jukebox, Vourteque, Glitch Gatsby, Scarlet Finch 9 PM, Double Door Nahko & Medicine for the People 5:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Spare Machine 8:30 PM, Wire F Steel Toed Slippers, Pure Colours, Turn N’ Fire 8 PM, Martyrs’ Hip-Hop Dave East 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Folk & Country John McCutcheon 8 PM, City Winery b

Joey Purp ò CORY POPP Jazz David Boykin Expanse, DJ Anna Contreras 10 PM, California Clipper Mo Fitz, Slique Jay Adams, Vernard Burton, DJ Doug 6 PM, the Promontory Classical Color Field Copland, Saariaho, Aucoin. 6:30 PM, Symphony Center Grant Park Orchestra with Andrew Von Oeyen and Fabio Bidini Carlos Kalmar, conuctor (Barber, Mussorgsky). 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park b The Singers 8:30 PM, Ravinia Festival b Yingying Su Piano. 12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b v

When you’re here, you’re part of it. Set your own tone. Get in your own groove. Join up with people from all walks of life, from all over Chicago and the world. Strike a chord with us this summer. Find your folk at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Daytime, weekend and evening classes begin June 20. Sign up at oldtownschool.org WITH

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52 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

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FOOD & DRINK

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You can tango at Artango But the food is less than artful. By MIKE SULA

Clockwise from top: grilled steak, charred octopus, beef carpaccio ò DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

n the late 1800s hordes of randy young European males landed in Buenos Aires to seek their fortunes. As these desperate bachelors slouched through the seedier parts of the port city, a slinky mating dance developed between them and the working girls they sought to couple with. Meanwhile the swells in the upper classes looked down on the dance as it was practiced in milongas, the spots where the dancing went down. The tango has come a long way since then, evolved, modernized, and danced in a million different directions, so much so that now there’s an honest-to-God milonga/ Argentine steak house plopped down on the stroller lanes of Lincoln Square. It comes from Ukrainian-born tango instructor Maria Alferov and her Argentine husband, Sebastian Casanova, who used to run the late Artango Bistro in Ravenswood, a place where you could get a rib eye, take a tango lesson, or host your wedding, but not anywhere you could buy a cocktail. Now the couple has installed themselves, as well as a bar and a dance ﬂoor, in the much larger space that once housed the late Trattoria Trullo. From antique telephones to faux distressed paint and murals of accordions, it’s intended to somehow evoke those Buenos Aires alleys with a roomy dance floor filled with slender tango students in form-fitting dancewear. You’d half expect a Borgesian knife fight to break out. They’ve also installed virtually the same menu of vaguely Italian-inﬂuenced Argentine and pan-South American standards, from grilled steaks and ceviches to empanadas and paella to griddled Provoleta cheese. One J

JUNE 9, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 53

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54 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 9, 2016

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continued from 55

would expect the kitchen to execute dishes like these with the same passion as the dancers execute their ganchos and lustradas. But that’s not apparent among a trio of ceviches bearing barely a note of the promised leche de tigre to distinguish the assortment of shrimp and corvina from undressed fish. Instead they’re every bit as raw and unmanipulated as the cliche tuna tartare with avocado, soy, and sesame oil that accompanies them. Certain aspects of the presentation at Artango can give the impression that not a lot of attention is being paid to the food by either the front or the back of the house. Ravioli filled with kale and ricotta on one occasion had a leathery texture that indicated they’d been sitting around too long on the pass. A salad of roasted vegetables was draped with a cold, congealed slab of melted cheese. A sampler of grilled meats featured short ribs overbraised to a gelatinous consistency, broken morcilla crumbling across the board, and grilled flank steak betraying no sign of seasoning, the bright spot being the chorizo, which had a welcome chile sting. An overcooked duck breast, marinated in annatto and aji mirasol chiles, is piled atop a moun-

tain of mashed potatoes—a plating straight out of 1998. A lifeless watermelon-cucumber gazpacho special just seems childish this time of year. Perhaps the greatest disappointment I faced during my visits to Artango was a seafood paella nearly overflowing with tepid, mushy rice, the often elusive crispy socarrat at its base a bitter, blackened atrocity. Within narrow parameters you can put together an acceptable meal at Artango. There’s a nicely charred tender octopus plated with kale and cherry tomatoes in a bracing chile oil. Tissue-thin beef carpaccio, showered with arugula and shaved Parmesan, is about as competent a version of this chestnut as you’ll find. The steaks themselves, though not of extraordinary quality, can serve as budget fixes for anyone wanting to avoid downtown prices. But between the watery, over-iced cocktails and desserts overdependent on cream and bruleed meringue, the food at Artango seems stuck in a stagnant and unevolved cliche of what South American cuisine is supposed to be, left in the dust of culinary history by the dancers on the floor. v

@MikeSula

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