Results tagged “barrygifford”

We've just learned that due to a last minute scheduling conflict, Matt Dillon has had to drop out of Nelson Algren Live: The 100th Birthday Celebration, which is Monday evening at the Steppenwolf. In his stead will be Willem Dafoe. A script written just for the occasion weaves tributes from people who knew Algren with excerpts from his writing. Dafoe will portray Frankie Machine from The Man with the Golden Arm, while author Barry Gifford will play Nelson himself. Among others performing are writers Russell Banks and Don DeLillo, and Steppenwolf ensemble member Martha Lavey. Tickets are available by calling the theater box office.

2009 marks the 100th birthday of Nelson Algren, the quintessential Chicago author. Long before the word "hipster" had even been coined, he chronicled the bleak existence of society's misfits, living on the fringe in West Town and Wicker Park. His best known books are The Man with the Golden Arm, Chicago: City on the Make and Never Come Morning, which no less than Hemingway declared "the best book to come out of Chicago." They describe a Chicago so different from our city today that they almost read like science fiction, yet when Algren lived here he often hung out at the Rainbo Club and the Gold Star.

An impressive array of Chicago heavyweights will assemble next Monday evening at 7:30 at the Steppenwolf to pay tribute to Studs Terkel. A staged reading, with music, of Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Terkel’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken makes up the bulk of the program, which will feature David Schwimmer; Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey and ensemble members Robert Breuler, K. Todd Freeman, Tom Irwin, and Alan Wilder; director Joyce Piven (mother of Jeremy); and Trib writer Rick Kogan. Tickets will be free but reservations are required. They'll be available to the public beginning tomorrow by calling the Steppenwolf box-office at 312-335-1650.

We had the good fortune recently to speak with Barry Gifford, one of our favorite contemporary authors. His newest book is Memories from a Sinking Ship, a "fictional memoir" about growing up in mid-fifties Chicago (and Key West and New Orleans). Roy is a youngster shuttled from place to place, alternating between his beautiful, vivacious mother and his estranged, gangster father. For a sizeable chunk of the book he lives at 6312 N. Rockwell, and the story is packed with fascinating details about a vanished Chicago: going to movies at the Nortown Theater on Western or hanging out at Lucky's El Paso pool hall.