Characters

New York -- Patty Hewes frightens Glenn Close. No wonder: Hewes is an ice-eyed trial lawyer and serpentine liar who disdains white-collar violence in favor of open sadism. She never settles for $100 million, in other words, when she can put everyone through hell for a nickel more. But Close is Patty Hewes, the central character in Damages, a cloak-and-dagger legal thriller that begins Tuesday on FX. In 40 years in theater and movies, Close has appeared as Norma Desmond, Cruella de Vil and Alex Forrest, the Medusa-haired bunny boiler of Fatal Attraction.

"Don Vincente," by F. Sionil Jose. Modern Library. 415 pages. $13.95.Sionil Jose does not include an epigraph for his novel, "Don Vincente." But he could have chosen John Donne's line: "No man is an island." Jose's characters are torn between acting against the injustice of the system and accepting the way of life offered to them. When they take the easy way out, they learn that all people are connected -- painfully connected.A Filipino writer and political activist, and likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, Jose writes absorbing novels in English, often about the struggle between the peasantry and landowners.

Eight seasons was plenty for ABC's "Home Improvement," says series co-star Patricia Richardson."I think it's absolutely the time" to stop, said Richardson, who plays Tim Allen's wife on the popular sitcom, which ends its run Tuesday on WMAR, Channel 2. "I always had a really hard time the last couple of years knowing where to take the characters. The hardest thing about a sitcom or a long-running series is that the characters can't really grow very much, because if they do, there's no show, you lose conflict."

RECENTLY IT CAME TO MY attention that I was one of the eight remaining Americans who had not seen "The Blair Witch Project."In case you're one of the other seven, I should explain that "The Blair Witch Project" is a hugely popular movie that was featured simultaneously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek (mottoes: "We Both Have The Same Motto"). "The Blair Witch Project" stunned the Hollywood establishment, because it proved that, to make a hit movie, you don't need big stars, an expensive production and a huge promotional budget to generate hype.

It isn't true that life begins at 40, at least not for Kevin Spacey. Professionally speaking, Spacey, who turned 40 in July, has been surfing a jet stream since 1995, when he imprinted himself on our collective consciousness as the most unusual of "The Usual Suspects."He gave Hollywood its archetypal crazed movie exec in "Swimming With Sharks," turned slightly more lethal as the manipulative serial killer in the Stygian "Seven," and seemed to surprise even himself as a smooth cop working both sides of the street, then rediscovering his idealism, in "L.A.

"A Certain Age," by Tama Janowitz. Doubleday. 317 pages. $23.95.Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is praised for its brilliant satire. But I can't remember a single character in it whom I actually liked. The latter is also true of Tama Janowitz's new novel, "A Certain Age." It's full of despicable people, but at least it fits the definition of satire. The problem is, she picks such easy targets -- the gilded automatons of New York high society -- that her victory is cheap.Janowitz's novels, which include "A Cannibal in Manhattan" and "The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group," have rarely strayed from the Big Apple since she made a splash in the '80s as the "brat pack" writer of "Slaves of New York."

Call me a traditionalist, but if it was a board game when I was a kid, then so it should remain.This isn't just an egotistical request. My experience with other board games gone interactive has not been good. Hasbro's computerized version of Monopoly Hasbro, left me craving the good old days when players actually held the car or the hat in their hand.But when it came to evaludate Hasbro's Clue: Murder at Bloody Mansion, I changed my mind.All the elements of the board game aimed at solving Mr. Boddy's murder are here in this $30 Windows game, from the characters to the inevitable questions: Whodunit?

"The Catastrophist," by Ronan Bennett. Simon & Schuster. 332 pages. $24.There is so much to like about "The Catastrophist," Ronan Bennett's novel set in the turbulence of the Congo as that massive central African country contemplated then realized independence 40 years ago.Essentially, this is a classic love triangle among James Gillespie, a dispassionate English writer, Ines Sabiani, a passionate Italian journalist, and the revolution that engulfs them.But in Bennett's skillful hands, it becomes a combination political thriller, adventure tale and love story.

Performance artist Danny Hoch has been known to step outside the theater and drum up trade among the kids on the street."I see 50 kids playing basketball who live across from the theater and have never been there. I tell them, 'Yo, there's this kid across the street, he's [bleeping] hysterical, you should see it before it goes to HBO.' "It's not that theaters have trouble filling seats for this 27-year-old solo performer, whose newest show, "Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop," begins a three-day engagement at Center Stage's Off Center Festival tomorrow.

High school may not be an experience everyone cares to relive, but Rob Nash leaps boldly back in time to re-create the horrors, embarrassments, heartbreaks and occasional heartwarming moments of those formative years in his two-part, one-man show, "Freshman Year Sucks" and "Sophomore Slump" at the Theatre Project.And, like many an adolescent who struggles through an identity crisis in high school, Nash's uneven show, which is still very much a work in progress, suffers from an identity crisis of its own.The two one-acts that make up the evening are the first installments of an intended tetralogy, each set in a different year in high school and each in a different decade.

In just a handful of scenes as Eddie Murphy's ex-wife in Imagine That, Baltimore-bred Nicole Ari Parker creates a woman who sums up the aspirations of every parent in the movie. She's a caring mother who balances her inner child with her essential adult. She doesn't hesitate to leave her fantasy-prone daughter (Yara Shahidi) in the care of her workaholic husband. When he fails her daughter, Parker's character picks up the pieces without freezing him out. Imagine That is a kids' movie that focuses on motherhood and fatherhood.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, issues that had long been unspoken, long kept under wraps, began to surface. One, in particular, jumped out to startle people right out of their puritanical/Victorian comfort zones - sex. The eagerness to talk openly about sex seems to have been particularly pronounced in Germany, where the 1890s saw one of the world's first gay-rights organizations and where a play by Frank Wedekind called Spring Awakening explicitly...

Available on Nintendo DS. Released by Konami. One player. Rated Everyone (10+). $34.99. *** (3 stars) games The Nintendo DS has quietly turned into the best platform for role-playing games, from remakes of Final Fantasy IV and Dragon Quest V to original fare such as Suikoden Tierkreis and Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. Suikoden Tierkreis takes place in a new world without the baggage of the previous games. Some fans of the series and its recurring characters may not like this, while others will welcome it as a breath of fresh air. Either way, they'll find the game play similar to classic Suikoden.

Last week, the producers of the Fox medical drama House pulled off one of the more difficult tricks in TV these days: They cut through the clutter of a not-so-terrific year for prime-time scripted series and caused a major stir with the out-of-the-blue suicide of a character, Dr. Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn). The shocking gunshot wound to the head of this make-believe character gave birth to a host of real-life questions as to how we relate to TV, how the networks sometimes exploit our devotion to beloved characters, and how new media, like Facebook and Twitter, are making fictional characters more a part of our everyday lives than ever.

The stylized treetops in Everyman Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard appear to be made from glass. The leaves and flowers are transparent, though dabbed with white paint. When the ground beneath them heaves and resettles, you can practically see the delicate branches shatter. Even though Anton Chekhov's drama is set in early-20th-century Russia, at times the play's depiction of a splintering way of life strikes too close to home. Director Vincent Lancisi and his fine cast evoke the devastation wrought by unwelcome social change.

Susan Lowe is the sort of person who likes to stay busy - whether it's as a painter, sculptor, teacher, mother or actress who has appeared in most of John Waters' films. So when serious health problems left her confined to a sickbed for most of 2006, she wasn't content to lie back and watch TV all day. To relieve the tedium, she took a pad of paper and box of Crayola crayons and started drawing characters from her imagination, as if she were casting her own movie. There were pimps and hustlers, beatniks and newlyweds, enough to populate a small town.

You know how Mom always made you eat your vegetables? I can't help wishing she was around to stop the members of Single Carrot Theatre from slipping their broccoli under the table to the dog. Baltimore's semiprofessional troupe of twentysomethings is talented and ambitious, but its members tend to eschew the meat-and-potatoes shows within their range in favor of caloric, less nutritious fare. Take this production of Killer Joe. Tracy Letts' black comedy about Texas trailer park denizens who hire a hit man to murder a family member is a terrific play, but it poses challenges currently beyond the Carrots' abilities.

The man in the black cotton skirt and kerchief plucks the string of pearls hanging around his neck. His fingers probe cautiously the area over his heart, as if to determine if that organ has remained intact. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin's controversial "tranny granny," was a transvestite, folk hero and police informant who died in 2002. But she will step onto the Everyman Theatre stage this month in the person of actor Bruce Nelson, who is starring in a one-performer play called I A m My Own Wife that is based on her life story.

It isn't love that makes the world go 'round, but jealousy. That's one conclusion to be drawn from the Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Way of the World. The characters drift around the stage in coats and dresses in various shades of emerald and hunter and lime. Costume designer Jane Greenwood wanted to reflect the characters' obsession with money; indeed, every man and woman on stage resembles a dollar bill with legs and a wig. But the color palette also mirrors the characters' moods.

For the next four nights, the legendary Macbeth, long-deceased high king of Scotland, will stride about Woolly Mammoth Theatre's stage with Homer Simpson and Barack Obama. MacHomer, the 70-minute solo show that Rick Miller, a Canadian actor, has been performing on and off for the past 13 years, is always a delightfully bizarre concoction. Only Miller would bring audiences the Bard's spooky, 11th-century tale of murder and ambition as narrated by more than 50 characters from The Simpsons.