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There are plays that seduce and anesthetize and candy-coat everything to make the world taste good. And then there are plays like Suzan-Lori Parks’s three-part, three-hour 2014 drama Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2, & 3—long, complicated, intellectually teasing, hard-to-categorize works that riff on difficult issues and refuse to give expected, easy answers. The last part of the play is in many ways a retelling of Ulysses’s return home in The Odyssey, though Parks plays with the story a bit....

Chicago’s Ben LaMar Gay is one of the most mercurial musicians in a city full of them. He’s a jazz cornetist who came up through the AACM and then spent several years living and working in Brazil earlier in the decade. He’s logged time in jazz groups such as Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone and Greg Ward‘s 10 Tongues, but one of his most exciting projects, Bottle Tree, is a progressive R&B trio....

The three members of Growing Concerns Poetry Collective all juggle other practices outside their collaboration. Their CVs are too extensive to discuss exhaustively, but poet McKenzie Chinn has built a career acting onstage (she’s a Goodman Theatre regular) and on TV (she has a recurring role on CBS’s Chicago-based drama The Red Line). She also wrote, produced, and starred in the indie film Olympia, which premiered at the 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival....

On a warm afternoon in May, a pair of geese and their gaggle of goslings waddle single file over broken pavement and shaggy patches of weeds on their journey to the edge of the Chicago River. Elsewhere, red-winged blackbirds chirp their songs while yellow butterflies flutter over wildflowers peeking through piles of rubble. Or what would happen, as some have suggested in the past, if the land known as Rezkoville could return to its natural state as a crooked bend of the Chicago River nearly a century after the city engineered its straightening in 1928?...

No one has ever used the words joy or spark to describe me and I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book or seen her TV show. Yet, in the past year I’ve shed more than half my belongings and drastically changed my relationship to what remains. I moved last May and have been forced to stay inside with my possessions as sole company like most people, but there’s more to it than that....

ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: Goggs at Empty Bottle on Tue 7/19 and Wed 7/20 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com

Denny Renshaw San Fermin This morning the city released the lineup for the 2015 season of Downtown Sound, the free concert series that happens at Pritzker Pavilion. In the past Downtown Sound was just one of several series focused on different styles, but this year everything—apart from the annual Made in Chicago jazz series—has been folded into the Downtown Sound rubric. Instead of only Monday night shows, the series will take place on Thursdays as well....

Editor’s note: The Reader-has teamed up with Renata Cherlise, the founder of Blvck Vrchives, “a curated visual journey through history,” to create multimedia narratives of black life in Chicago using the Sun-Times archive. This week’s feature explores the real Cooley High and the 1975 film of the same name. Like Cooley High, the TV series Good Times shows black youth tackling inequality in schools, and shines a spotlight on racial disparities in Chicago....

There’s plenty to do this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 1/27: Up Comedy Club (230 W. North) hosts She the People: Girlfriends’ Guide to Sisters Doing It for Themselves. The Reader‘s Marissa Oberlander calls it, “90 minutes of eviscerating the patriarchy and a laugh-out-loud wake-up call that’s necessary viewing for women and men alike.” 8 PM, $26-$36 For more things to do this weekend—and every day—visit our Agenda page....

Last year Englewood rapper, multi-instrumentalist, and studio engineer Christopher Horace, aka F.A.B.L.E., grew frustrated with his lack of progress on an ambitious full-length and released the EP (IX) The Hermit as a stopgap, throwing it together in an effort to break his creative blocks. The EP’s seven irrepressibly joyful songs have become some of my most cherished music over the past 12 months, so my expectations were high when I heard that Horace was finally about to drop the album he’d been working on when he made them....

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more like frenemies than friends. Their real-life relationship in the 1920s could be adversarial—Doyle believed in the occult, and Houdini repeatedly (and sometimes successfully) tried to debunk its existence (sorry, kids, his magic wasn’t real). They eventually had a massive falling out and became rivals—but according to Houdini & Doyle, a new drama on Fox, their opposing views made them the perfect pair of rogue detectives....

Chicago rapper-producer Tree has one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop. I’m not just referring to his deep, grainy vocals, but the range of emotions he’s able to conjure in just a few short bars. His brand-new Trap Genius furthers his peerless spin on hip-hop, and it’s got all the mystifying power I’ve come to expect from a Tree release. One of the ten Trap Genius cuts I’m obsessing over at the moment—and, mind you, it’s more than just one—is “New Or Leins / Training Day,” a collaboration with Seattle production group Blue Sky Black Death....

Census self-response opened on March 12. The next day, “we were in the full throttles of the health pandemic,” Anita Banerji of Forefront, a civic organization that coordinates grantmakers and community nonprofits, recounts. At Pilsen’s Mujeres Latinas en Acción, plans for census outreach were well underway when the virus hit: weekly education efforts that regularly reached hundreds at the Mexican consulate, Saturday morning canvassing trips where promotoras (census outreach workers) and volunteers regularly knocked on over 700 doors in a single morning, and one-on-one conversations with community members....

There’s been no respite in the American crisis of police officers fatally shooting civilians at a higher rate than in any other developed country—not since the events in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, that nationalized the Black Lives Matter movement, and certainly not since the Justice Department took an about-face under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and pledged to abdicate its department-review duties. With that in mind, Dael Orlandersmith’s unsparing series of monologues makes some big asks of its audience: to listen to and better understand a multitude of perspectives—some heinous—on the events that led to the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, at the hands of Darren Wilson, a white police officer, and to continue seeking hope in a situation where so little is apparent....

AP Photo/Rob Carr Is Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman a finished novel? Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • This investigation into the circumstances under which the new Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, was initially written and then rediscovered? —Aimee Levitt

There’s plenty to do—besides gift shopping!—before this weekend’s holiday overload. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 12/20: This month for Drink N Draw at Emporium Arcade Bar (1366 N. Milwaukee) Star Wars-themed models pose to inspire artists of all levels and mediums. Costumes are welcome, and as always, there will be plenty to drink. 8-10 PM

Time to plan the final week of January (time flies, huh?). Here’s some of what we recommend: 1/25-4/10: The Museum of Contemporary Photography (600 S. Michigan) celebrates 40 years with “MoCP at 40.” The exhibit is a chronological collection of pictures from notable photographers—Diane Arbus, Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann—from the museum’s permanent collection, in honor of four decades in business. Reception Thu 1/28, 5 PM. Tue 1/26: All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records is a chronicle of the life of the record empire, directed by Colin Hanks and screening as part of Stranger Than Fiction, the series of documentary premieres at Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N....

Last week after Jeanette Tran-Dean and David Hollinger told me about their two-great-tastes-taste-great-together moment in the creation of their cassava quesadilla with corn ice cream, I went out in search of the ancestors of the signature dish of their Guatemalan-Vietnamese pop-up Giống Giống. I figured with the abundance of Filipino sweets in stock at Seafood City, that would be the place, but no dice. But I did find a solitary plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray with three thick slices of banh khoai mi nuong all by itself on a shelf at Tai Nam Food Market, 4925 N....

Last week at the UN’s Climate Action Summit, 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg had a stern warning about global warming for world leaders and, by extension, city politicians and adults in general: “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.” But gentrification isn’t much of an issue in already affluent communities like East Lakeview. Therefore, the TOD proposed by Glencoe-based Optima, Inc....

Composer David Lang, who served on the committee that awarded Kendrick Lamar’s album Damn a Pulitzer Prize earlier this week, won his own Pulitzer in 2008 for the vocal composition The Little Match Girl Passion. Commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Perth Theater and Concert Hall, it was premiered in October 2007 by Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. A sublime recording of the work by the same ensemble was released in 2009 by Harmonia Mundi....