Before the beginning of each bout (which can last no longer than 30 minutes) the artists are given a starting topic. They start drawing on the blank board. Every five minutes the group breaks out the “wheel of death,” which they spin to choose a new fan-generated topic. Artists are allowed to attack each other by finishing an incomplete piece or by making additions to it. And the artist with the loudest cheers wins.

On May 19, SAF is holding a 12-hour festival at the Metro Gallery from noon to midnight to raise money for the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults. The festival is going to include fights between veteran SAF artists, as well as live comedy and music from Adam WarRock. Fighters for the next generation will also be selected, pitting eight hopefuls against each other in the Art Fight Idol 2012 Tournament. The winner of the elimination-style battle will become a member of SAF.

The Ulman Cancer Fund works to “support, educate, connect and empower young adult cancer survivors,” according to its site. The show is free and all proceeds from donations will go to the Fund. The show will also be broadcast live online at SAF’s web site.

The app has a series of clean, colorful illustrations that use shapes to make up an image of, say, a boy in a baseball cap holding balloons and standing with a dog on a leash. The player finds and touches the shapes each illustration is designed to teach, and as the player touches the shapes, the program calls out a running tally of the total number of shapes found. The animated explanations of each shape are read aloud by a child’s voice while a catchy whistling tune plays. A semi-circle, for instance, is “a circle cut in half. It can be a baseball cap, or a juicy slice of orange, or a baby’s cradle.” When all the shapes are found, an element of the illustration comes alive in brief animation–the dog barks approvingly, for instance.

It’s an “edu-tainment” app, as a colleague called it, and a cute one at that. When an iPhone version was recently announced, I decided to get a review from a veteran player: my two-year-old. Here’s the conversation:

Q: Do you want to play Shapes?

A: Yeah.

Q: What do you think of that game?

A: Um, it works now.

Q: It works now?

A: Yeah.

Q: It wasn’t working?

A: It was not working, yeah.

Q: I thought Shapes worked pretty well.

A: I have to take off my flip-flops to watch it. Can I hold it?

Q: Sure. So what do you think of this game? Do you like it?

A: [No answer, lost in play.]

My child, who has limited interest in iPad apps, gives Shapes an active endorsement: happy to find it working properly, but too busy playing to talk about it.

The studio is hosting two flower workshops in preparation for Mother’s Day—surprise her with a gift or bring her along—and a paperweight workshop aimed at Father’s Day. Thursday May 3 will feature wine and cheese in addition to the glass-blowing; the fee is $50 per flower including wine and cheese, and the event is 21-plus. On Saturday May 5, anyone can participate, and the fee is $38 per flower. The paperweight workshop takes place Saturday June 2 and costs $50 per paperweight.

Corradetti Glass Studio and Gallery is located at 2010 Clipper Park Road, No. 119. The showroom is open Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; and Sundays from 11 a.m.-3 p.m.

The season opens with Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still (Aug. 29-Oct. 2), which follows Sarah and James, a photographer and journalist, respectively. The two cover high-intensity stories in war zones until Sarah gets injured in a bombing. Time is followed by Heroes (Oct. 24-Dec. 2), based on Gerald Sibleyras’ Le Vent des Peupliers and translated by Tom Stoppard. The titular heroes are three World War I vets passing time in a military retirement home in the French countryside in 1959, cracking jokes and pondering their futures; the show earned this year’s Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy.

Following Heroes is the grand opening of the Fayette Street location, featuring Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (Jan. 16-Feb. 17, 2013). The cast for the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning show will consist entirely of resident company members as they tell the story of the disappearance of a wealthy patriarch and the ensuing drama as the family tries to pull itself together. Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage (March 13-April 7, 2013), another Tony Award winner, follows, depicting two couples who meet to discuss an altercation between their sons.

Next up is Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, which won the 2002 Pulitzer for Best Drama for its telling of two African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth whose lives are shaped by their names and their difficult pasts. Everyman closes the season with George Farquhar’s The Beaux’s Stratagem (June 5-June 30, 2013; adapted by Thornton Wilder and Ken Ludwig), a comedic love story about two young schemers who try to woo two beautiful ladies.

Everyman is currently located at 1727 N. Charles St.; its new location is at 315 W. Fayette St. Current subscribers can renew now for next year, and new subscriptions will be available starting May 16.

The opening reception takes place on Saturday, April 21 from 6:30–8:30 p.m. at Spur Gallery, 3504 Ash Street. For more information, call 410–235-7803.

The free screening, co-hosted by Coppin State University’s Entertainment Management Student Union, will take place on Thursday, April 19, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Coppin State University Talon Center Atrium (2500 W. North Ave.).

Sophia

The Baltimore Humane Society is teaming up with the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory to put their animals into the spotlight, then hopefully into the home of a loving family. This month the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory is performing Macbeth. Different dogs or cats from the Humane Society will assume the role of “Man’s Best Friend” in each performance, adding “thespian” to the list of reasons why they should be adopted. (A nine-month-old boxer mix named Sophia will star in the April 12th performance.)

The animals will get their own full page actor bio in the playbill and there will be a table set up to provide patrons with more information about adopting from the Baltimore Humane Society. If you see any scruffy pups or cats on stage that you just have to adopt, go on into the Baltimore Humane Society, mention the play and get half off the adoption fee.

Macbeth will be performed on April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at The Great Hall Theatre, St. Mary’s Outreach Center, 3900 Roland Avenue. The show will also be held April 20–22 and April 27–28. For more information and tickets visit theshakespearefactory.com.

If you have a play—with or without music—a poem, or a short story in any stage of production, send it in to Submit 10; you can read or perform you own work, or the folks from Submit 10, which will be held at Liam Flynn’s Ale House, can spontaneously cast and perform your work for you. The 90-minute program is weekly, so writers have the chance to develop their work over time. Submit 10 Baltimore also needs actors, musicians, directors, and producers to act out the submissions.

Informal discussion of the writing is encouraged, and will almost certainly involve the drink specials Liam’s is offering, including $3 pints of cask-conditioned ale. There is no cover for the evening, and you must be 21 or older to participate.

Beyond supporting Baltimore storytellers, Submit 10 Baltimore aims help businesses in the Station North Arts and Entertainment district.

Entries should be 10 minutes or less and should be sent in PDF format, along with your contact information, to Submit10baltimore@gmail.com. Writers will be notified via e-mail or phone if their entries will be performed.

All Submit 10 events will be held at Liam Flynn’s Ale House at 22 W. North Ave.; the first show will be Monday, April 16, with submissions due Friday, April 13. Those interested in performing should show up at 7:30 p.m. to receive scripts and directions; the show begins at 8 p.m.

Aided by a grant from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, Nachmany embarked on a journey to research the presence of Yiddish theater in society over time and the result is her version of Singer’s story. Throughout the play Nachmany employs short bursts of Yiddish coupled with English in an effort to include both Yiddish and non-Yiddish audience members in the theatrical experience. Although adapted to suit contemporary audiences, the play will still retain the essence of Yiddish culture, and will explore the strong undertones of sexuality that conflict with the religion of the Jewish community.

The play, with accompanying music from Charm City Klezmer, will be performed on April 13 and 14 at the Arellano Theater at Johns Hopkins University, April 19 at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and April 21 at the Bell Foundry at 1539 N. Calvert St. (Station North). The shows will open with Talmudic standup by the poet Alexander Nemser and a short screening of Mugi Takei’s erotic, stop-motion animations. More information can be found on the Facebook page; all shows are free.

In between stories, Glass Mind will announce shows for its upcoming third season. The event takes place Monday, April 9 at 7:30 p.m., at Cyclops Books and Music (30 W. North Ave.); it’s free, but a $10 suggested donation is appreciated.

The event will be held April 7 at 11:00 a.m. Tickets range from $23-$31, including fees; regardless of age, all those attending must have a ticket.

The murals now forming on North Avenue or off St. Paul Street, spanning the length of several storefronts and creeping up the sides of garages and apartment buildings, are the result of a city-supported project that invites artists from around the world to create outdoor murals in the district. Over 20 artists, including Maya Hayuk and Gaia, are participating.

And at least some of them will come together for a night of “drinks, décor, atmosphere, and attitudes exploring the balance between working hard and playing hard,” according to the event’s Facebook page. Hosted by Ellen Degenerate with music by DJ Mark Brown, the night will play off of several different themes including beauty, business, and success, and will feature a Baltimore versus Philadelphia dance battle, featuring members of the Baltimore Experimental Dance Collective and Effervescent Collective vs Club Lyfestile.

She Had Style, She Had Grace takes place on Friday, April 13 at 8 p.m. at Area 405,  405 E. Oliver St. Tickets are $3.

The 2012-’13 season kicks off on Sept. 19 with Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, adapted by Arthur Miller, presenting a story of two opposing brothers and a community in opposition with itself. The show will run through Oct. 21.

Stephen Thorne’s The Completely Fictional—Utterly True—Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allen Poe, an examination of the poet’s life and final days starring Bruce Nelson, will run from Oct. 17– Nov. 25.

A story about fear and relationships, A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee will run from Nov. 21– Dec. 23.

Both Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop and Marisa Wegrzyn’s Mud Blue Sky present interactions between strangers taking place within a hotel room. Hall’s piece depicts an exchange between Martin Luther King Jr. and a hotel maid, and shows in Baltimore for the first time from Jan. 9– Feb. 24. Mud Blue Sky centers on an interaction between three flight attendants and a stranger as they regard their pasts, presents, and futures, and runs from March 6– April 14.

Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris’ drama Clybourne Park–a response to Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun–plays from April 10 through June 9, in rotating repertory with the world premiere of Kwei-Armah’s own American drama, Beneatha’s Place–also a response to Hansberry–showing May 8 through June 9.

Via press release, Kwei-Armah says, “Locally and nationally, civically and artistically, our aim is to be a focal point for art as a catalyst for debate,” an idea that undoubtedly inspired this year’s theme.

The Gilman School Film Festival is on Friday April 13, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., at the Alumni Auditorium. Tickets are $3 for adults and $2 for students. The Baltimore High School Film Festival is Thursday June 7 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at the Charles Theatre; the event is free.

The Kane Show will also be available on iHeartRadio and the iHeartRadio mobile app.

At 8 p.m., there will be a workshop performance of City Arts resident Marcus Civin’s new piece, A Play Called Scenes From A Love Story, where actors, with scripts in hand, will perform the story of two lovers, Cass and Boldo, who are so busy trying to get out of their apartment and plan a peaceful protest that they miss the fact that their home is haunted.

Nearby Area 405 will also be open for a student exhibition juried by Sarah Tanguay.

The Final Friday tour takes place Friday, March 30 at 5 p.m. at City Arts, 440 E. Oliver St. The student exhibition will take place from 7–10 p.m. at 405 E. Oliver St. All events are free.

The show follows gravedigger Henry Spade, his bride, and lots of crows with a score that melds classic musical theater with blues, gospel, and rock and roll. Tickets are $15, cash only. Reservations are encouraged, as seating is capped at 50 people. (Rumor has it that Saturday night has already sold out, so get on it.) Call (410) 236‑5773 for reservations. EMP Collective is located at 306 W. Redwood St.

McChrystal’s sterling military career and subsequent forced retirement has been compared to that of the famous Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Also the son of a military officer and a graduate of West Point Military Academy, McChyrstal served as a Special Forces Green Beret and former commander of Joint Special Operations Command before he was relieved of his command under the specific direction of President Barack Obama. Although his leadership has been credited with the capture of Sadam Hussein, McChrystal’s reported negative opinions about the Obama Administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan led to his forced retirement.

Touted as a “dynamic and powerful speaker,” McChrystal will expound on his career and his unique leadership model that has sculpted some of the most effective military task forces in Army command. The Stevenson event is free and takes place Tuesday March 27 at 3:30 p.m. in the Stevenson University Pavilion, which is located on the Greenspring campus. The talk at the Meyerhoff takes place that evening at 8 p.m.

The exhibition, which employs collaboration through various mediums including photography, graffiti, hip-hop, and architecture, has been up at the Windup Space since March 1. Portraits by Michel DeAscentiis meet layering by Owen; Owen turns Morgan State architectural student Samir Taylor’s thesis into a 4-foot-by-8-foot painting. These and many more joint projects between Owen and Mario Sam,  Sean Scheidt, Jake Warford, and MC Arcieri Keness produce surprisingly inventive results.

The Windup Space hosts a free reception for the exhibition Friday March 23 from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., with a performance by Keness at 10 p.m. The exhibition runs through April 30.

Neil Freeman, “New York”

If you happen to be in the vicinity of the case[werks] gallery any time soon, Line Weight/Line Speed, an exhibition curated by local polymath Marian April Glebes, is well worth your time. The exhibition features three artists who “preserve the spontaneous and control the uncontrollable via drawings, reconfigurable geometries, and digital prints.”  What they do, Glebes writes, is “a step toward capturing magic in the mundane.”

Baltimore-based artist Jan Razauskas’ mixed media pieces are the most eye-catching of the bunch. Razauskas creates her pieces on a completely non-absorbent plasticized surface. As a result, her pigments–many of them of a metallic sheen–move in unpredictable ways when applied to the paper. Often the pigments pool towards one another like iron filings, creating rich fields of color, sometimes smooth, sometimes pitted, sometimes edging out to a clear wash. The images that result have a compelling, near geologic depth. As a final step, Razauskas  interprets the “accidental” images in clean, geometric lines with graphite, drawing from the shapes that have formed as well as building upon them. Her pieces are evocative, and ever-changing. As sunlight filters through the gallery’s many windows, the pieces glow, their angles subtly changing throughout the day. They are, Razauskas says, an attempt to express the ephemeral. They are also just plain gorgeous.

Artist and musician Conrad Freiburg has a fascination with structure and geometry, particularly, it seems, with the undecagon (an 11-sided polygon). He has an album called the Undecagon, and the shape appears repeatedly in his visual art. His pieces–like 2006’s “The Ball Dropper” and “The Blind Light, The Pyre of Night”–are often interactive, but his work here is solely for viewing. It is minimalist, and compelling. A set of small wooden undecagons sit in stacks on the floor, like ornate bedposts or children’s toys. One has an irrestible urge to reach out and restack them in different configurations. On the wall, the shape repeats, though in this case, swirling ink patterns adorn them.

Neil Freeman’s work here exhibits the cleanest lines, though he composes the pieces in his All the Streets, Centered series from chaotic urban maps. (Freeman is an urban planner.) The streets of the cities depicted in the series–Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, etc.–are horizontally and vertically centered, literally. The result is a dense black star with rays reaching out in the cardinal directions, tendrils of outlying curvy roads wiggling between like hairs. Each city’s rendition is, however, unique. Urban, dense New York City is a uniform, fat diamond. Sprawling, less populated Chicago, on the other hand, is thin and graceful, like the star on a Christmas tree.

Line Weight/Line Speed will be on display through March 29. For more information, visit casewerks.com.

Solan is pleased with the offers to keep the impressive array of titles intact. “It all happened very quickly…and I’m kind of honored that there are people in town that think it is worthy of keeping together,” he says. Although independent video stores were, as Solan says, a “strange little interlude” in the  film business, some of these stores housed extraordinary collections; indeed, there is a precedent for buying collections in order to keep them in one piece.

Three years ago in New York’s East Village, Yongman Kim’s rare, eclectic video collection (Kim’s Video and Music) went to Salemi, a small village in Sicily whose mayor promised his town “The Neverending Film Festival.” Kim’s collection was kept in one place, available to the public; it brought attention to the restoration efforts of the village, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968.

For his part, Solan is pleasantly surprised that keeping the collection intact is of interest to people in the community. “I’m just an old-fashioned type of business guy,” he says. “I’ve never been involved in anything that involved this sort of effort.”

To kick off the event, Hollaback is hosting a mud-stenciling event—painting pictures on public surfaces using earth. Hollaback invites one and all to make some stencils—“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” reads one downloadable example on the event’s Facebook page—gather up some mud, and come paint Baltimore in muddy anti-harassment messages. The event will be held at McKeldin Square at 2 p.m. on March 18.

At 2 p.m. on March 9th

The discussion afterward was mostly lighthearted—Franco, who played a role in the 2008 stoner comedy Pineapple Express, declined any potential invitations to “smoke weed later,” eliciting laughter from the audience. Despite his informality, Franco was clearly passionate about Crane—he took his time to respond accurately to the audience’s questions, and through his responses it was clear that he had been painstaking in researching the life of one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. Working with Paul Mariani, the author of The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, on which Franco’s film is based, Franco sought to familiarize himself with Crane’s work, researching the poet’s influences, and searching out recordings of his voice and descriptions of his personality and physical appearance.

The Broken Tower premiered in April 2011 at Boston College and screened at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival but never saw a theatrical release. It’s available on DVD and digital download through Focus Features.

That collection will go on sale piecemeal starting Friday, March 16, when the store reopens to liquidate its stock. But tonight, at the end of the last night of the store’s nearly 20-year run renting Disney flicks and Godard films, vigil organizers invite you to show up and offer your respects: “Dress in black, bring flowers/candles/etc.”

The screening is free and open to the public and takes place at 2 p.m. in Shriver Hall on Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus. For more information visit Johns Hopkins’ Film and Media Studies page.

The play, which ran as part of Run of the Mill Theater’s farewell production last summer, was reprised at Theatre Project during Artscape last year. The current production is showing at Arena Players, 801 McCulloh Street, from March 10–25. For more information visit the event’s Facebook page; for tickets, visit Brown Paper Tickets or call 410–728-6500.

Also playing at Arena, in rotating repertory: Happy Ending and Day of Absence, both by Douglas Turner Ward. Happy Ending concerns two sisters who work as a maid and a laundress in Harlem. Days of Absence is a satire about an imaginary Southern town where all the black people have suddenly disappeared. For tickets, visit Brown Paper Tickets.

Courtesy The Walters Art Museum

A knight in shining armor, Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum, plans to relinquish his position in 2013 after 18 years of leadership. As director of the museum, Vikan has accumulated an impressive resume of recognition and honors for his work. Vikan is the man to thank for the elimination of general admission to the Museum, its Touring Exhibition Program, and the regular “Postcards from the Walters” segment on WYPR. If you’re wondering how any of this makes him a knight, Vikan was appointed to Knighthood in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Communication for his contributions. His successor will have a very large suit of armor to fill.

“It’s a mix of business and health issues—events conspiring against me,” VA owner Barry Solan says when reached by phone. The rise of Netflix and Redbox as sources for DVD rentals and the ongoing boom in online streaming and downloading has devastated the brick-and-mortar rental business in recent years. The clientele at VA’s other Baltimore location on Cold Spring Lane in Roland Park “is less transient,” he adds, whereas the Charles Village location depended in large part on college students, “which is exactly the group that isn’t renting [DVDs] anymore.” Solan says that the fact that he may be undergoing heart surgery soon spurred him to go ahead and close the Charles Village location before a possible long recovery time.

He sounds surprisingly sanguine. “Everybody in the world knows that the video business is dying,” he says. “I always say you have to keep in mind that it’s not a failure—it’s like the Hanukkah story. It’s not that the oil lasted forever, but it lasted far longer than it was supposed to. It’s a miracle the stores have stayed open as long as they have.”

The Charles Village store will stop renting films on Monday, close for a few days, and then reopen Thursday, March 15 Friday, March 16, to begin selling off its voluminous collection. (Some rare titles will be folded into the collections at Cold Spring Lane and at the VA store in Takoma Park.) After two months at most, it will close its doors for good.

Solan says the two remaining VA locations will remain open, though he acknowledges, “We’re in discussions with both landlords about the future.”

“Man ex Machina,” by Hungarian artist Venelin Shurelov. Courtesy Open Theatre Baltimore.

The Baltimore Open Theatre, a new organization offering free performances of contemporary theater and dance, holds its first public event this month: a discussion about “the political dismantling” of Hungarian theater. Led by Andrea Tompa, president of the Hungarian Theatre Critics’ Association, the discussion will explore the artistic silence brought on by Hungary’s move toward nationalism and the ways in which freedom of speech and Hungarian theater are being threatened by this shift. Joining forces to put on the event are Baltimore Open Theatre, Center Stage, CityLit Project, and the Center for International Theatre Development. This event is free to the public and you can get your tickets online. But if you can’t make it, catch the discussion later, via webcast by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

The discussion will be held on March 9 at 7 p.m. at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. For more information and for free tickets visit the discussion’s page and for more background on the situation in Hungary check out the blog Hungarian Watch.