Jordan Wimby, aka The Melanin Martha, returns to Monday Night Foodball tonight with a prix fixe plate of “classic and reimagined” soul food, including crispy fatback and microgreens and a sweet fried buffalo chicken thigh. Advance orders are sold out, but a limited amount of food will be available for walk-in ordering. Get there early if you can; MNF kicks off at 5 PM at the Kedzie Inn (4100 N. Kedzie). Stick around for a custom cocktail collaboration created by Wimby and Kedzie owner Jon Pokorny. (SCJ)
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If all the world’s a stage, then your dramatic atlas for the next couple of weeks is International Voices Project, opening tonight at 6:30 PM at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago (31 W. Ohio). Now in its 12th season, IVP (the brainchild of executive director Patrizia Acerra) offers six free readings of plays in translation by writers around the world. This is the first in-person presentation since the COVID-19 shutdown (they offered a digital version in 2020 and 2021), and IVP partners with other local companies to make the work come alive. Tonight’s reading, for example, is of Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s The Mapmaker, presented in association with Water People Theater. Blanca, a woman in present-day Warsaw, hears the story of a ghetto cartographer who decided to map the dying world around him, and goes in search of this legendary artifact. The readings are every Monday and Wednesday at 6:30 through 9/28; the other plays are The Shroud Maker, by Palestinian-born playwright Ahmed Masoud and loosely based on the real story of a woman on the Gaza Strip who makes shrouds for the dead in the besieged territory; Give Me a Happily Ever After, a look at the “bumpy ride” of life by Norway’s Marius Leknes Snekkevag; Turks, Fire by German playwright Özlem Özgül Dündar, based on the deadly 1993 arson attack in Solingen, Germany, in which young men with neo-Nazi ties set fire to the home of a Turkish immigrant family; a trio of plays from Ukraine (Call Them By Their Names, The Peed-Upon Armored Personnel, and A Dictionary of Emotions in War Time by Tetyana Kitsenko, Oksana Gritsenko, and Elena Astasyeva, respectively); and Totentanz: Black Night, Black Death by Poland’s Ishbel Szatrawska, set during COVID quarantine in Bergamo, Italy. Though performances are free, the lineup is subject to change and reservations are required, so check out ivpchicago.org for information and tickets. (KR)
If you’re looking for some music tonight, there’s a few options featuring musicians and ensembles that our writers have previously covered. Reader contributor Monica Kendrick told us last year about French multi-instrumentalist and dark synth artist James Kent, who performs as Perturbator. Kent co-headlines a bill tonight at Park West (322 W. Armitage) along with the LA noise rock band Health; opener Street Sects starts at 7 PM. Tickets are still available for this 18+ show. And the noise doesn’t stop: head over to the Beat Kitchen (2100 W. Belmont) to catch Austin, Texas via Chicago band Glassing play with local power noise makers Meth. and Chicago collective Anatomy of Habit. That show is open to those 17 and older, and starts at 8 PM. (SCJ)
