Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which would take her life six and a half years later. The day my sister died, my other sister’s mother-in-law fell down the basement stairs at her home and died of her injuries a couple of hours after my sister passed. Somewhere in the timeline, my other sister was also diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (She’s still with us, thank god.) 

The Malignant Ampersands Through 11/27: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$40

So maybe I’m the target audience for a play like Brett Neveu’s The Malignant Ampersands, in which a once-prominent family has fallen from wealth and happiness into a surreal world of unending sickness and the clammy fears that living surrounded by such illness unleashes in your psyche. Now in its world premiere at Neveu’s artistic home, A Red Orchid Theatre, under the direction of frequent Neveu collaborator Dado, the show is described in press materials as “a very unofficial sequel to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.”

You don’t really need to know the 1942 film (based on Booth Tarkington’s 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) to understand the world of Neveu’s play. In fact, you might find it challenging to understand Neveu’s world, whether you’ve seen the film or his deliberately opaque work before or not. (Neveu, a longtime friend and collaborator of Michael Shannon, seems poised for a larger national profile now that Shannon has directed a film version of his 2002 play, Eric LaRue.) 

One salient fact, though, is that Welles’s film has become the stuff of cinematic folklore: his original 131-minute cut was slashed by RKO to 88 minutes while Welles was working in Brazil on the ill-fated It’s All True. The original director’s cut has become a holy grail for cinematic historians. And just as they search for the missing pieces that will make the final picture make more sense, or at least closer to their ideal vision, so too do the Ampersands.

We first meet Gabe (Travis A. Knight), a somewhat awkward young man who nevertheless is tasked with running various relatives around to their medical appointments, while he’s on the phone with Corey (Steve Schine), who appears to be the putative head of the family, though some sort of respiratory ailment keeps him housebound. (The actual relationships they all have with each other remain vague throughout—a symbol of how they’re just making their lives together out of scraps of the past. Since the characters tend to refer to each other by their proper names throughout rather than use pronouns, those too are on the vague side.) 

Gabe is at the Dollar Store, which is next to the Goodwill, where he’s put a deposit down on a foosball table, and he’s hoping Hiker (Meighan Gerachis) can help him pick it up, even though Hiker lost their hands to osteosarcoma at some point. Gabe moons about the old family photos from when their ancestors lived in a big house in town, surrounded by nice things. But Corey tells him, “You have to figure it out for yourself. If you want nice things like in those photos, you have to get out of your own way and follow through.”

So far, that sounds like the kind of send-up of therapy-speak that Neveu has used before (notably in Eric LaRue, where the attempts of a mother of a school shooter to find some “closure” come to naught as she’s barraged with empty bromides from her husband and pastor). But thinking that you’re entitled to some nice stuff when everything around you is turning to shit isn’t unhealthy; what does your head in is thinking that the universe cares whether you get it or not.

So yeah, this is a grim and absurd piece that doesn’t always make narrative sense. Gabe’s youngest relative, Summer (Emilie Maureen Hanson), sees a large shadow figure (a lifesize alien-like creature created by Lolly Extract of Jabberwocky Marionettes) that might be a figment of a brain tumor, or might be a realization of the dark fate surrounding all these characters, just beyond the vinyl curtains at the back of Grant Sabin’s deliberately dingy set (a portable commode doubles as a chair for the family, if that’s not too on the nose as a metaphor). Regardless, the shadow creature teaches Summer a creepy poem: “Sometimes the crypt can be comforting / Dirt and Stones / Moonlight shining through cracks / A worn path literally headed to death’s literal door.” 

Meantime, West Ampersand (the delightfully choleric John Judd) indulges in a wide range of conspiracy theories about the health-care industry that have just enough truth to them to be compelling. Gabe avoids visiting the deathbed of his sort-of cousin Jamie by going over to have a sort-of date with barista Bobbie (Jackie Seijo). But he can’t outrun his family’s fate, apparently.

If you hate stories that resist interpretation, this probably isn’t your show. And I certainly hope most of you don’t have the same family history with cancer that I do. (It sucks, trust me.) But somehow, Neveu’s story felt closer to the truth about what it feels like to be down the rabbit hole of family death and sickness than any number of more straightforward narrative pieces I’ve seen. I’m not sure I can recommend it for everyone, but the adroit work by the ensemble will at least mean you won’t be bored. Does it make sense? No, not always, and the end is particularly befuddling. And that, sadly, is the point.

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Shepsu Aakhu, a founding member of MPAACT (Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre) has crafted many of the company’s shows over the past 32 years. But I’m not sure I’ve seen one as personal as his current world premiere, Ride or Die, now at the Greenhouse Theater Center under the direction of the legendary Chuck Smith. 

Ride or Die Through 11/20: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $22-$40

Presented as a sort of theatrical diary of Aakhu’s experiences in the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown and the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the slayings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the piece incorporates close-up images of flowers Aakhu took during numerous bike rides over the first months of the pandemic, accompanied by his entries tracing his thoughts and reactions to what was going on in the world. (He called the 200 entries “Project Uplift,” and shared them along the way with a few friends, including Smith.)

Sometimes those trips took him to predominantly white neighborhoods, where inevitably questions of personal safety arose. (Would a paranoid homeowner call the cops?) Often he was on the lakefront trail, officially closed by order of Mayor Lightfoot. But as he found out, the cops didn’t care enough to get out of their cars to chase him away.

His stories are told in an intertwining fashion by five ensemble members of various races and genders, all dressed in identical black athletic pants and gray hoodies. But they’re not so much a choral construct as aspects of his own psyche, interrogating each other as if Aakhu is setting up Socratic dialogues with himself to figure out the world going mad (and trying to stop the madness) around him.

Along the way, as the flowers survive the extremes of Chicago weather, he reminds us (and himself) that they are both delicate and tough. He explores the evolution of the story of the magical “genie” over time. And he tries to understand the events of January 6. “We can’t impeach an entire country,” he notes—a pointed reminder that Trump wasn’t the cause of the disease of white supremacy and authoritarianism; he just gave permission for a frighteningly large number of people to give it their full-throated devotion.

There will be any number of pandemic plays in the years to come, to be sure. But Aakhu’s deeply personal account, rendered with grace, passion, and wit by Smith’s ensemble, provides an important snapshot of one Black man’s experiences, filtered through isolation, nature, protests, and family. At the end, the ensemble tells us, “We are all leaving rehab and rejoining society,” and it’s a pretty accurate way of summing up how the last couple of years have felt.

Read More

Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which would take her life six and a half years later. The day my sister died, my other sister’s mother-in-law fell down the basement stairs at her home and died of her injuries a couple of hours after my sister passed. Somewhere in the timeline, my other sister was also diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (She’s still with us, thank god.) 

The Malignant Ampersands Through 11/27: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$40

So maybe I’m the target audience for a play like Brett Neveu’s The Malignant Ampersands, in which a once-prominent family has fallen from wealth and happiness into a surreal world of unending sickness and the clammy fears that living surrounded by such illness unleashes in your psyche. Now in its world premiere at Neveu’s artistic home, A Red Orchid Theatre, under the direction of frequent Neveu collaborator Dado, the show is described in press materials as “a very unofficial sequel to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.”

You don’t really need to know the 1942 film (based on Booth Tarkington’s 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) to understand the world of Neveu’s play. In fact, you might find it challenging to understand Neveu’s world, whether you’ve seen the film or his deliberately opaque work before or not. (Neveu, a longtime friend and collaborator of Michael Shannon, seems poised for a larger national profile now that Shannon has directed a film version of his 2002 play, Eric LaRue.) 

One salient fact, though, is that Welles’s film has become the stuff of cinematic folklore: his original 131-minute cut was slashed by RKO to 88 minutes while Welles was working in Brazil on the ill-fated It’s All True. The original director’s cut has become a holy grail for cinematic historians. And just as they search for the missing pieces that will make the final picture make more sense, or at least closer to their ideal vision, so too do the Ampersands.

We first meet Gabe (Travis A. Knight), a somewhat awkward young man who nevertheless is tasked with running various relatives around to their medical appointments, while he’s on the phone with Corey (Steve Schine), who appears to be the putative head of the family, though some sort of respiratory ailment keeps him housebound. (The actual relationships they all have with each other remain vague throughout—a symbol of how they’re just making their lives together out of scraps of the past. Since the characters tend to refer to each other by their proper names throughout rather than use pronouns, those too are on the vague side.) 

Gabe is at the Dollar Store, which is next to the Goodwill, where he’s put a deposit down on a foosball table, and he’s hoping Hiker (Meighan Gerachis) can help him pick it up, even though Hiker lost their hands to osteosarcoma at some point. Gabe moons about the old family photos from when their ancestors lived in a big house in town, surrounded by nice things. But Corey tells him, “You have to figure it out for yourself. If you want nice things like in those photos, you have to get out of your own way and follow through.”

So far, that sounds like the kind of send-up of therapy-speak that Neveu has used before (notably in Eric LaRue, where the attempts of a mother of a school shooter to find some “closure” come to naught as she’s barraged with empty bromides from her husband and pastor). But thinking that you’re entitled to some nice stuff when everything around you is turning to shit isn’t unhealthy; what does your head in is thinking that the universe cares whether you get it or not.

So yeah, this is a grim and absurd piece that doesn’t always make narrative sense. Gabe’s youngest relative, Summer (Emilie Maureen Hanson), sees a large shadow figure (a lifesize alien-like creature created by Lolly Extract of Jabberwocky Marionettes) that might be a figment of a brain tumor, or might be a realization of the dark fate surrounding all these characters, just beyond the vinyl curtains at the back of Grant Sabin’s deliberately dingy set (a portable commode doubles as a chair for the family, if that’s not too on the nose as a metaphor). Regardless, the shadow creature teaches Summer a creepy poem: “Sometimes the crypt can be comforting / Dirt and Stones / Moonlight shining through cracks / A worn path literally headed to death’s literal door.” 

Meantime, West Ampersand (the delightfully choleric John Judd) indulges in a wide range of conspiracy theories about the health-care industry that have just enough truth to them to be compelling. Gabe avoids visiting the deathbed of his sort-of cousin Jamie by going over to have a sort-of date with barista Bobbie (Jackie Seijo). But he can’t outrun his family’s fate, apparently.

If you hate stories that resist interpretation, this probably isn’t your show. And I certainly hope most of you don’t have the same family history with cancer that I do. (It sucks, trust me.) But somehow, Neveu’s story felt closer to the truth about what it feels like to be down the rabbit hole of family death and sickness than any number of more straightforward narrative pieces I’ve seen. I’m not sure I can recommend it for everyone, but the adroit work by the ensemble will at least mean you won’t be bored. Does it make sense? No, not always, and the end is particularly befuddling. And that, sadly, is the point.

Read More

J.C. Cricket’s Sex Demonis not for the faint of heart—it’s for the depraved of mind, and Chicago is blessed to have it showing one night only at the Music Box on October 26. In this 1975 porno from the gay underground, John, a demure and understated kind of guy, buys his lover Jim an ostentatious necklace at an antique store on Christopher Street. But when Jim puts it on, he finds himself possessed by a sex-crazed demon who compels him to hit up every cruising spot in town. This evil spirit’s got an insatiable thirst for hot homo fucking . . . and murder! Can Jim be saved? Or will John lose Jim to his newly uncontrollable urges?

While oft billed as the gay Exorcist, about the only thing the two films have in common is a demon and an exorcism. From the 60s through the 80s, porn was the easiest way for gay filmmakers to secure funding for films that represented gay storylines, and piggybacking on popular titles made marketing easier. What Sex Demon is really about is a tension that continues today between polite gays and raging homos.

Throughout the film, Good Gay™ John—who enjoys his quiet life of monogamy and tender hand holding with Jim—insists he doesn’t know the gay clubs or cruising spots. He’s not that kind of gay! Unfortunately, after one trip to Christopher Street, now his lover is. If you don’t know your queer geography, Christopher Street is a famously gay strip of the West Village; in fact, it’s home to the Stonewall Inn and was long a hot spot for gay rights organizing. When Jim puts on John’s Christopher Street gift, he can no longer pass as straight in public; the sheer flamboyance of the piece marks him, and he won’t take it off, even when John asks him to. 

Once possessed, Jim finds a gay go-go bar in the backpages of a newspaper (maybe his favorite alt-weekly?), and Shirley & Company’s “Shame Shame Shame” plays while he has his first anonymous male sexual encounter. Shots of Jim’s bathroom hookup alternate with shots of a man alone simply taking his clothes off onstage. The scene is profound for the way it evokes the shame associated with any kind of homoerotic sexual expression, even imagined or solo play. John eventually learns that, if there’s any hope in saving Jim, he must rely on the couple’s Bad Gay™ friends—you know, the ones who aren’t possessed by demons but still enjoy all the bad gay stuff (glory holes, orgies, etc.) that John has distanced himself from. 

As a sexually explicit camp masterpiece, Sex Demon has it all. The film only runs an hour but manages to deliver some incredibly tender dicksucking and artfully framed fucking. Will you witness a little fisting? Yes! And a wild, glittering orgy, too! At the film’s climax, you’ll also see a screwdriver jammed in a most sensitive spot. (The scene is jarring, sure, but the absurdist plot coupled with the actor visibly breathing through it reminds you this is all fiction.) And demons have long been metaphors for gateways to things that run counter to traditional Judeo-Christianity—for instance, magic, astrology, and luxury. Gay, much?

Of course, this screening—appropriate for queer history enthusiasts and horror movie lovers of all stripes—wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of film historian and archivist Elizabeth Purchell. She’s dedicated her life to preserving queer history through film. After observing Sex Demon repeatedly celebrated in adult magazines of the era—with gripping details unlike any other movies she was reading about—the movie landed on her “must-find” list. In 2020 she was contacted by a New York collector who invited her to peruse roughly 50 gay porn titles he’d acquired as part of a lot more germaine to his interests. It was there she found an original print of the fabled movie which hadn’t been publicly screened since 1981. With the help of Vinegar Syndrome’s Joe Rubin, she was able to make a 2k scan within a day of getting the print.

Sex Demon Music Box of Horrors: Scared StupidWednesday, October 26, 9:45 PM $11 general admission, $8 Music Box members

“He did an amazing job on the color correction,” she says. “The print we had was completely faded. Just red. He was able to bring a lot of color back.”

“I’ve always been a kind of obsessive collector-slash-viewer,” Purcell continues. “I got interested in this genre of all-male cinema—gay porn or whatever you want to call it—but as I started looking into these films, I found there wasn’t really much information about them online. Looking at old issues of magazines—like the Advocate or Drummer—I was realizing that these films were, at the time, a fairly large presence in quote-unquote gay life. They were on magazine covers, they were advertised, they were heavily reviewed. They were a big deal! And now they’re really, really hard to find.”

In 2018, that inspired her to start the Instagram project Ask Any Buddy, which has since generated a movie and podcast of the same name. In recent years, she’s observed an uptick in interest about gay life in the 70s and how it’s been documented through “adult” material.

“I think these films represent different types of nostalgia,” she explains. “For people who were alive at the time—it’s nostalgia for people who they’d maybe known who are no longer with us. For younger people, people around our age, I think it is more of a nostalgia trap. Like, God, the 70s would have been an amazing time to be alive as a gay person! Everything was wonderful! Look at all the bars and the bathhouses and porno films and this and that! But despite all that, I don’t think it was necessarily that great of a time to be gay in America. So I mean, that’s something I always try to be very conscious of. It was good in some ways, but it was also really bad in other ways. With the rise of PReP over the past few years, I think there’s been a kind of resuscitation of that sort of, like, open sexual culture after two, three decades of AIDS—I think that’s part of the reason people are interested in this history. At the same time, this history has been hidden from people for so long. I think queer people in general just want to know more about queer history, and they don’t get that anywhere else.”

Read More

Last fall for the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, Aguijón Theater (the oldest Latinx company in the city) unveiled the world premiere of Rey Andújar’s La Gran Tirana (descarga dramática), a fantasia based on the life of singer “La Lupe” (Lupe Victoria Yolí Raymond). This year, the company turns its attentions and considerable talents to two iconic women in Mexican art: 20th-century painter Frida Kahlo and 17th-century poet and composer  Juana Inés de la Cruz, or Sor Juana. 

Cintas de Seda Through 11/20: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Aguijón Theater, 2707 N. Laramie, aguijontheater.org, $35 general admission (or 2 for $60), $20 students, educators, and seniors, $12 for Belmont-Cragin residents with ID showing zip codes 60634, 60635, 60639, or 60641. Presented in Spanish with English supertitles.

Cintas de Seda, written by Norge Espinoza Mendoza and directed by Sándor Menéndez, unfolds in a hospital on the eve of Día de los Muertos. The Painter (Aguijón co-artistic director Rosario Vargas) cradles empty bottles of wine in memory of her former happier days and works sporadically on a painting, while The Nun (Claudia Rentería Peña) mediates between the fiery artist and the controlling Doctor (Marcopolo Soto). 

It’s clear who The Painter represents, even before she launches into a monologue about the death of Leon Trotsky. (Kahlo, who had once been lovers with the exiled Soviet revolutionary, was briefly suspected of being an accomplice to his assassination by Ramón Mercader.) But The Nun’s role is unveiled more slowly and purposefully—appropriate, given that the real Sor Juana’s gifts were hidden from historical consideration for centuries until Octavio Paz and others championed her as a major poet of the Spanish Golden Age and a protofeminist.

The Painter paints The Nun, while The Nun talks about her secret writing. And The Doctor is a man divided—all business and authority when bossing his patient and his employee around, but when seen behind the scrim at the back of the playing area, a pitiable and possibly insane figure. When alone, The Painter pulls out a large red flag with the communist hammer and sickle and drapes herself in it. She’s isolated in her illness, but still dreams of revolution.

The gray-walled, dimly lit hospital itself could be a relic of Mexican colonial times or of Sor Juana’s cloistered home as a nun. Is it a real place? An afterlife purgatory? The story teases out both possibilities. (If you’re expecting an afterlife like Pixar’s Coco, which also featured Kahlo as an exuberant performance artist, you’ll be disappointed.) “There is an epidemic out there,” The Nun tells The Painter. (The real Sor Juana, forced to give up her writing and sell her books, died of the plague while tending to her fellow sisters in 1695.) But the epidemic of authoritarianism and patriarchy is within the walls, too, and as the soliloquies from both women make clear, the cure for that is far from certain, and the disease has lingered for centuries, from both church and state. Vargas and Peña play their roles with arresting chemistry, like solo dancers learning to mirror each other’s moves. (Mirrors are also an important metaphor in this story.)

Beautiful visuals and poetic language surround and entrance us as the 90-minute show unfolds. Vargas’s Frida describes “hummingbirds like children’s hearts suspended in the air” surrounding the gardens in her famous Casa Azul. The title translates as “silk ribbons,” referring to the luxurious material used to trim clothing, and it’s an apt metaphor for how Mendoza structures the narrative of these women’s lives, in which small details add rich texture. Augusto Yanacopulos’s set (he also collaborated with Aguijón co-artistic director Marcela Muñoz on the effective crepuscular lighting) captures the boxed-in world where these two extraordinary women work out their final resistance (which involves a twist that won’t be revealed here). Live guitar music from Norberto Guerra González, who sits to one side in a monk’s robes, adds a quiet, mournful, reflective air.

This isn’t a piece about reclaiming women’s lives from the outside through straightforward biography. It’s about creating an atmosphere where we can feel what it would be like to live those lives—thwarted by illness, sexism, and politics, yet ultimately defiant and unbowed. 

Read More

J.C. Cricket’s Sex Demonis not for the faint of heart—it’s for the depraved of mind, and Chicago is blessed to have it showing one night only at the Music Box on October 26. In this 1975 porno from the gay underground, John, a demure and understated kind of guy, buys his lover Jim an ostentatious necklace at an antique store on Christopher Street. But when Jim puts it on, he finds himself possessed by a sex-crazed demon who compels him to hit up every cruising spot in town. This evil spirit’s got an insatiable thirst for hot homo fucking . . . and murder! Can Jim be saved? Or will John lose Jim to his newly uncontrollable urges?

While oft billed as the gay Exorcist, about the only thing the two films have in common is a demon and an exorcism. From the 60s through the 80s, porn was the easiest way for gay filmmakers to secure funding for films that represented gay storylines, and piggybacking on popular titles made marketing easier. What Sex Demon is really about is a tension that continues today between polite gays and raging homos.

Throughout the film, Good Gay™ John—who enjoys his quiet life of monogamy and tender hand holding with Jim—insists he doesn’t know the gay clubs or cruising spots. He’s not that kind of gay! Unfortunately, after one trip to Christopher Street, now his lover is. If you don’t know your queer geography, Christopher Street is a famously gay strip of the West Village; in fact, it’s home to the Stonewall Inn and was long a hot spot for gay rights organizing. When Jim puts on John’s Christopher Street gift, he can no longer pass as straight in public; the sheer flamboyance of the piece marks him, and he won’t take it off, even when John asks him to. 

Once possessed, Jim finds a gay go-go bar in the backpages of a newspaper (maybe his favorite alt-weekly?), and Shirley & Company’s “Shame Shame Shame” plays while he has his first anonymous male sexual encounter. Shots of Jim’s bathroom hookup alternate with shots of a man alone simply taking his clothes off onstage. The scene is profound for the way it evokes the shame associated with any kind of homoerotic sexual expression, even imagined or solo play. John eventually learns that, if there’s any hope in saving Jim, he must rely on the couple’s Bad Gay™ friends—you know, the ones who aren’t possessed by demons but still enjoy all the bad gay stuff (glory holes, orgies, etc.) that John has distanced himself from. 

As a sexually explicit camp masterpiece, Sex Demon has it all. The film only runs an hour but manages to deliver some incredibly tender dicksucking and artfully framed fucking. Will you witness a little fisting? Yes! And a wild, glittering orgy, too! At the film’s climax, you’ll also see a screwdriver jammed in a most sensitive spot. (The scene is jarring, sure, but the absurdist plot coupled with the actor visibly breathing through it reminds you this is all fiction.) And demons have long been metaphors for gateways to things that run counter to traditional Judeo-Christianity—for instance, magic, astrology, and luxury. Gay, much?

Of course, this screening—appropriate for queer history enthusiasts and horror movie lovers of all stripes—wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of film historian and archivist Elizabeth Purchell. She’s dedicated her life to preserving queer history through film. After observing Sex Demon repeatedly celebrated in adult magazines of the era—with gripping details unlike any other movies she was reading about—the movie landed on her “must-find” list. In 2020 she was contacted by a New York collector who invited her to peruse roughly 50 gay porn titles he’d acquired as part of a lot more germaine to his interests. It was there she found an original print of the fabled movie which hadn’t been publicly screened since 1981. With the help of Vinegar Syndrome’s Joe Rubin, she was able to make a 2k scan within a day of getting the print.

Sex Demon Music Box of Horrors: Scared StupidWednesday, October 26, 9:45 PM $11 general admission, $8 Music Box members

“He did an amazing job on the color correction,” she says. “The print we had was completely faded. Just red. He was able to bring a lot of color back.”

“I’ve always been a kind of obsessive collector-slash-viewer,” Purcell continues. “I got interested in this genre of all-male cinema—gay porn or whatever you want to call it—but as I started looking into these films, I found there wasn’t really much information about them online. Looking at old issues of magazines—like the Advocate or Drummer—I was realizing that these films were, at the time, a fairly large presence in quote-unquote gay life. They were on magazine covers, they were advertised, they were heavily reviewed. They were a big deal! And now they’re really, really hard to find.”

In 2018, that inspired her to start the Instagram project Ask Any Buddy, which has since generated a movie and podcast of the same name. In recent years, she’s observed an uptick in interest about gay life in the 70s and how it’s been documented through “adult” material.

“I think these films represent different types of nostalgia,” she explains. “For people who were alive at the time—it’s nostalgia for people who they’d maybe known who are no longer with us. For younger people, people around our age, I think it is more of a nostalgia trap. Like, God, the 70s would have been an amazing time to be alive as a gay person! Everything was wonderful! Look at all the bars and the bathhouses and porno films and this and that! But despite all that, I don’t think it was necessarily that great of a time to be gay in America. So I mean, that’s something I always try to be very conscious of. It was good in some ways, but it was also really bad in other ways. With the rise of PReP over the past few years, I think there’s been a kind of resuscitation of that sort of, like, open sexual culture after two, three decades of AIDS—I think that’s part of the reason people are interested in this history. At the same time, this history has been hidden from people for so long. I think queer people in general just want to know more about queer history, and they don’t get that anywhere else.”

Read More

Last fall for the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, Aguijón Theater (the oldest Latinx company in the city) unveiled the world premiere of Rey Andújar’s La Gran Tirana (descarga dramática), a fantasia based on the life of singer “La Lupe” (Lupe Victoria Yolí Raymond). This year, the company turns its attentions and considerable talents to two iconic women in Mexican art: 20th-century painter Frida Kahlo and 17th-century poet and composer  Juana Inés de la Cruz, or Sor Juana. 

Cintas de Seda Through 11/20: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Aguijón Theater, 2707 N. Laramie, aguijontheater.org, $35 general admission (or 2 for $60), $20 students, educators, and seniors, $12 for Belmont-Cragin residents with ID showing zip codes 60634, 60635, 60639, or 60641. Presented in Spanish with English supertitles.

Cintas de Seda, written by Norge Espinoza Mendoza and directed by Sándor Menéndez, unfolds in a hospital on the eve of Día de los Muertos. The Painter (Aguijón co-artistic director Rosario Vargas) cradles empty bottles of wine in memory of her former happier days and works sporadically on a painting, while The Nun (Claudia Rentería Peña) mediates between the fiery artist and the controlling Doctor (Marcopolo Soto). 

It’s clear who The Painter represents, even before she launches into a monologue about the death of Leon Trotsky. (Kahlo, who had once been lovers with the exiled Soviet revolutionary, was briefly suspected of being an accomplice to his assassination by Ramón Mercader.) But The Nun’s role is unveiled more slowly and purposefully—appropriate, given that the real Sor Juana’s gifts were hidden from historical consideration for centuries until Octavio Paz and others championed her as a major poet of the Spanish Golden Age and a protofeminist.

The Painter paints The Nun, while The Nun talks about her secret writing. And The Doctor is a man divided—all business and authority when bossing his patient and his employee around, but when seen behind the scrim at the back of the playing area, a pitiable and possibly insane figure. When alone, The Painter pulls out a large red flag with the communist hammer and sickle and drapes herself in it. She’s isolated in her illness, but still dreams of revolution.

The gray-walled, dimly lit hospital itself could be a relic of Mexican colonial times or of Sor Juana’s cloistered home as a nun. Is it a real place? An afterlife purgatory? The story teases out both possibilities. (If you’re expecting an afterlife like Pixar’s Coco, which also featured Kahlo as an exuberant performance artist, you’ll be disappointed.) “There is an epidemic out there,” The Nun tells The Painter. (The real Sor Juana, forced to give up her writing and sell her books, died of the plague while tending to her fellow sisters in 1695.) But the epidemic of authoritarianism and patriarchy is within the walls, too, and as the soliloquies from both women make clear, the cure for that is far from certain, and the disease has lingered for centuries, from both church and state. Vargas and Peña play their roles with arresting chemistry, like solo dancers learning to mirror each other’s moves. (Mirrors are also an important metaphor in this story.)

Beautiful visuals and poetic language surround and entrance us as the 90-minute show unfolds. Vargas’s Frida describes “hummingbirds like children’s hearts suspended in the air” surrounding the gardens in her famous Casa Azul. The title translates as “silk ribbons,” referring to the luxurious material used to trim clothing, and it’s an apt metaphor for how Mendoza structures the narrative of these women’s lives, in which small details add rich texture. Augusto Yanacopulos’s set (he also collaborated with Aguijón co-artistic director Marcela Muñoz on the effective crepuscular lighting) captures the boxed-in world where these two extraordinary women work out their final resistance (which involves a twist that won’t be revealed here). Live guitar music from Norberto Guerra González, who sits to one side in a monk’s robes, adds a quiet, mournful, reflective air.

This isn’t a piece about reclaiming women’s lives from the outside through straightforward biography. It’s about creating an atmosphere where we can feel what it would be like to live those lives—thwarted by illness, sexism, and politics, yet ultimately defiant and unbowed. 

Read More