Glistening with sweat in a short, flattering turquoise dress, Demetria Stewart gracefully walks downstage to belt out the final notes of "Home" in the Renaissance Guild's production of The Wiz. Although noticeably fatigued, her voice is strong and resonant. She seems increasingly determined to give the well-known power ballad all she's got, captain. On cue, a small dog runs onstage, but just as she bends down to pick him up, this Toto scoots in the opposite direction. Stifling an involuntary chuckle, Stewart turns front and center and sings her heart out.

Sam Shepard’s break-out play, Buried Child, runs like a family sitcom plot gone horribly wrong. Young, optimistic Vince brings his girlfriend with him to rural Illinois to patch things up with his wacky, dysfunctional family. A horrible secret tears the family apart. Hilarity fails to ensue.

The Classic Theatre’s new production emphasizes the thwarted comedy.

John Cody Williams' one-man show at Joan Grona Gallery feels like a coming-of-age party, and it is a celebration of sorts for his drawing talent, discouraged for years during formal art studies. Williams, 33, moved back to his hometown of Mason, Texas, on the edge of the Hill Country after he graduated from the University of Houston in 2008. There he's been composting his meaty illustration skills and childhood kitsch into swamps of memory, nightmare, and wish fulfillment.

American scholar Ward Churchill courted controversy by arguing, publicly and emphatically, that the September 11, 2001 attacks were a direct and predictable response to American foreign policy, that they were simply an instance of the “chickens coming home to roost.” The suspicion, shared by other political theorists — Slavoj Žižek comes to mind — is that Western consumer capitalism engenders terrorism as its opposition through its natural behavior, that the policies created by such a culture are the necessary and sufficient cause for global terrorism. In Millennium People, J.G. Ballard takes this claim a step further, suggesting that terroristic violence, fueled by malaise, could dwell in the psyche of the middle class itself, that the Western capitalist lifestyle and terrorism are not even so distant as warring enemies but are in fact two parts of the same whole.