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The Yard, a professional company of teenage actors, brings extraordinary urgency to its mounting of this powerful theater piece about the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Created by the United States Theatre Project and written by P.J. Paparelli and Stephen Karam, Columbinus is drawn largely from documentary sources-including diaries, e-mails, Internet posts, and homemade videos left behind by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine seniors who on April 20, 1999, went on a shooting spree at the school, killing 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves....

Four years ago I heard Cincinnati-bred drummer Jeremy Cunningham for the first time at the Chicago Jazz Festival, playing behind young alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, who was just beginning to make a big splash locally. I was impressed by his concision, his time, and his restraint; he was doing more than merely swinging, but he never got in the way. He conveyed his personality subtly and with purpose. Cunningham moved here in 2009, and I’ve since seen him play in many other contexts, most notably in groups with saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and guitarist Tim Stine; he brings the same qualities to every setting....

I don’t know as much about the history of stoner metal and its various offshoots as some of my Reader compatriots, and when it comes to Japanese bands playing this style of spirited sludge, well, I’m basically stumbling blindly through the woods. But during one of my routine late-night Bandcamp trawling expeditions, I found Japanese stoner band Greenmachine. In June three international labels—Robustfellow in Ukraine, Long Legs Long Arms in Japan, and Riff Merchant in the U....

QI’m a 35-year-old divorced man. I’ve been on plenty of dates since my marriage ended, but I invariably get asked this question on or before date number two: “Why did you get divorced?” This is where everything goes to shit. I’m honest: “We got divorced because I cheated on my wife. A lot.” This usually catches my date off guard because I “don’t seem like that kind of guy.” But then I can hardly get past it, because this information is “too much to handle....

James Beard Foundation It’s gotten very little attention from local food media (that was sarcasm) but the James Beard Foundation Awards for chefs and restaurants are being held on Monday night, and there are approximately 14,000,000 events related to them this weekend. Most are for industry people, but some are open to regular folks who want to mingle with chefs and such. For instance, tonight Acadia is hosting a bourbon and bluegrass party from 6 to 10 PM....

Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive is a stunner. A memoir of sexual abuse in 1960s Maryland, the piece emerges as the associative leaps of a digressive memory shored up by the cool technical outlook of an instruction manual for a rite of passage as common as kissing—the rules of the road, as it were. The narrator, Li’l Bit, is her Uncle Peck’s favorite niece. He’s her favorite too—the only one who seems to respect her in a family that doles out nicknames based on genitalia, declares that her credentials are on her chest, and (for the women) tends to get knocked up before finishing high school....

There’s been a lot of changeover in top leadership at Chicago theaters over the past 18 months, with more to come; we’re still waiting to hear who will be replacing Anna Shapiro as Steppenwolf’s artistic director when she leaves at the end of her six-year contract in August. (Will the company honor past tradition and draw from within the ensemble, or will they look outside the walls of the growing Steppenwolf campus on Halsted?...

On this week’s gig poster, a party skull says hello to October—and to the fifth edition of ZINEmercado, an independent zine fair based in Logan Square. The poster was created by one of the event’s organizers, artist Chema Skandal, who’s graced the pages of the Reader before with his illustrations and gig posters. He grew up in Mexico City and is now based in Chicago, where he serves as a member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, a local organization dedicated to the activist history and tradition of Latinx printmaking....

The past 12 months have seen the theatrical releases of three extraordinary dramas powered by nonactors: Chloé Zhao’s lyrical contemporary western The Rider, starring horse trainer Brady Jandreau as a Native American cowboy on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation; Alfonso Cuarón’s sublime Roma, an homage to the strong women who reared him in 1970s Mexico City, with first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio carrying the movie as its lead; and now Nadine Labaki’s searing take on the global refugee crisis, Capernaum, in which the director is the only professional actor among a cast of hundreds who portray migrants in a Beirut slum....

Now that two mornings have passed, it’s safe to say we aren’t going to wake up from this nightmare. Among the angry, despairing reactions to Trump’s victory, I keep seeing an impulse to blame it on progressives’ failure to empathize with his supporters. Because many of us in “blue” enclaves never have to deal with “red” voters, the thinking goes, we’re unable to understand the source of their values—and thus we can’t do the hard work of directly confronting those values we find toxic....

Trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes begin their new duo album, Heritage of the Invisible II (International Anthem), with “Initial Meditation,” a red-hot vortex of percussion and electronics whose abrasive, hypnotizing swirls sometimes sound like a helicopter flying overhead. That powerful opening statement makes clear that these musicians—best known from unrepentantly political jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements—can sound just as colossal as a duo as they do with that five-piece band....

Sue Kwong One of the great things about organizing the Greatest Ever Chicago Book tournament was seeing how excited people got about it. When we started asking writers we knew if they might be interested in being judges, we were overwhelmed by the response. In the end, we had way more potential judges than judging slots—a couple of writers volunteered to write their own judgments on the final round, just to take part in the conversation....

It’s been about two weeks since a bunch of well-intended liberals and lefties wrote an open letter in Harper’s Magazine, denouncing intolerance on the left. As if that clarification is any less offensive. Or historically accurate—’cause it’s not at all clear that many slave-owning founding fathers thought there was anything evil about owning slaves. In the aftermath, there are no apologies, no regrets. Apparently, they’re proud of what they say and would say it again....

When you have an important question you need answered, psychic advice can clarify the best choice to make. But online psychics can be expensive—how do you choose the best one without paying a lot of money? Luckily, there are free psychic readings you can access online to help you make a good choice. Whether you just have a quick question you need input on or want to experiment to find the best online psychic for you, here’s how to access a free psychic reading....

“I hope this strike don’t last too long, CPS,” a young mother announces to the bus she’s just flagged down as she shepherds her two school-age sons on board. “Every day they’re not in school they gotta come to work with me.” To fill the gap, organizations and institutions across the city are offering camps, classes, and workshops, though a word of caution: most cost money, and some of them are just for this week....

Lillie Mae Rische has spent the bulk of her 25 years playing music. She began singing with her father and siblings in the Forrest Carter Family Band at age three, and added fiddle four years later. The group played around Branson, Missouri, and toured RV parks in Texas for donations, and after her parents split up, she and her siblings formed Jypsi, a middle-of-the-road country band that made a failed album for Arista in 2008....

The torpor-inducing temperatures seem to be cooling down, so it’s a good time to get out and about. Here are some mid-August events worth looking into. Fri-Sun 8/13-8/15 (and through 8/29): High school can be fraught, as so many teen dramedies have taught us. School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy set in a girls’ boarding school in Ghana in 1986, explores cliques, colonialism, and colorism. It’s running at the Goodman in a stellar production under Lili-Anne Brown’s direction....

Fronted by Chicago music-scene staple Che Arthur (former member of Atombombpocketknife, sometimes Bob Mould backup singer, and sound guy extraordinaire), Pink Avalanche have been cranking out wiry, moody postpunk since 2013. Formed by Arthur and a longtime partner in crime, drummer Adam Reach, as a way to further their musical and personal connection, the band fleshed out their lineup with second guitarist Kortland Chase and bassist Pete Croke, and set about making two records of angular midwestern punk rock that’s as catchy as it is aggressive....

From the inaugural issue of the Illustrated London News in 1842 to the first chapter of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning serial Maus in 1980, comics have had a long affiliation with documentary and reporting. So why isn’t the illustrated medium associated with nonfiction as reflexively as news articles and photographs? In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form that “endeavors to express history....

In some ways, 2016 was a rough year for those of us who care about sustainable transportation in Chicago. Six people were fatally struck while biking in the city this year—an average number according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. However, several of these were high-profile cases that shook the cycling community, including the nation’s first bike-share fatality, deaths on popular bike routes like Milwaukee Avenue, and a hit-and-run case that’s still unsolved....