Concerts

If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’s a meta-accomplishment: not a false note in this version of a play that’s entirely about false notes. Pinter’s breakthrough piece (albeit a flop at the time), encompasses all the themes for which he later became known: the mindlessness and dishonesty of most of what passes for communication; the universal capacity, and appetite, for savagery; how no one is innocent but anyone might be a victim; how most efforts at heroism—or even simple humanity—end with a whimper.

The Birthday Party Through 2/26: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 2/13 and 2/20 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students and military)

McCabe has cast the show flawlessly, anchored by perfect-pitch Elaine Carlson as Meg, whose comic cluelessness devolves into hideously willful blindness, and by James Sparling as Goldberg, who looks and sounds exactly like Patrick Stewart at his most posh while simultaneously nailing every stereotype of the East End London Jew getting what he wants at others’ expense. The entire six-person ensemble is strong, and there’s a particular pleasure in watching 6-foot-6-inch Will Casey as the henchman McCann looming over David Fink, a foot shorter, as the titular guest of honor and designated victim Stanley.

I’ve often felt that I don’t understand what Pinter is on about: menace, sure, and the comedy of cruelty, but to what end? I can offer this production no higher praise than to say, now I get it.  Highly recommended, as in Do. Not. Miss.

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Like many of the American musical theater greats, Cabaret is one of those shows that can suffer from style-creep,wherein an unwritten but generally agreed-upon aesthetic tradition grows into self-parody. For John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary pre-WWII Berlin-set romantic drama (based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood), that usually translates to a Kit Kat Club that’s more of a strung-out haunted house than a cheeky flesh fair anyone would actually want to rain deutsche marks on. Not so in Porchlight’s nachtclub, a sparkling, inviting, exuberant pansexual party (led by Emcee Josh Walker) that puts a hearty emphasis on the “willkommen.”

Cabaret Through 3/5: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Thu 2/2 1:30 PM; open caption Sat 1/28 and Sat 2/4 3:30 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, 773-777-9884, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $45-$77

Establishing that contrast is essential in order for any of the second-act gut punches to land, and in that respect, director Michael Weber, associate director/choreographer Brenda Didier, and music director Linda Madonia leave bruises and draw blood. I found my eyes welling up with spectacle tears long before the first emotional blow, and I suspect that has to do with just how masterfully pieced together these musical theater elements are, from the crystalline vocals to the bombastic ensemble-wide numbers to the intimate conversations between (ahem) “roommates.”

Gilbert Domally, who brings a radical softness to the character inspired by Isherwood, makes for a heart-melting partner with Sally (Erica Stephan, giving a performance for the ages). Even Angela Weber Miller’s and Patrick Chan’s Anhalter Bahnhof-inspired set and lighting design has a sense of gravity and impermanence to it, as if to ask: if brick, studded steel, and heavy cathedral wooden buttresses won’t survive the looming tsunami of inhumanity, what chance do we have?

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Redtwist’s rolling world premiere of The Great Khan with the National New Play Network couldn’t be better timed. When Florida’s Department of Education had just rejected an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. When Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders just signed an executive order banning critical theory in public schools, making Arkansas the 18th state to limit how racism and sexism are taught. And when Missouri lawmakers just proposed three similar bills, which will also allow parents to monitor school curricula. 

A rebellious production about the effects of racism and sexism on Black teens, written by Michael Gene Sullivan and directed by Jamal Howard, this intimate play calls on viewers to confront “history” through the eyes of high schoolers, who aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions. 

The Great Khan Through 2/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwisttheatre.org, $40

After fighting off a group of boys who were assaulting his friend Ant (Monique Marshaun), Jayden (Simon Gebremedhin) and his protective mother, Crystal (LaTorious Givens) move to a new neighborhood. At his predominantly white school, Jayden strikes a deal with his history teacher, Mr. Adams (Bryan Breau): he’ll do his Genghis Khan report if Mr. Adams can name 20 Black Americans who aren’t athletes or entertainers. Traumatized by the world, Jayden grows fascinated with the Mongolian emperor’s vengeful spirit. But when Khan (Steffen Diem Garcia) visits Jayden, he reveals the story written about him is only part of the truth. 

It’s a multiplex piece that demands adults grow up. With Jayden’s class partner Gao Ming (Josie Mi) as our narrator, we start to question how we enable these whitewashed tales and are inspired to find our own answers. If anything, you’ll realize that history is a great con. 

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Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizing capillary waves of memory, selective and otherwise. (“This country is built on selective memory,” one character observes while watching the Rodney King trial in 1992, and it’s impossible to argue with that, given the escalated police violence 30 years later.)

the ripple, the wave that carried me home Through 2/12: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 1/31 7:30 PM, Sun 2/5 7:30 PM, and Thu 2/9 2 PM; touch tour and audio description Sat 2/5 2 PM (touch tour 12:30 PM), ASL interpretation Sat 2/11 2 PM, Spanish subtitles Sat 2/11 8 PM, open captions Sun 2/12 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$40

Janice (Christiana Clark) is a native of fictional Beacon, Kansas, where her late father Edwin, a civil rights activist who focused on desegregating the town’s public pools, is about to have a pool named in his honor. Janice has several reasons for not wanting to travel from Ohio to Kansas for the ceremony, no matter how much Brianna Buckley’s Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman, a volunteer with a Black community group in Beacon, implores her. Those reasons spool out as Anderson’s play takes us through nearly 40 years of history. It begins when Janice’s mother Helen (Aneisa Hicks), from the “thinking class” Black people of Beacon, and Edwin (Ronald L. Conner), a “necessity” Black man, (as in “working for the bare necessities”) meet and begin courting in the mid-50s; moves through Janice’s own adolescence as a budding swimmer; and concludes in the midst of the King riots. 

Edwin and Helen’s joint activism kicks into high gear with the “Beacon Three”—a group of white and Black boys who, unable to find a pool where they can swim together, drown in a garbage-filled lake. Yet that activism hits differently for Helen than it does for Edwin in sometimes horrifying ways, which has repercussions for their daughter.

Directed by Jackson Gay, Anderson’s play lets us see the characters and their causes with complexity (intraracial class differences, as well as gendered abuse, come into focus), along with sorrow and horror at the repeating cycles of white abuse. A recurring line, “Is this your first time in America? Let me show you around,” hits with both humor and heartache at the unwillingness of white Americans to confront racism. Yet by the end, there is also a hard-won pride and hope washing over the women in the story.

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If you, like me, are a fan of the humble city rat, then the relationship between our fair city and New York is an instructive one. Like all things New York, the allure of America’s biggest city seems to make everything, including its relationship to the quintessential urban rodent, more grandiose. Whether it’s the high-profile search for a well-paid “rat czar” to handle the city’s “real enemy,” the countless videos of rats dragging around slices of pizza, or even the fact that “Rats in New York City” is its own Wikipedia page, you could easily convince yourself that the Big Apple is the singular American locale for ratty obsessions. 

But Chicago is no slouch when it comes to a certain reverence for the oft-despised creature. The transformation of Chicago’s iconic Don’t Feed the Rats poster by artist Derek Erdman into a loving encouragement to “Put ALL garbage on the ground” is only the most obvious example. WBEZ’s Curious City also did an investigation into the proliferation of Chicago’s rat population. While New York gets all the attention, Chicago has quietly held down the title of America’s rattiest city for eight straight years. If we’re the city that works, as Nelson Algren once said, it seems that the rats also got the message.

It’s no wonder then, that the goal of Target: Rats, a new board game from the Chicago-focused retailer Transit Tees, is to grow the city’s rat population, rather than destroy it. Following on the success of the company’s Uno-inspired card game Loop, later turned into a board game, Target: Rats pits up to four rat families against one another, and even more distressingly, an exterminator figure who haunts the city streets. The goal is simple: to spread one’s rat empire above and below ground as far and wide as possible, by building nests, spawning new rats, and fighting to become “Da Big Cheese,” or the ruler of the underground hub that sits at the center of the game board.

Target: Rats The Board Game transittees.com

Like many board games, Target: Rats requires a bit of a learning curve to settle in, although once you’ve established the basic rhythms, gameplay is dynamic and rewarding. Turns are structured by a combination of movement and activity, with several possible outcomes after moving four spaces on the board: feed (if rats are at a food source), breed (if two rats are fed, they can give birth to two others), nest (creating a potential new spawning point), fight (if you happen upon another player’s rats), or scavenge, which involves taking a card from one of two decks. Players move from the surface to the underground via sewers, and placeable dumpsters can create a steady food source that allows more rats to enter gameplay.

The game balances elements of strategic thinking, luck, and interpersonal interactions but not always successfully. For one, there’s an imbalance in the two card decks: surface-level cards are skewed nearly three-to-one in favor of spawning more rats, compared to a more even split underground, which can create inadvertent imbalances in player outcomes depending on where players settle. But the biggest impediment to forward progress is the lack of dedicated food sources that remain on the game board, making it hard to even begin expanding one’s rat population. Even if you’ve played the game before and have a strategy in mind, it can take a frustratingly long time to build momentum, which in my experience warded off some first-time players from wanting to dig deeper.

Courtesy Transit Tees

Like so many board games, house rules can make up for certain limitations in the board game’s base settings. For one, all future playthroughs in my household will include several dedicated, nondisappearing food sources, available to all rats at all times. Rebalancing the game in this way speeds up gameplay and removes some of the frustration for first-time players, better allowing players to focus on the other, more fun elements of the game that are more challenging when resources are scarcer.

Those elements are combat between rat families, and the ever-present threat of the Exterminator, a crucial X factor that can make or break a game. The player who possesses Da Big Cheese, first gained by throwing a one in the center of the board, also gains a critical advantage that makes its possession vital throughout the game. Balancing the strategic question of when and with how many rats to fight your opponents for territory, combined with the luck of a dice throw, ensures that each confrontation around the game board becomes a dynamic showdown.

The Exterminator is the other factor that can cut a player’s momentum in their tracks and prevent someone from winning just as it seems the game is in hand. The Exterminator kills rats, destroys food sources and nests, and otherwise blocks movement around the board. 

It provides a challenging impediment to forward progress, while also allowing those falling behind to catch up by targeting their opponent’s favorite dedicated nesting spot/food source combination for extermination. Even when a player is on the brink of victory, holding possession of Da Big Cheese and with three nests around the board even after every other player has gone, a lucky throw can unexpectedly stretch the game further.

Still, at the end of the day, I found myself wondering: would it be possible to play against the Exterminator? In a game of expanding rat populations, could players work together not in a battle of survival of the fittest, but instead aim to overrun the entire map, until the Exterminator can no longer prevent the rats from taking over the entire city itself?

I have yet to give this rewrite a chance, but my vision is simple: players collaborate to build communal nests, expand food supplies, and otherwise attack the Exterminator at all turns. There’d be a limit on the number of player turns available before the game ended, and the goal would be to get every single nest and rat on the board before time ran out. The game board itself seems capacious enough to carry out this approach and honors our city’s real-life rats, who have done so well to grow their ranks with seemingly nothing to stop them.

In his book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants,  Robert Sullivan writes, “I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same.” Target: Rats invites us to suspend our usual judgments, embrace our furry rodent counterparts, and spread out a bit, content to proliferate as widely as our own rats have managed. Our rats live in abundance, making us the country’s rattiest city; perhaps it’s time we start to do the same. 

Read More

There’s no restaurant opening in 2023 more desperately anticipated than Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s transformation of his brother’s venerable but grotty River North beef joint into a fine dining destina—uhhh, wait. No.

I’m thinking of season two of The Bear, the fictionalized heart-attack-on-a-plate that might be the most harrowing depiction of life on the line ever committed to the small screen. Shooting starts next month in advance of a ten-episode return to Hulu in early summer, according to the trades.

Little noticed amid the deafening buzz is the forthcoming release of the documentary antidote to Jeremy Allen White’s dreamy kitchen dysfunction: Cambodian Futures, a 17-minute short film focused on a real-life restaurant—the beloved, ever-evolving Hermosa. Shepherded these past eight years by Ethan Lim, who took it from a neighborhood sandwich shop to one of the hottest tables in town, the chef serves a visionary expression of Khmer food, a cuisine whose development skipped a generation due to war and genocide.

Lim, the most chill chef you’ll ever meet, soothingly narrates his own sometimes gutting journey, beginning in a Thai refugee camp and leaving off at last year’s Jean Banchet Awards (where, spoiler, he won Rising Chef of the Year). Directed by Dustin Nakao-Haider (Shot in the Dark), it’s one episode in the second season of Firelight Media/American Masters’ In the Making series, focusing on emerging BIPOC artists. Lim’s the only chef to be profiled. There’s no official release date yet, but Nakao-Haider reports it’ll likely appear on PBS sometime in March.

I can’t predict whether the Chicago food world’s onscreen profile this year will match 2022 (which included the Trotter doc, and arguably, The Menu, and season three of South Side), but that’s a good start.

There’s a clearer picture for food writers.

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir Iliana Regan (Agate, January 24): This is the former Elizabeth chef’s second tell-all after 2019’s Burn the Place. Since then, she left the kitchen and earned an MFA in writing from the Art Institute while running the remote Milkweed Inn in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. During the pandemic, Regan’s lengthy family history of mushroom hunting followed her and her wife north, along with the anxieties of a fretful father. Remoteness doesn’t mean idleness, as she recounts fraught trips over dirt roads to the truck stop for broasted chicken, baby-making efforts, and an alcoholic relapse. Regan may have left the mental hazards of restaurant life behind, but she’s found plenty to worry about in the woods.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine, edited by Colleen Taylor Sen, Sourish Bhattacharyya, and Helen Saberi(Bloomsbury Academic, February 23): I’m probably more excited for this massive 436-page ($157.50) tome than any other in recent memory. Comprehensively capturing the breadth of subcontinental cuisine seems like an impossible Borgesian labor, but Chicago culinary historian Sen—with seven related titles already to her name—along with two co-editors and 27 writers have made a convincing go at it. You could easily spend weeks bouncing among 236 entries, from Sanskrit scholar and food chemist K.T. Achaya to the kokum fruit, and the black, sticky condiment it produces; from the slow-stewed Muslim beef dish nihari to the galaxy of yams and their infinite purposes.

Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites, Monica Eng, David Hammond (3 Fields Books, March 21): Via the Tribune and WBEZ, current Axios reporter Eng has been documenting the dimmer corners of the Chicago food scene longer than just about anyone. With Newcity’s Hammond, they’ve assembled a taxonomic guidebook to the city’s lesser-known endemic eats. With obligatory chapters on familiar signatures like hot dogs and deep dish, its real value lies in the stories behind less celebrated working-class originals like the Japanese-American rice and gravy burger plate akutagawa; sweet sticky Chinese-Korean gampongi lollipop wings; and the city’s other beef on a bun: the sweet steak sandwich.

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit, Abra Berens (Chronicle Books, April 4): If two years go by without a sprawling single-subject cookbook from former Chicago chef Berens, did they really happen? Along with 2019’s vegetable-forward Ruffage and 2021’s grain-based Grist, this fruit- and (somewhat) baking-centered book makes a nice boxed set, even if it is just concerned with varieties that can be found in the midwest. (What, no pawpaws?) Still, from her Three Oaks farm kitchen she manages to conjure up Michigan exotica like marigold syrup, ground cherry floats, and rosé-poached apricots with earl grey semifreddo.

Midwest Pie: Recipes that shaped a region,edited by Meredith Pangrace (Belt Publishing, May 9): On the heels of 2021’s Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen, Belt’s creative director tackles a more ubiquitous and crowd-pleasing subject, with recipes spanning “old classic” pies such as funeral and sawdust; regional originals like the Nation of Islam’s bean pie and Indiana’s sugar cream Hoosier pie; “desperation pies” that relied on pantry staples when times were tough (chess, shoofly, mock apple); midwestern produce pies (persimmon chiffon); and retro relics (cottage cheese, chocolate rum).

Read More

If you, like me, are a fan of the humble city rat, then the relationship between our fair city and New York is an instructive one. Like all things New York, the allure of America’s biggest city seems to make everything, including its relationship to the quintessential urban rodent, more grandiose. Whether it’s the high-profile search for a well-paid “rat czar” to handle the city’s “real enemy,” the countless videos of rats dragging around slices of pizza, or even the fact that “Rats in New York City” is its own Wikipedia page, you could easily convince yourself that the Big Apple is the singular American locale for ratty obsessions. 

But Chicago is no slouch when it comes to a certain reverence for the oft-despised creature. The transformation of Chicago’s iconic Don’t Feed the Rats poster by artist Derek Erdman into a loving encouragement to “Put ALL garbage on the ground” is only the most obvious example. WBEZ’s Curious City also did an investigation into the proliferation of Chicago’s rat population. While New York gets all the attention, Chicago has quietly held down the title of America’s rattiest city for eight straight years. If we’re the city that works, as Nelson Algren once said, it seems that the rats also got the message.

It’s no wonder then, that the goal of Target: Rats, a new board game from the Chicago-focused retailer Transit Tees, is to grow the city’s rat population, rather than destroy it. Following on the success of the company’s Uno-inspired card game Loop, later turned into a board game, Target: Rats pits up to four rat families against one another, and even more distressingly, an exterminator figure who haunts the city streets. The goal is simple: to spread one’s rat empire above and below ground as far and wide as possible, by building nests, spawning new rats, and fighting to become “Da Big Cheese,” or the ruler of the underground hub that sits at the center of the game board.

Target: Rats The Board Game transittees.com

Like many board games, Target: Rats requires a bit of a learning curve to settle in, although once you’ve established the basic rhythms, gameplay is dynamic and rewarding. Turns are structured by a combination of movement and activity, with several possible outcomes after moving four spaces on the board: feed (if rats are at a food source), breed (if two rats are fed, they can give birth to two others), nest (creating a potential new spawning point), fight (if you happen upon another player’s rats), or scavenge, which involves taking a card from one of two decks. Players move from the surface to the underground via sewers, and placeable dumpsters can create a steady food source that allows more rats to enter gameplay.

The game balances elements of strategic thinking, luck, and interpersonal interactions but not always successfully. For one, there’s an imbalance in the two card decks: surface-level cards are skewed nearly three-to-one in favor of spawning more rats, compared to a more even split underground, which can create inadvertent imbalances in player outcomes depending on where players settle. But the biggest impediment to forward progress is the lack of dedicated food sources that remain on the game board, making it hard to even begin expanding one’s rat population. Even if you’ve played the game before and have a strategy in mind, it can take a frustratingly long time to build momentum, which in my experience warded off some first-time players from wanting to dig deeper.

Courtesy Transit Tees

Like so many board games, house rules can make up for certain limitations in the board game’s base settings. For one, all future playthroughs in my household will include several dedicated, nondisappearing food sources, available to all rats at all times. Rebalancing the game in this way speeds up gameplay and removes some of the frustration for first-time players, better allowing players to focus on the other, more fun elements of the game that are more challenging when resources are scarcer.

Those elements are combat between rat families, and the ever-present threat of the Exterminator, a crucial X factor that can make or break a game. The player who possesses Da Big Cheese, first gained by throwing a one in the center of the board, also gains a critical advantage that makes its possession vital throughout the game. Balancing the strategic question of when and with how many rats to fight your opponents for territory, combined with the luck of a dice throw, ensures that each confrontation around the game board becomes a dynamic showdown.

The Exterminator is the other factor that can cut a player’s momentum in their tracks and prevent someone from winning just as it seems the game is in hand. The Exterminator kills rats, destroys food sources and nests, and otherwise blocks movement around the board. 

It provides a challenging impediment to forward progress, while also allowing those falling behind to catch up by targeting their opponent’s favorite dedicated nesting spot/food source combination for extermination. Even when a player is on the brink of victory, holding possession of Da Big Cheese and with three nests around the board even after every other player has gone, a lucky throw can unexpectedly stretch the game further.

Still, at the end of the day, I found myself wondering: would it be possible to play against the Exterminator? In a game of expanding rat populations, could players work together not in a battle of survival of the fittest, but instead aim to overrun the entire map, until the Exterminator can no longer prevent the rats from taking over the entire city itself?

I have yet to give this rewrite a chance, but my vision is simple: players collaborate to build communal nests, expand food supplies, and otherwise attack the Exterminator at all turns. There’d be a limit on the number of player turns available before the game ended, and the goal would be to get every single nest and rat on the board before time ran out. The game board itself seems capacious enough to carry out this approach and honors our city’s real-life rats, who have done so well to grow their ranks with seemingly nothing to stop them.

In his book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants,  Robert Sullivan writes, “I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same.” Target: Rats invites us to suspend our usual judgments, embrace our furry rodent counterparts, and spread out a bit, content to proliferate as widely as our own rats have managed. Our rats live in abundance, making us the country’s rattiest city; perhaps it’s time we start to do the same. 

Read More

There’s no restaurant opening in 2023 more desperately anticipated than Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s transformation of his brother’s venerable but grotty River North beef joint into a fine dining destina—uhhh, wait. No.

I’m thinking of season two of The Bear, the fictionalized heart-attack-on-a-plate that might be the most harrowing depiction of life on the line ever committed to the small screen. Shooting starts next month in advance of a ten-episode return to Hulu in early summer, according to the trades.

Little noticed amid the deafening buzz is the forthcoming release of the documentary antidote to Jeremy Allen White’s dreamy kitchen dysfunction: Cambodian Futures, a 17-minute short film focused on a real-life restaurant—the beloved, ever-evolving Hermosa. Shepherded these past eight years by Ethan Lim, who took it from a neighborhood sandwich shop to one of the hottest tables in town, the chef serves a visionary expression of Khmer food, a cuisine whose development skipped a generation due to war and genocide.

Lim, the most chill chef you’ll ever meet, soothingly narrates his own sometimes gutting journey, beginning in a Thai refugee camp and leaving off at last year’s Jean Banchet Awards (where, spoiler, he won Rising Chef of the Year). Directed by Dustin Nakao-Haider (Shot in the Dark), it’s one episode in the second season of Firelight Media/American Masters’ In the Making series, focusing on emerging BIPOC artists. Lim’s the only chef to be profiled. There’s no official release date yet, but Nakao-Haider reports it’ll likely appear on PBS sometime in March.

I can’t predict whether the Chicago food world’s onscreen profile this year will match 2022 (which included the Trotter doc, and arguably, The Menu, and season three of South Side), but that’s a good start.

There’s a clearer picture for food writers.

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir Iliana Regan (Agate, January 24): This is the former Elizabeth chef’s second tell-all after 2019’s Burn the Place. Since then, she left the kitchen and earned an MFA in writing from the Art Institute while running the remote Milkweed Inn in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. During the pandemic, Regan’s lengthy family history of mushroom hunting followed her and her wife north, along with the anxieties of a fretful father. Remoteness doesn’t mean idleness, as she recounts fraught trips over dirt roads to the truck stop for broasted chicken, baby-making efforts, and an alcoholic relapse. Regan may have left the mental hazards of restaurant life behind, but she’s found plenty to worry about in the woods.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Cuisine, edited by Colleen Taylor Sen, Sourish Bhattacharyya, and Helen Saberi(Bloomsbury Academic, February 23): I’m probably more excited for this massive 436-page ($157.50) tome than any other in recent memory. Comprehensively capturing the breadth of subcontinental cuisine seems like an impossible Borgesian labor, but Chicago culinary historian Sen—with seven related titles already to her name—along with two co-editors and 27 writers have made a convincing go at it. You could easily spend weeks bouncing among 236 entries, from Sanskrit scholar and food chemist K.T. Achaya to the kokum fruit, and the black, sticky condiment it produces; from the slow-stewed Muslim beef dish nihari to the galaxy of yams and their infinite purposes.

Made in Chicago: Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites, Monica Eng, David Hammond (3 Fields Books, March 21): Via the Tribune and WBEZ, current Axios reporter Eng has been documenting the dimmer corners of the Chicago food scene longer than just about anyone. With Newcity’s Hammond, they’ve assembled a taxonomic guidebook to the city’s lesser-known endemic eats. With obligatory chapters on familiar signatures like hot dogs and deep dish, its real value lies in the stories behind less celebrated working-class originals like the Japanese-American rice and gravy burger plate akutagawa; sweet sticky Chinese-Korean gampongi lollipop wings; and the city’s other beef on a bun: the sweet steak sandwich.

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit, Abra Berens (Chronicle Books, April 4): If two years go by without a sprawling single-subject cookbook from former Chicago chef Berens, did they really happen? Along with 2019’s vegetable-forward Ruffage and 2021’s grain-based Grist, this fruit- and (somewhat) baking-centered book makes a nice boxed set, even if it is just concerned with varieties that can be found in the midwest. (What, no pawpaws?) Still, from her Three Oaks farm kitchen she manages to conjure up Michigan exotica like marigold syrup, ground cherry floats, and rosé-poached apricots with earl grey semifreddo.

Midwest Pie: Recipes that shaped a region,edited by Meredith Pangrace (Belt Publishing, May 9): On the heels of 2021’s Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen, Belt’s creative director tackles a more ubiquitous and crowd-pleasing subject, with recipes spanning “old classic” pies such as funeral and sawdust; regional originals like the Nation of Islam’s bean pie and Indiana’s sugar cream Hoosier pie; “desperation pies” that relied on pantry staples when times were tough (chess, shoofly, mock apple); midwestern produce pies (persimmon chiffon); and retro relics (cottage cheese, chocolate rum).

Read More

Improvisers from around the globe flock to Chicago to learn the “right” way to improvise, yet veteran actor (actor, not improviser) David Razowsky’s new book throws “yes, and” in the trash, sets it on fire, composts it, and plants a tree with it. He’s earned the right, after ten years on Second City Chicago’s mainstage with Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Rachel Dratch, and others; serving as artistic director of Second City Hollywood; and now working as a traveling instructor who has taught in prisons, and even delivered a TedTalk. He’s philosophical, funny, and says “fuck” frequently. Razowsky sat down with me to talk about his methodology, the good ol’ days of improv,, and Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon.  

Sheri Flanders: So how was writing a book? 

David Razowsky: It’s sort of like waking up one morning and you’re pregnant. And you don’t know what creature got you pregnant, so you don’t know how long the gestation period is, and what you do know is it’s too late to abort it. The most important thing is to keep it alive so that it doesn’t kill you. Then when you’re like, “I think I’m gonna give birth to it,” you go to the Internet and google lists of names for the book, like baby names. Then, if you’re self-publishing it, it’s like there’s no doula, there’s no midwife. It’s like being in a cave and . . .

. . . biting on a stick?

That’s the process!

Most improv instruction is structured around the eight-week class. As a teacher I was always like, “OK, I can see half of you have not gotten it yet, and now I have to move on to next week’s lesson,” and felt super frustrated. What are we missing by being stuck in this format?

In the book, I talk about how I reached a point at Second City where I didn’t want to deal with a rigid structure anymore. That allowed me to do whatever the fuck I need to do. I don’t do eight-week classes anymore. I feel like one of the problems is—what’s the word that everybody’s using nowadays? Pedagogy. My advice to improv teachers is to not worry about what you have to finish teaching and be with the students every step of the way. You’re modeling what kind of an improviser to be by modeling what kind of a teacher you are. Every once in a while somebody says, “Wow, you really spent a lot of time with Alice.” And I’m like, “Alice needs a lot of time right now, and when you need time, I’m going to spend time with you.” Did you ever study with Del [Close]?

No. That was before I moved to Chicago.

Del had a class at iO. It wasn’t a class in improvisation, it wasn’t a class in Harold, it was a class on what was on Del’s mind. I loved it. He would say, “I went to the Art Institute and I saw some Hopper. I think we’re gonna do some Hopper scenes.” And I’m like, what? But when you have the confidence of the students, knowing that they’re along for the ride, they’re gonna do whatever the fuck you want to do.

A Subversive’s Guide to Improvisation: Moving Beyond “Yes, And” by David Razowsky, Boyd Parker Press, paperback and ebook, 496 pp., $9.99, amazon.com

In the book you talk about how most improvisers don’t identify as actors. Why is that? 

When I started at iO in 1985 or ’86, there were maybe four improv schools in the country? Wow, I could be totally wrong! [starts counting] Dudley Riggs? I don’t know if the Committee was around when I was there in San Francisco, Keith Johnstone, of course, Second City, Players Workshop which was connected to Second City at that time, and iO. So six. So the people that I took classes from weren’t improvisers, because there wasn’t such a thing. They were actors, directors, and writers. They were imparting skill sets that are vital in good scene work: blocking, viewpoints, tempo, repetition, typography, architecture . . . I think the reason that people don’t teach it now is they didn’t learn it. 

I love the way your book throws out all of the traditional improv rules like “yes, and,” and that there’s a section geared toward advanced improvisers.

Say NO! There is no play that doesn’t have the word “no” in it. And there is no play that doesn’t have a question in it! There is no play where they’re not talking about somebody who isn’t there! All of that. Why is it that improvisers aren’t fucking allowed to do that? Fuck off!

I don’t teach “yes, and,” so it’s already advanced. I’m teaching, “look at your partner right now, what are they thinking?” And keep going with that. So what ends up happening is we start opening our hearts more, and we start going, “I trust you, you trust me.”

There’s a show called Naked Lunch, a podcast by that guy, Phil, Rosenberg? Rosenthal? One of my fellow Jews, whatever. He interviewed Elaine May for her first podcast. She talked about when she first really sat down with Mike Nichols, just to fuck around on a park bench, or something, she realized, “He’s got my sense of humor! And I like his sense of humor!” The need for “yes, and” doesn’t apply to them! Because they’re living in their own world!

In your book you recall your father telling you to get a real job, and having a meandering career like many artists—myself included. As artists, there’s always the doubt of “Is this what I should be doing?” How did you navigate that?

There’s something that happens to us called compulsion. I’m compelled to do this, I have to do this, I must do this. As much as I feel like I don’t want to do this, I have to do this. 

Like somebody says “Come out, we’re gonna eat dinner together” you’re going to go, even though you just ate. And you’re reading a menu for the restaurant, and you see Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon! Anything below that, you’re not paying attention to, because you cannot get that Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon out of what it is that you’re doing. As much as you try to do something else, it’s not going to work, because that’s not what you want to do! There’s always this thing in the back of your head that’s going, “Yeah, like, I’m making the money, and yeah, I got a parking space, and yeah, I got bennies. But you know what?—”

I could be having Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon. 

Exactly. After a while, the universe gives you signs. It was just a matter of me being at the right place at the right time, which really helped push me. Then to be cast with Mick Napier and Splatter Theatre—which changed the face of theater I think in Chicago, arguably the Annoyance changed the face of improvisation and sketch writing—I was part of that. I was also in a theater company with Carell and Colbert and Amy Sedaris, and that was the universe saying, you’re in the right place. I couldn’t fucking get enough of it because I was given the opportunity—and I think that that is a huge thing right there—I feel I’m coming from a place of privilege. I never take that for granted. 

I went into your book as an improv person, ready to nerd out, then I realized that this book is also really accessible for somebody who’s like, “I don’t do improv and I’m never gonna do improv.” You just have a lot of fun stories about life and theater.

This book is for anybody who has a curiosity about what it was like to be putting on a sketch show, how to work with people, no matter where it is that you are. It’s for writers, I think it’s also for directors. And that’s why there’s a Buddhist part of it—it’s like, this is for everybody. This is for any creative person, you know? Do whatever it is that you want to do! Fuck the voices that are telling you not to do it!

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Improvisers from around the globe flock to Chicago to learn the “right” way to improvise, yet veteran actor (actor, not improviser) David Razowsky’s new book throws “yes, and” in the trash, sets it on fire, composts it, and plants a tree with it. He’s earned the right, after ten years on Second City Chicago’s mainstage with Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Rachel Dratch, and others; serving as artistic director of Second City Hollywood; and now working as a traveling instructor who has taught in prisons, and even delivered a TedTalk. He’s philosophical, funny, and says “fuck” frequently. Razowsky sat down with me to talk about his methodology, the good ol’ days of improv,, and Bacon-Flavored Bacon Bacon.  

Sheri Flanders: So how was writing a book? 

David Razowsky: It’s sort of like waking up one morning and you’re pregnant. And you don’t know what creature got you pregnant, so you don’t know how long the gestation period is, and what you do know is it’s too late to abort it. The most important thing is to keep it alive so that it doesn’t kill you. Then when you’re like, “I think I’m gonna give birth to it,” you go to the Internet and google lists of names for the book, like baby names. Then, if you’re self-publishing it, it’s like there’s no doula, there’s no midwife. It’s like being in a cave and . . .

. . . biting on a stick?

That’s the process!

Most improv instruction is structured around the eight-week class. As a teacher I was always like, “OK, I can see half of you have not gotten it yet, and now I have to move on to next week’s lesson,” and felt super frustrated. What are we missing by being stuck in this format?

In the book, I talk about how I reached a point at Second City where I didn’t want to deal with a rigid structure anymore. That allowed me to do whatever the fuck I need to do. I don’t do eight-week classes anymore. I feel like one of the problems is—what’s the word that everybody’s using nowadays? Pedagogy. My advice to improv teachers is to not worry about what you have to finish teaching and be with the students every step of the way. You’re modeling what kind of an improviser to be by modeling what kind of a teacher you are. Every once in a while somebody says, “Wow, you really spent a lot of time with Alice.” And I’m like, “Alice needs a lot of time right now, and when you need time, I’m going to spend time with you.” Did you ever study with Del [Close]?

No. That was before I moved to Chicago.

Del had a class at iO. It wasn’t a class in improvisation, it wasn’t a class in Harold, it was a class on what was on Del’s mind. I loved it. He would say, “I went to the Art Institute and I saw some Hopper. I think we’re gonna do some Hopper scenes.” And I’m like, what? But when you have the confidence of the students, knowing that they’re along for the ride, they’re gonna do whatever the fuck you want to do.

A Subversive’s Guide to Improvisation: Moving Beyond “Yes, And” by David Razowsky, Boyd Parker Press, paperback and ebook, 496 pp., $9.99, amazon.com

In the book you talk about how most improvisers don’t identify as actors. Why is that? 

When I started at iO in 1985 or ’86, there were maybe four improv schools in the country? Wow, I could be totally wrong! [starts counting] Dudley Riggs? I don’t know if the Committee was around when I was there in San Francisco, Keith Johnstone, of course, Second City, Players Workshop which was connected to Second City at that time, and iO. So six. So the people that I took classes from weren’t improvisers, because there wasn’t such a thing. They were actors, directors, and writers. They were imparting skill sets that are vital in good scene work: blocking, viewpoints, tempo, repetition, typography, architecture . . . I think the reason that people don’t teach it now is they didn’t learn it. 

I love the way your book throws out all of the traditional improv rules like “yes, and,” and that there’s a section geared toward advanced improvisers.

Say NO! There is no play that doesn’t have the word “no” in it. And there is no play that doesn’t have a question in it! There is no play where they’re not talking about somebody who isn’t there! All of that. Why is it that improvisers aren’t fucking allowed to do that? Fuck off!

I don’t teach “yes, and,” so it’s already advanced. I’m teaching, “look at your partner right now, what are they thinking?” And keep going with that. So what ends up happening is we start opening our hearts more, and we start going, “I trust you, you trust me.”

There’s a show called Naked Lunch, a podcast by that guy, Phil, Rosenberg? Rosenthal? One of my fellow Jews, whatever. He interviewed Elaine May for her first podcast. She talked about when she first really sat down with Mike Nichols, just to fuck around on a park bench, or something, she realized, “He’s got my sense of humor! And I like his sense of humor!” The need for “yes, and” doesn’t apply to them! Because they’re living in their own world!

In your book you recall your father telling you to get a real job, and having a meandering career like many artists—myself included. As artists, there’s always the doubt of “Is this what I should be doing?” How did you navigate that?

There’s something that happens to us called compulsion. I’m compelled to do this, I have to do this, I must do this. As much as I feel like I don’t want to do this, I have to do this. 

Like somebody says “Come out, we’re gonna eat dinner together” you’re going to go, even though you just ate. And you’re reading a menu for the restaurant, and you see Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon! Anything below that, you’re not paying attention to, because you cannot get that Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon out of what it is that you’re doing. As much as you try to do something else, it’s not going to work, because that’s not what you want to do! There’s always this thing in the back of your head that’s going, “Yeah, like, I’m making the money, and yeah, I got a parking space, and yeah, I got bennies. But you know what?—”

I could be having Bacon Flavored Bacon Bacon. 

Exactly. After a while, the universe gives you signs. It was just a matter of me being at the right place at the right time, which really helped push me. Then to be cast with Mick Napier and Splatter Theatre—which changed the face of theater I think in Chicago, arguably the Annoyance changed the face of improvisation and sketch writing—I was part of that. I was also in a theater company with Carell and Colbert and Amy Sedaris, and that was the universe saying, you’re in the right place. I couldn’t fucking get enough of it because I was given the opportunity—and I think that that is a huge thing right there—I feel I’m coming from a place of privilege. I never take that for granted. 

I went into your book as an improv person, ready to nerd out, then I realized that this book is also really accessible for somebody who’s like, “I don’t do improv and I’m never gonna do improv.” You just have a lot of fun stories about life and theater.

This book is for anybody who has a curiosity about what it was like to be putting on a sketch show, how to work with people, no matter where it is that you are. It’s for writers, I think it’s also for directors. And that’s why there’s a Buddhist part of it—it’s like, this is for everybody. This is for any creative person, you know? Do whatever it is that you want to do! Fuck the voices that are telling you not to do it!

Read More