WEDNESDAY 10/5
Susana Paiva
Liddell promises to bleed for her art at On the Boards.
Nadja Spiegelman
Spiegelman in his SoHo loft.
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Books/Stage: Dr. Lizardo
Chances are you think of him as a killer: the Emmy-winning kind who enlivened Dexter on Showtime, or perhaps the tongue-in-cheek kind who stole Cliffhanger right out from under Sly Stallone's mountain. Of course, you may also have tender feelings toward him: the same ones that crossed his hangdog face as the woebegone, married loan officer who falls for Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment; the same ones that, playing Hollywood's first sympathetic transsexual in The World According to Garp, fueled his fervent protection of feminist nurse Glenn Close. And then there are all those seasons he played an alien on Third Rock From the Sun. I could go on and on about John Lithgow, but it will be more fun to hear him answering KUOW host Marcie Sillman's questions about Drama: An Actor's Education (Harper, $26.99), a memoir filled with facts as quirky as his career on stage and screen. For example: Coretta Scott, before she married Martin Luther King, babysat the future actor. And who knew that Midwestern kid would grow up to have a heated affair with Liv Ullmann? "We all have our secrets and we all have our deceptions," he recently told The New York Times. "Acting at its best is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us." Sure. But being bonkers in Buckaroo Banzai helps, too. University Temple United Methodist Church, 1415 N.E. 43rd St., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. $10 (free with purchase at University Book Store). 7:30 p.m. STEVE WIECKING
THURSDAY 10/6
Visual Arts: Fighting Words
The work of New York artist Glenn Ligon is rooted in popular language and iconography. From the beginning of his career in the '80s, he's been sampling the words of disparate figures like Charles Dickens, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Pryor. He transforms their phrases into flatly ironic yet combative statements about being black in America. As with Andy Warhol or Jasper Johns, there's a meeting of formalism and cultural appropriation in his printmaking. Sometimes a two-word phrase will hover softly on a canvas; elsewhere a verbal motif is starkly repeated until it becomes an abstraction. In one series, Ligon removes Pryor's words from the arena of comedy and stencils them on painted canvases—stripping away the laughter and revealing the bitterness. Equally famous is his transformation of Gertrude Stein's phrase "negro sunshine" into neon signage—the fraught old language is almost physically invested with new meaning. No wonder the Obamas have Ligon's work hanging in the White House. (Through Nov. 12) Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave. S., 624-0770, gregkucera.com. Free. Opening reception 6–8 p.m. BRIAN J. BARR
Stage: Pornography of the Soul
The intensity of Angélica Liddell's first performance in the U.S. will likely knock you flat out. Her stage presence, and uncompromising confrontation with both material and audience, are close to terrifying. To be translated into English for the first time, Te haré invencible con mi derrota is nominally a work about the late cellist Jacqueline du Pré. But as the Spanish performance artist draws her own blood and carves away at a series of cellos lying on the floor, it becomes more an endurance contest—for Liddell, as she runs pins into her arms and hands, and for us, as we watch her do it. As she says of her work, "What I do is some kind of pornography, the pornography of the soul; for I tell what cannot be uttered or confessed to." (Repeats Fri. & Sun.) On the Boards, 100 W. Roy St., 217-9888, ontheboards.org. $25. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ
Music: Oh L'Amour!
Go ahead and put the synth-pop label on Erasure, though it doesn't hint at even a fraction of the swirling, glittery fabulousness that they've been producing since 1985. While a slew of one-hit wonders of the '80s got lost with silly dalliances on the dance floor, Andy Bell and Vince Clarke wrote songs celebrating the epic possibilities of a long night in a club spent going bump-bump-bump. They heard ABBA in the fun, fond way that critics missed, then donned Frida and Agnetha drag for the video to their "Take a Chance on Me" cover. And they knew genuine love when they heard it—think of "Oh L'Amour"—but could tweak the hell out of it, too. Today, in Lady Gaga's oddball romantic pop, you can hear Bell's influence (think of the orgasmic build on "Love to Hate You.") And put Bell, by the way, in the choice company of Freddie Mercury and Jimmy Somerville as men unafraid to voice what many might consider a feminine emotiveness. The duo is touring in support of Tomorrow's World. Its lead single, "When I Start to (Break It All Down)," finds Bell declaring "I believe in sweet surrender." Thank God for that. Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.com. $45. 8 p.m. STEVE WIECKING
FRIDAY 10/7
Film: Blood and Snow
In the annals of scary movies, The Shining (1980) is something of an art-film anomaly, since director Stanley Kubrick emphasizes the long build-up so much more than Jack Nicholson's final ax attack on his snowbound family. The swooping aerial shots, the Big Wheel pedaling down endless hallways, the dull talk of canned goods and Indian burial grounds, the thumping tennis ball—they lull you into a kind of dream state. There's a primal, fairy-tale quality laced with Oedipal conflict as this household of three is fatally divided. It matters less if Nicholson's blocked writer is demonically possessed (or Indian-cursed or evil reincarnated or whatever) than that he's simply a bad father—rough and impatient with his young son, cruelly dismissive of his wife (Shelley Duvall), selfish in his writerly ambitions. (Stephen King is never kind to his fellow scribes.) A failure at the typewriter, his imagination turns inward, rotting inside its own topiary maze. If King's book manifests more of that horror, Kubrick lingers upon its latency and origins. (Through Wed.) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6. 9:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
