THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI Rages on Screens Tomorrow

As awards season begins, Oscar contenders like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri get wider releases to reach bigger audiences. If you've been waiting for this one, it opens tomorrow, November 30, in Bloomington-Normal at the Wehrenberg Cinema, if you want the cushy seat experience, or December 1 at The Art in Champaign, if you prefer a more intimate theater.

It's been getting lots of Oscar buzz, and not just for Frances McDormand's fierce performance as a hard-scrabble mother pushing to find justice for her daughter, who was raped and murdered outside their town. The movie itself, plus Martin McDonagh's screenplay and direction and Sam Rockwell's performance as a racist, messed-up cop, are also showing up on awards shortlists and predictions. So far, Three Billboards has three nominations for Film Independent Spirit Awards -- Best Female Lead for McDormand, Best Supporting Male for Rockwell and Best Screenplay for McDonagh -- with awards at a score of international film festivals and 11 nominations and two wins at the British Independent Film Awards.

You may know McDonagh as a playwright, with major work like The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman to his credit, or as a screenwriter and director of films like In Bruges. Violence, meanness, small towns and a streak of humor laced with cruelty show up frequently in his darkly cynical writing. They're certainly a part of Three Billboards, with critics talking about the rage and pain that fuel McDormand's role and the film as a whole.

For RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico calls Three Billboards "one of those truly rare films that feels both profound and grounded; inspirational without ever manipulatively trying to be so. Very few recent movies have made me laugh and cry in equal measure as much as this one. Very few films recently are this good," while Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post notes its timeliness, "when sexism in its most virulent forms has been revealed in a daily drumbeat of stories recounting unspeakable exploitation and abuse." She concludes: "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is as dark as they come, a pitch-black, often laceratingly funny look at human nature at its most nasty, brutish and dimwitted."

And if you're keeping an Oscar scorecard, you'll definitely want to check off Three Billboards. Dunkirk and The Post may be ahead of it in the Best Picture race, but McDormand and Rockwell are starting to climb in their categories. Don't count out that screenplay, either.

Arts@ICC Theater Season Opens Sept 29

Illinois Central College will open its 2017-18 theater season on September 29, when Steve Martin's crazy comedy The Underpants begins a six-performance run in the ICC Performing Arts Center.

Martin based his boisterous farce play on a 1910 satire of middle-class mores written by German playwright Carl Sternheim. The Underpants involves what happens after Louise Markes, the wife of a puffed-up civil servant, loses her undies as she's attempting to get a better look at the king during a parade. Her husband fears his reputation and his career are toast because of his wife's errant intimate apparel, while Louise is starting to get a lot of attention from smitten men who saw her panties drop in public. Those men include two would-be boarders in the Markes household. And hilarity ensues.

Tim Wyman directs The Underpants at ICC with a cast that includes Nathanael Anderson as the king, Darrell Kimbro as Louise, Noah Lane as Theo, Dylan McDonell and Creighton Peacock as the two men who want to rent rooms to pursue Louise, Max Rutschke as an elderly scientist and Adyson TerMaat as the upstairs neighbor.

Tickets for The Underpants are $8 for the general public and $6 for students and senior citizens. Performances run from September 29 through October 8, with Friday and Saturday shows beginning at 7:30 pm and Sunday matinees at 2:30 pm. The show is rated PG for "mild adult situations."

In November, ICC Theatre will offer a dinner-theater option with Bullets for Broadway by David Landau, billed as "an audience participation whodunit that combines music, food….and murder!" Look for Bullets for Broadway and its "The Sopranos meet The Producers" antics November 10 to 19 in ICC's studio theater. The food will, of course, be Italian.

And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank by Jim Still is up next. This multimedia experience is "part oral history, part dramatic action, part remembrance" as it focuses on the world of Anne Frank, seen through the eyes of two Holocaust survivors. And Then They Came for Me will play for six performances between February 23 and March 4, 2018, in ICC's mainstage theater. Rated PG for intense material.

Keeping up the intensity level, Martin McDonagh's biting, bitterly funny The Cripple of Inishmaan comes to ICC's studio theater from April 13 to 22, 2018. This tragic comedy centers on an Irish boy whose body holds "a host of troubles." He is a square peg in his small village but dreams of becoming a movie star in Hollywood when a documentary film crew (Robert J. Flaherty's real venture to film The Man of Aran in 1933) comes calling. Let's just say things don't turn out the way "Cripple Billy" hoped. Rated R for adult language.

Both individual and season tickets are available to these shows. To get all the info on ordering, check out ArtsAtICC.com or call the ICC Performing Arts Center box office at 309-694-5136.