Choreographer Ea Sola is loyal to two cultures–and to none. “I never feel that I’ve got a country to call my own,” she said in a 1995 interview. “When I’m in Paris I’m in love with Paris; when I go to Vietnam I like Vietnam.” Born and raised in that war-torn place, she left it in 1974 and wandered from country to country, arriving as a teenager in Paris in 1978....

In 1991 Cindy Mitchell traveled to Casablanca for the Chicago Sister Cities Program. While there, she toured the 276-bed Ibn Rochd Children’s Hospital, an enormous complex of many buildings erected around the turn of the century by the French when they occupied Morocco. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ibn Rochd not only serves the five million people of Casablanca but those living in the 37,000 villages of the country as well....

FALSETTOS, Athenaeum Theatre. This production of William Finn and James Lapine’s pop opera impressively meets the challenges of a beautiful but difficult work of musical theater. The story of a confused gay man, Marvin, who struggles to form an extended family with his ex-wife, Trina, his son, Jason, and his boyfriend, Whizzer, Falsettos is populated by funny but obsessive neurotics, each of whom undergoes a rite of passage: Marvin’s coming out, Jason’s bar mitzvah, Trina’s marriage to Marvin’s psychiatrist, Mendel, and Whizzer’s death from a mysterious unnamed disease we now call AIDS....

FORTUNES OF THE MOOR, ETA Creative Arts Foundation. This parable of adoption and greed presents a new vision of Shakespeare’s Othello. Playwrights Barbara and Carlton Molette imagine a custody battle over the Moor’s son, born secretly in a Venetian convent while he’s off fighting the wars that made him rich and famous. When Othello’s African family arrive to claim the child, they face treachery and racism. Clever plot twists combine with formal language to complement Shakespeare’s story, offering a bold critique of the white culture that exploited and destroyed Othello and now threatens his son’s life....

Most stand-ups I’ve met have wanted a shot at TV stardom–just some little sitcom or talk show they could call their own. As if every show becomes a hit and every stand-up comedian ends up as wealthy as Jerry Seinfeld. But in her one-woman piece Margaret Cho asks, What do you do after your sitcom or talk show tanks? The answer lies in this bitter, witty monologue, which details all the glorious idiocy behind Cho’s own ill-fated sitcom, All-American Girl–the ego battles, the bad decisions, the attempts to fashion a series ethnic enough to be called an ethnic comedy but bland enough for white-bread America....

By Michael Miner The 27-year-old author took two years off between her first and second years of law school to think through the book she wanted to write. She had something in mind vast and amorphous: African-American history in general and somewhere within it a history of her family. These great themes condensed into a series of snapshots set securely in time and place–“the book that was beneath all the rubble....

Lead Stories After Ivory Coast’s soccer team was eliminated from the African Nations Cup in January, the country’s military ruler, General Robert Guei, had the team arrested and put in a military prison for two days. Addressing the players, Guei said, “I asked that you be taken there so you reflect awhile. Next time [if you play badly] you will stay there for military service . . . until a sense of civic pride gets into your heads....

Lead Stories Least Justified Road Rages Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A 41-year-old man was arrested in Conneaut, Ohio, in May and charged with shooting two volunteer firefighters. The victims were assisting an ambulance crew with an injured, elderly woman; apparently the man became impatient when the ambulance driver took too much time backing out of a driveway. And in April army major Odie Butler stood for 45 minutes protecting a critically wounded woman whose van had overturned on a highway in Alexandria, Virginia, during rush hour....

Sometimes the difference between causing offense and speaking directly can lie in the timing. Cecil has complained of the massive amount of hate mail he has received from Wiccans after questioning the antiquity of their faith and their claims of maintaining continuity with the original Pagan traditions [November 12]. Late in the article he acknowledges that some Wiccans freely acknowledge the lack of evidence for a pre-Gardnerian origin of Wicca, and, as he states, point to the invention of ritual by those practicing it, as one of Wicca’s strengths....

Rivers typically symbolize journeys, the passage of time and space. For director D.P. Carlson, the Chicago River was central to his two-year struggle to complete a 65-minute film: Chicago Filmmakers on the Chicago River. It’s an engaging and thoughtful study of local film culture as told by people in the industry. Carlson did numerous interviews–all while floating on the river. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He surveyed prominent Chicago-born directors who work in mainstream studio features (Andrew Davis, Michael Mann, John Landis, Harold Ramis); filmmakers who shuttle between independent and studio work (John McNaughton, Steven A....

Rhino in Winter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Festival offerings are listed on a week-by-week basis (audiences are advised to call the festival for updates); following is the schedule for March 5 through 12. THURSDAY, MARCH 5 Amanda Clower’s one-woman show finds a late-night refrigeraider examining her relationships with her mother and grandmother. Jenny Magnus directs for Flying Girl. “[S]ometimes Clower gets stuck in her metaphors....

Hey, Faggot: –Sexless Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t have an answer for you, but some questions of my own: Why are you pregnant? What was going on in your head when you decided to get or stay pregnant by someone you’d known for such a short time? Considering that this is child number two, you had to be aware of the cause-and-effect relationship between fucking and babies....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, DFF: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your letter arrived yesterday afternoon, and some hours later, while I was sitting in a darkened movie theater, my thoughts returned to you. The film my boyfriend and I were enjoying was a hundred-million-dollar metaphor for your struggle: just as you did not let those bugs–HPV and herpes–get you down, the brave young men and women of Starship Troopers weren’t letting bugs get them down either....

You might not know it from watching Brett Neveu’s puppet show The Pup At Theatre, but he’s one of Chicago’s best unproduced playwrights. Then again, after seeing a show this artfully awful, this vivaciously vacuous, you might guess its creator had some talent. The Pup’s concept is simple: it’s the most pretentious, poorly executed puppet show imaginable. Performers Neveu and Eric C. Johnson adopt stern, artsy expressions while tearing through an hour’s worth of inspired insipid skits: a panda worrying about swallowing too much toothpaste, a bunny and a cow dancing to REO Speedwagon at the prom, a marauding porcelain hand terrorizing people with gentle taps....

The three Ryan boys came from Tipperary, Ireland, to New Orleans. Thomas, Patrick, and Philip. I don’t know the year. Philip and Patrick were both stonecutters. That’s all we know about the family in Ireland. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So they built the canals, and then Philip and Patrick married the McLaughlin sisters, Nancy and Ellen, whose family lived on a land grant around 131st and Wolf Road....

CHINA NATIONAL ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The China National Orchestra, one of only a few traditional-music groups that the country’s cultural ministry permits to travel abroad, last visited Chicago in 1984. The orchestra was a novelty then, but in the years since, concerts by touring expatriates and the efforts of the locally based Chinese Music Society of North America have ensured that its repertoire won’t seem quite so exotic this time–Chinese instruments like the erhu and suona may soon be as familiar to Western ears as the tabla and sitar....

KING FLOYD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even by R & B standards, the career of New Orleans vocalist King Floyd has been erratic. Raised in a musical family, he was a local celebrity by the time he hit high school. After trying his luck in both New York and California (where he cut his first LP in 1967), he returned home to the Crescent City and, in 1970, erupted onto the national charts with “Groove Me,” an infectious delight that melded deep soul emoting with a funk-popping, near reggae beat, all heated to a boil by producer Wardell Quezergue’s fatback horn charts....

My love of African dance began when I saw this company ten years ago at the Auditorium Theatre. Then it was nearly 30 years old: Senegal’s official music and dance troupe was founded by poet and president Leopold Senghor in 1960, the year the country achieved independence, and it has a born-again nationalistic fervor. Intended to preserve traditional forms, it’s colorful and loud, as chock-full of feats and magical images as a circus....

I’ve just read enough versions of the same story about Frank Lloyd Wright to know the story could be a myth. Each is set in the Wright house known as Wingspread, named by Wright for its pinwheel design, which stands near Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin. One night it rained. To choose the version of the tale told by Brendan Gill in his biography of the architect, the owner of Wingspread got Wright on the phone....

Lead Stories In March Doug and Veronica Wright celebrated their first wedding anniversary on the bridge between the U.S. and Canada at Niagara Falls because it’s the only place they can meet. American Doug is barred from Canada because of a criminal record that includes an illegal entry into that country; Canadian Veronica is barred from the U.S. because of a 1997 drug conviction. The couple’s six-month-old son lives with her and also visits with Doug on the bridge....