This week I review two indie dramas about social psychologists studying control and obedience: Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter tells the story of Stanley Milgram, whose famous “electroshock” experiment in the early 60s proved that most people could be pressured into torturing an innocent person, and Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment re-creates the notorious study in which college students were cast in the roles of guards and prisoners. Also in this week’s issue, Ben Sachs reviews Taxi, the latest from Iranian troublemaker Jafar Panahi....

CHICAGO SUN TIMES Morning Glories 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.

Courtesy Music Box Theatre For No Good Reason 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.

As a teenager, comedian Brittany Meyer (who prefers the gender-neutral plural pronoun) was four foot four and 140 pounds, and their mother put them on an experimental growth hormone in the hopes that they would “stretch out.” While Meyer did grow more than a foot, they still continued putting on weight. A phrase from their mother has stuck with them ever since: “You need to grow up, not out.” The lineups prioritize people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and women or female-identified performers—groups who are most often scrutinized for their looks....

“The thing about Detroit,” says Liza Bielby, codirector of the Detroit-based performing arts collective the Hinterlands, “is that it’s a very radical place. A lot of the conversations that ended up becoming part of the national conversation were already happening around us.” Originally inspired in 2014 by the activist movements sparked in the wake of high-profile killings of unarmed African-Americans, The Radicalization Process has taken on additional significance since the 2016 presidential election....

BoHo Theatre delivers an earnest, likable rendition of this 1963 musical version of N. Richard Nash’s 1954 romantic comedy The Rainmaker, which BoHo produced six years ago. Enhanced with a score by lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt—it was the songwriters’ follow-up to their 1960 off-Broadway hit The Fantasticks—the story focuses on Lizzie Curry, the daughter of a rancher whose cattle are dropping dead during a drought in the Depression-era southwest....

ARTIST: Axel Widén SHOWS: Scorched Tundra at Empty Bottle on Fri 9/1 through Sun 9/3 MORE INFO: axelwiden.com

ARTIST: Gregory Jacobsen SHOW: Lovely Little Girls, Glad Rags, and Circus in the Sea at Hideout on Wed 8/30 MORE INFO: gregoryjacobsen.com

Four West Loop galleries that all shared the same building on Washington Avenue—Document, PLHK, Volume, and Western Exhibitions—recently moved into a new venue in West Town, a large second-floor space on Chicago Avenue just west of Ashland. But the migration wasn’t acrimonious. “Our lease was up at the old space, and our landlords bought a building over on Chicago Avenue,” Western Exhibitions gallery owner Scott Speh says. “They said, ‘Why don’t we move you guys over here?...

Scott Olson/Getty Images The Webb report says the Chicago Tribune didn’t pick up some police files. Buried in the recent report by special prosecutor Dan Webb, “The Death of David Koschman,” is this tantalizing suggestion: that the Sun-Times campaign to fix responsibility for Koschman’s death in 2004 and find out why Chicago police were so unwilling to might have been a Tribune campaign instead. Koschman had been knocked unconscious when he was punched by R....

Deanna Isaacs George Lucas talks museums with Charlie Rose at Chicago Ideas Week George Lucas was the third and final speaker at the last session of Chicago Ideas Week’s “Edison Talks” event at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on Friday. The event had a pep-fest vibe, with spotlights strafing the audience and the volume turned way up on the Blue Man house band. Lucas: I’ve collected art ever since college, starting with comic art and moving up to illustrative art, and I realized there was no showcase for this work....

Mike Sula Pho dac biet, L.D. Pho In terms of its commercial offerings, Lawrence Avenue west of Western in Lincoln Square looks kinda Balkan, its smoky bars and dingy coffee shops crowded with an older population of domino-slapping Greeks, supplanted by more recent arrivals from the former Yugoslavia. You wouldn’t think of it as a Vietnamese neighborhood just because you can buy the city’s best banh mi at Nhu Lan Bakery....

To the neighborhood that was once the midwest’s bookmaking and printing capital, this weekend’s 30th Printers Row Lit Fest brings more than 200 authors, hundreds of booksellers, and more than 150,000 literature enthusiasts. The fest kicks off with a panel featuring Chicago fiction writer Stuart Dybek (who will be given the Harold Washington Literary Award), fest founder Bette Cerf Hill, and Mary Davis Fournier of the American Library Association (6/7, 10 AM)....

On Friday the Empty Bottle hosts a show by Radioactivity, a relatively new band from the incestuous garage-punk scene in Denton, Texas. Front man and chief songwriter Jeff Burke used to play in the Marked Men, who split in 2009 after four top-notch albums; from 2010 till 2012 he led a group in Mito, Japan, called the Novice, which became Radioactivity when he returned home and put together a new Texan lineup....

KRISTIN BASTA Chris Schoen and Emmy Bean in “Baudelaire in a Box” 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.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing but the might of America’s military-industrial complex—air shows feel like a relic of the past. (Doesn’t the Obama era call for an outdoor drone show?) But that won’t stop more than 1.5 million people from crowding the lakefront this weekend to watch the Blue Angels ride the highway to the danger zone during the Chicago Air & Water Show. Plys detailed the hundreds of people who had died in air show crashes from the previous 40 years, as well as the millions of taxpayer dollars wasted....

Larry Hirshowitz Marc Maron headlines the First Annual 26th Annual Comedy Festival’s final night Once you get over being amused at the tongue-in-cheek, that’s-so-Onion name, the First Annual 26th Annual Comedy Festival is pretty straightforward. It’s four shows of comedy in three days (June 12-14) at the Athenaeum Theatre—the one that looks like a “theater” from the outside and a “theatre” from the inside—and presented by, yep, the Onion and its sister publication, the A....

Courtesy XO Infinity’s Bandcamp page J.C. Thayer A couple weeks ago I ran into rapper J.C. Thayer when I wandered into KnockBox Cafe to take a reprieve from the blisteringly cold winds. I’d met Thayer last summer while hanging out at a taco joint with some mutual friends, but I wasn’t aware that he made music until I saw him looking at ordering pages for cassettes at KnockBox. When Thayer told me he was pressing up an album of “weird downer hip-hop” I immediately asked him to pass along some tracks—using the phrase “weird downer hip-hop” in a sentence is a great way to pique my interest....