In an overheated black box above the streets of Logan Square, the Runaways Lab Theatre presents Ysentia and The Adventures of Astroman, two short plays by Dan Mozurkewich with near-identical themes: the decline of the universe and the rise of a protagonist who may, though neither intrinsically gifted nor particularly driven, save us all. In Ysentia, a misfit machine made of titanium roams the galaxy in search of a new home....

Raj Kapoor in Awara “That’s Bollywood length!” a friend exclaimed when I told him the new Transformers movie was two hours and 45 minutes long. He was almost as surprised to learn that Age of Extinction wasn’t much longer than any of the other three Transformers movies—not because he’s unfamiliar with extralong blockbusters, but because he thought that no one made them outside of India. “So, do these Transformers movies have musical numbers and big slapstick sequences and melodramatic subplots about long-lost twins getting reunited?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 12, 2017. Mexican immigrant scheduled for deportation sues CPD for alleged gang database error A Mexican immigrant facing deportation has sued the Chicago Police Department, “alleging he was wrongly listed in a gang database and that it cost him the chance to get protection through a federal program and remain in the U.S.,” according to the Associated Press. Luis Vicente Pedrote-Salinas is scheduled to be deported July 20 after he allegedly was wrongly identified as a member of the Latin Kings during a January 2011 police stop....

Logan Square Preservation According to Logan Square Preservation president Andrew Schneider, this was taken in 1915. The Green Star Inn was, in his words, “a cabaret of mixed reputation.” Anyone who’s lived in Logan Square for more than a handful of years will talk your ear off about how much the neighborhood’s changed. A new exhibition of historic photos puts those anecdotes to shame. Logan Square Preservation Another photo Schneider believes was taken in 1915, this showcases a home on the southwest corner of Logan Square....

For this year’s Reader Key Ingredient Cook-Off, we asked some of Chicago’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who influenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories. Dish: White miso pot de creme with banana cake and macadamia nut crumble

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, August 2, 2017. Violent July puts the city on pace to exceed 750 murders in 2017 Seventy-five people were killed in July, putting Chicago on pace to exceed the more than 750 people killed last year. At the end of July 2016, 395 people had been killed; at the end of July 2017, at least 410 people had been killed. [DNAinfo Chicago]

Courtesy City of Chicago Tye Tribbett Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

STEFAN FALKE Holmes Brothers Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. See more Chicago street style in the Chicago Looks blog. Burlesque performer Moxie Rhodes hangs out after her gig.

Terence Davies is one of England’s most important living filmmakers, having directed two seminal British films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). His subsequent films—among them The House of Mirth (2000) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011)—are just as rich as these, combining vividly realized settings, balletic camera movements, and exquisitely understated performances to create visions of the past that resonate in your memory long after you watch them....

Margi Cole is uncertain about the future of dance. The art form will survive as long as people can move, but the professional dance industry is in a transitional period, and companies have had to learn how to adapt. The Dance COLEctive returns this month with “Reboot,” an evening of three premieres presented at Dovetail Studios in Albany Park. Working with frequent collaborators Peter Carpenter and Colleen Halloran, Cole sees this program as a new beginning celebrating the possibilities of the future and the process of personal growth....

John Moore, Getty Images Europe Aid workers stage an Ebola awareness event in Monrovia, Liberia. The Reader‘s “Did you read about?” feature drew my attention Tuesday to an article that compares Ebola to Enterovirus D68 (which gives children respiratory problems and is occasionally fatal) as a public health menace, but refuses to panic over either. “In reality,” says James Surowiecki on the New Yorker website, “we’re worrying too much about both Ebola and EV-D68, and too little about an infectious disease that is much more likely to inflict serious damage on the U....

The fictitious high school play The Gallows isn’t very good, judging from what we see of it during the real horror movie The Gallows. The dialogue is thin, bordering on cryptic; the characters’ motivations are unclear; and most important—at least for the school’s liability insurer—it climaxes with an execution on a fully functioning gallows, which has already resulted in one student’s accidental death back in 1993. Remounting the play 20 years later is morbid at best and negligent at worst, but then again, bad decisions are the foundation upon which the horror genre was built....

When the name Edwin Eisendrath surfaced a few weeks ago as someone putting together a team to buy the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader, I said it was good news. The former 43rd Ward alderman’s younger brother John had been a Reader staff writer in the early 80s and most likely he retained some affection for the paper. Perhaps that affection might save the publication. Minutes before Edwin and I spoke by phone I’d been reading “Why is this man running?...

A pioneer of alternative stand-up in the late 90s, Patton Oswalt treads familiar ground on his latest live album, Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time (Comedy Central)—but he also wades into uncharacteristically conventional territory, a sign that the snide malcontent whose jokes once came at the expense of red-staters and KFC has grown up. Still, the material remains as insightful and idiosyncratic as ever, showcasing Oswalt’s knack for shaping the mundane into a highly personal expression....

The Santaland Diaries at the Goodman is a hilarious adult romp through the holiday season. This one-man show, adapted by Joe Mantello from David Sedaris’s 1992 This American Life essay, delivers an uncensored tour through the dark heart of retail, told through the eyes of Crumpet, one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s. This show offers desperately needed catharsis: someone finally admits that maybe the dog-and-pony show we call Christmas isn’t really for the kids after all....

In 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell led a party of explorers down the Green and Colorado Rivers, traversing what Powell would later tag the Grand Canyon. Never mind that the local Paiutes already had their own, way better name for the place—”Mountain Lying Down”—the trip was a big deal from a manifest-destiny point of view: the first time white men of European heritage had laid eyes on and mapped out that particular stretch of geological magnificence....

Since January Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, has filled a Soundcloud account attributed to user18081971 with nearly 300 previously unreleased tracks and remixes. Late last month he dropped a remix of “I Want to Be With You,” a decades-old Chicago house track credited to Street Side Boyz. On the extended edit James removes the original’s sensual, snarling vocals and darkens its late-night thump—the shuddering synths and needle-sharp hi-hats take on a monstrous form....

The winter of our political discontent brought Chicago some incongruously mild weather. The National Weather Service logged no measurable snowfall in the city during the months of January and February for the first time in the 146 years it’s been keeping such records. In place of regular seasonal flurries, a shitstorm of turmoil swept the country. Russia had effectively shoveled out a spot in the U.S. electoral system and plunked down an orange traffic cone with a bad combover into the White House, as if Vladimir Putin were a neighborhood jagoff calling “dibs” on our democracy....