How many of us have sat around work, watching our colleagues act out one way or another, and thought, I should write a play about this? Lots. How many of us have followed through on that notion? Few. And that’s a good thing, because (a) most of us haven’t the talent and (b) what happens on the job seldom interests anybody else nearly as much as it interests us. 10 Out of 12 attempts to trace a similar evolution in a more constricted framework....

“It’s a painful reality that so many families are separated in this way,” says Holly Krig, a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund and Mothers United Against Violence and Incarceration. “When we talk about community safety, harm, and harm reduction, in no way does incarceration, of mothers in particular, in no way does that make anyone safer or improve any lives or make our communities more stable. It profoundly disrupts families and profoundly disrupts communities....

On Sunday morning I chatted with superb trumpeter Hugh Ragin as we waited for a flight to Chicago from Norway. We’d both been there for the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, where he played in the recently resurrected Art Ensemble of Chicago. Ragin performed in Chicago in early June, and he told me Sunday that during his visit he was able to meet with Kelan Phil Cohran—a cornetist, instrument inventor, composer, educator, and genuine Chicago visionary, who died just weeks later, on June 28, at age 90....

Glitter Guts Thomas Loconti in 2012 Though Thomas Loconti, the street artist known as Plainwhite Tom, danced or mimed or wrote poetry for thousands of Chicagoans, I never saw him perform. We met only over the phone, when I interviewed him in 2012. Because he didn’t own a cell phone for philosophical reasons, he had to borrow a friend’s phone. He was my favorite kind of interviewee—warm, talkative, and insightful, supplying wonderfully specific details without being prompted....

Will Chicagoans all ditch their bikes, cars, and public transportation to zip around everywhere on lime-green electric scooters over the next few years? One of the first decisions I had to make: Where’s the most appropriate place to actually ride the thing? The street felt like a weird place for a compact scooter that resembles an adult version of a child’s toy, but so did the sidewalk, where I could have really annoyed (or even knocked into) pedestrians....

Key to a False Door This year’s Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, an open-air art gallery of sorts that takes over the stretch of Milwaukee Avenue from Kedzie to Kimball Avenues, has an awesome live-music lineup, and one of the highlights is Sunday night’s South Stage headliner, the Blind Shake. The Minneapolis-based trio, whose latest LP, Key to a False Door, came out on John Dwyer‘s Castle Face Records at the end of last year, play some of the best “garage rock” I’ve ever heard or seen....

The House Theatre of Chicago’s premiere of The Revel, Damon Kiely’s backwoods Depression-era reworking of Euripides’s classical tragedy The Bacchae, has almost everything going for it. Leslie Buxbaum Danzig directs a nimble, grounded 11-person ensemble who for the most part imbue potentially stereotypical hillbilly hicks with psychological depth. Grant Sabin provides a striking, spartan set design that reinvents the often unwieldy Chopin Theatre and places the audience smack in the heart of the action....

Named for wobbly stage chairs, iO’s first annual Bentwood Comedy Festival runs August 10 through 19. Much comedy awaits; here are the Reader‘s top picks, each of which has been vetted by our critics over the years. Klepper has cobbled together a team of Chicago’s best improvisers to join him onstage Fri 8/17 at 8 and 10:30 PM. Sherman works as an illustrator by day, and her show Sun 8/19 at 8 PM will ideally include many of her hand-drawn oversize tampons hanging from the backdrop....

John Kass is so often wrong in my view that I try to maintain a quota system on how often I write to disagree with him. But there’s an idee fixe at the core of Kass’s Tribune columns, and I would not only defend his right to belabor it but think Chicago is better off that he does. When Richard M. Daley’s time came, he was smart enough to realize that a lot of his father’s old critics hadn’t opposed Richard J....

Now in its second year, the Three Oaks Theater Festival brings works from Chicago’s performing arts community to locales in Michigan’s Harbor Country, with events from July 5 through the first weekend in August (all times are Eastern). Northlight Theatre’s Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie follows the hardscrabble life of the famed folksinger (Fri 7/18, 8 PM; Sat 7/19, 4 and 8 PM, $30-$35). Performed by a cast of four playing 15 instruments, the musical is “entertaining enough” but tends to “soft-pedal Guthrie’s political views,” according to Reader contributor Jack Helbig....

Chicago’s south side isn’t exactly short on breweries, but they’re a lot sparser than they are up north. Just a year ago there wasn’t a single taproom in Pilsen, a problem that Moody Tongue remedied last fall by opening a tasting room. It’s not exactly a casual place to grab a pint, though: the stunning space, with its hand-blown Austrian glassware and limited food menu (oysters and giant slices of chocolate cake), can be a little much for a Monday....

AP Photos If Brazilian soccer star Fred occasionally flops during World Cup action, he’s just following an age-old tradition. Soccer sources who used to keep their mouths shut have finally flipped on the floppers. Fred’s flop put flopping on the table. The debate wasn’t over whether Fred flopped; it was over whether the flop was so egregious that the ref should have let play continue. Instead, he blew his whistle; a penalty kick, a goal, and a 3-1 victory for Brazil over Croatia ensued; and the question was posed in all its amorality: if you don’t flop, can you win at soccer?...

courtesy of Fully Altered Media Ryan Keberle It makes sense that composer, bandleader, and trombonist Ryan Keberle keeps landing lots of work; although he’s a jazz musician first and foremost, his ears are open and his technique keeps the doors opening, whether that means touring with Sufjan Stevens or playing sessions with St. Vincent and Alicia Keys. He’s also a key figure in big bands led by Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, but in the last few years he’s seriously stepped out on his own, creating warm small-group music that’s front-loaded with melody; there’s also plenty of harmonic movement, but his remarkable rapport with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez never lets technique get in the way of tunefulness....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Paul Kolnik Four Corners In 1958, Alvin Ailey set out to choreograph the moral enlightenment of the African-American soul. Revelations was an immediate, irresistible success. It bridged the spiritually downtrodden condition of enslaved blacks and the spiritual ecstasy that free blacks experienced in Southern Baptist churches; it had a backbone that moved with the fluid pulp of sorrow and jubilation and everything in between.

While Chicago is blessed to have access to a relatively high-functioning train system, it’s still hard not to get beaten down by the monotony and grind of the public-transit gauntlet. Weary-eyed and apathetic—oftentimes compounded by whatever weather-beaten slog it took to get from point A to point B—we wriggle through thickets of humans during rush hour in hopes of finding some shred of somewhere to sit, just enough for a butt cheek....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “We had a long talk when we got back. It was almost disturbing. He said, ‘I know you hate me, Mr. Herman, because I’m black.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If I hated you for any reason, you would have been gone a long time ago. It’s not the color of your skin, OK, that I care about....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

“Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness,” an exhibition currently on display at the School of the Art Institute’s Sullivan Galleries, not only is a beautiful collection of video installations and still images, but provides new insight into the career of one of the most important filmmakers working today. The content of “Serenity” might be described as the interstices of Weerasethakul’s filmmaking career, with video diaries, short films, and photographs that meditate on themes and images elaborated on in the Thai director’s features....

Gregori Civera Estrella Morente 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.