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Play On! Goodman Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Turning Shakespeare’s fanciful Illyria into “the magical kingdom of Harlem” during “the swingin’ 40s,” Play On! focuses on two couples whose members spend most of their time pining for the wrong partner. Vy, modeled on Shakespeare’s Viola, is an aspiring songwriter recently arrived in New York from her Mississippi home (“I don’t want your Dixie,” she sings of her plans to trade in “southern skies” for “that classy uptown style”)....

By Kristin Ostberg Emotions researchers have traditionally focused on negative emotions: the fear, anxiety, and depression that make people sick. To try to explain the flip side–how positive emotions keep people well–researchers at Madison are looking at a constellation of qualities related to a person’s ability to regulate his or her emotions and recover from negative ones, or what they call positive affective style. Generally, the monkey with the positive affective style is the one that tends to move forward in the world where others hold back....

Guillermo Kuitca By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The contradictions in modernist works are in part intended to make the viewer play a more active role in determining meaning. And for minor artists, producing contradiction-laden art has become almost a parlor game. But Kuitca’s images, which seem overfilled and vacant at once, open up a yawning gap–between the almost too literal mattresses and the almost too suggestive maps–into which a veritable panoply of contradictions can enter....

The Architecture of Honey The first sounds I heard when we clambered off the yellow school bus were the wind and the birds. It was dusk in the Illinois farmland, and our voices seemed muffled by the quiet and the green intensity of trees; the fresh grass swept in waves, some of it neatly mowed, but most of it rising up long in the supple fields. After the gritty clutter of the street outside the former Randolph Street Gallery, after an hour or so bumping down the highway on the bus, this transition into grace was sudden and dramatic....

Taking Sides Harwood’s recent drama Taking Sides, now receiving its Chicago premiere by the Organic Touchstone Company, explores The Dresser’s theme from another angle. Once again Harwood’s hero is an elderly artist convinced that his art is ammunition against Hitler’s horrors. But where Sir was a fictional character loosely modeled on a real-life figure (the actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit, for whom the young Harwood worked as backstage assistant), Taking Sides focuses on a historical personage of considerable significance: Wilhelm FurtwŠngler, the great symphonic conductor who, as maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic, stayed in Germany after the Nazis came to power while other artists–among them his fellow musicians Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Kurt Weill–went into exile....

By most accounts, the Italian pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the fourth centennial of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, was a marvel of artistic riches. Located in the 30-acre Palace of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, the pavilion displayed bronze statuary, marble and wooden carvings, ornamental furniture, paintings, mosaics, bas-reliefs, Venetian glassware, ceramics, and lace, as well as treasures from the Vatican. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Stories In September engineers reported that Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium is corroding because so many fans, unwilling to miss a few minutes’ action by waiting in line for the rest rooms, relieve themselves on the terraces. Also in September, Macedonian soldiers captured a very modest Albanian border officer who had wandered across the line; he said the Macedonian trees provided better cover for answering nature’s call than the sparse vegetation on his own side....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Los Angeles surgeon Brigitte Boisselier announced in November that her company, Clonaid, might soon accept orders from clients who want to clone themselves. She hopes human cloning techniques will be refined within two years. In her spare time, Boisselier is a bishop in the Raelian religion, founded in 1970 by a former sports reporter in France, which states that earth was populated 25,000 years ago with alien DNA....

PIERRE DORGE’S NEW JUNGLE ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The long-term success of any artistic enterprise depends equally on seemingly conflicting virtues: adaptability to new influences and adherence to an initial creative vision. Twenty years ago Danish guitarist Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra arose from the confluence of his interest in West African music and his respect for the work of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk–and if Dorge had strictly maintained that direction, we’d still be listening to the nutball hybrids of big-band saxophones, kora-styled guitar solos, Euro-American harmonies, and loping high-life rhythms that characterized the orchestra’s first albums....

That expensive new dress in my closet has been insisting I take it to Blackbird all summer. When I finally did it was in good company. Nearly everyone–overtired artist types, overfed business types–turned out in black or white, which look great against Blackbird’s sleek gray interior, sort of the minimalist haute diner effect. There’s no art at Blackbird, save for one big sticky painting. No art, that is, until you get serious about dinner....

The Chicago sports media–print and electronic–reached some sort of new low in the wake of Dennis Rodman’s most recent transgression. For days after Rodman kicked a cameraman on the baseline in Minnesota, coach Phil Jackson stopped talking to the media. Gosh, various reporters said or wrote, Phil must be really mad at Rodman this time; he won’t even talk to us. The utter cluelessness of that state of mind is difficult to fathom....

When my roommate’s alarm goes off, he invariably presses the snooze bar. This continues in nine-minute cycles until I have to rouse him myself. All the alarms I have seen have a nine-minute snooze interval. Is this a standard number, and if so, where did it come from? –Matt Mc, Indiana, Pennsylvania Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (2) Engineers believe their bosses come to check on them every ten minutes....

By Frank Melcori “All union problems involve the boss and the worker,” she says. “It’s the same with actors’ unions–it is a dynamic that transcends all industries. In this regard we have a PR problem. The public does not view actors as union members or people even requiring a union.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “At this point SAG had a rude awakening–the two unions were going to destroy one another, while the producers would obviously accept the bid most favorable to their interests....

BETH ORTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although Beth Orton has sung with the Chemical Brothers, Red Snapper, and William Orbit, she’s no dance diva. Several tunes on the London resident’s debut record, Trailer Park (Dedicated), are garnished with spacey electronics and propelled by shuffling dance beats, but her songs really pay homage to the icons of 1970s English folk rock. And like her elders, Orton isn’t afraid to rely on contemporary production to put forth her introspective lyrics and indelible melodies....

Thank you so much for your spotlight on Barry Bruner, art teacher at Whitney Young High School [October 22]. I started at Whitney Young in seventh grade and graduated in 1986. I had Mr. Bruner for art when I was a junior. I was one of the lucky ones. Whitney Young has always been a special school for most of us who attended, and Mr. Bruner personified the excitement of attending a school where many of the teachers were actually interested in each student....

CARLA COOK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carla Cook’s debut album came out only a few months ago, but I’m already tempted to call her one of my favorite jazz singers. Part of Cook’s appeal is her reach: on It’s All About Love (Maxjazz) she sings Basie, Rodgers and Hart, and Nascimento, but also taps into the music of her native Detroit (Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues”) and her experience in gospel choirs (“Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand”)....

Martin Newell In its broad outline, the plight of British guitarist and songwriter Martin Newell will sound familiar. Since 1980 Newell has been releasing brilliant, deliriously tuneful pop records–as the Cleaners From Venus and the Brotherhood of Lizards as well as under his own name–yet he’s received scant attention and had little commercial success. Even in his own country, he remains largely unknown to the musical community. (4) Music too far ahead of its time....

Unless they’ve contributed to my campaign fund. “At a fund-raising dinner,” reports Sam Smith in the “Progressive Review” (June 11), “the President promised more actions like that against Yugoslavia to aid people attacked for their racial, ethnic or religious background: ‘If we can stop it, we intend to stop it.’ It was not clear whether Clinton was referring to China with its repression of Christians, Buddhists, Tibetans, and human rights activists....

homi.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hapless victims of circumstance, these otherwise law-abiding women found themselves slammed in jail for such minor offenses as running red lights and having expired license plates, all because there were outstanding warrants for their arrests. These warrants, which the women were supposedly unaware of, harked back to a trumped-up child-neglect charge in one case and an unfortunate collision with an elderly pedestrian while driving with a suspended license in another....

The difference between being a drug addict and a Straight Dope addict is that I can only get an occasional fix of the Straight Dope. You make me laugh hard enough to put the pain out of my head that the ruptured disks in my back are causing me. Monday is when the Internet releases the Straight Dope; I seem to need less medication that night to relieve my pain. So my question is, is laughter truly good medicine?...