Nancy Bishop is a Chicago native, who writes about things she loves, like theater, film, books, music, art and design. Nancy is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2014 Fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. You can read her personal writing on pop culture at nancybishopsjournal.com, and follow her on Twitter @nsbishop. Nancy is editor and publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review.
Awkward dialogue. Misunderstood references. Two people with obscure diseases. Two couples named Jones. Two marriages in flux. The Realistic Joneses is about life and the fear of death—and about the life and […]
Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote a compelling drama about a village that rebelled against its lecherous overlord to protect its women—a very 21st century story. De Vega wrote it 400 years […]
Playwright Theresa Rebeck is a master of dialogue and never hesitates to portray the bad manners of her contemporaries. Her 2011 play, What We’re Up Against, just opened as the inaugural production […]
Conor McPherson is a storyteller. That was his first love and he’s a master of the form, in the Irish storytelling tradition. Many of his early plays were monologue plays or built […]
We don’t have to look far for a definition of a neighborhood. Jane Jacobs, the famous architecture writer who faced down Robert Moses’ efforts to demolish part of Greenwich Village to build […]
Madelines. Military service. Marriages and family. Swann’s Way to Time Regained. An older man decides he will read Marcel Proust’s iconic novel. As he reads all six volumes over the course of a year, he […]
“How did you discover Brecht?” That was the first question asked of the four theater directors by the moderator at this engrossing session on “Brecht in Chicago/Brecht and Chicago.” It was part […]
African American designers’ contributions to Chicago’s design history are on display through March 3 at the Chicago Cultural Center. The exhibition is particularly interesting because it explores the confluence of design, capitalism […]
The Neo-Futurists are staging their sad and fantastical romp based on the true story of Chicago’s 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire, in which 600 audience members were killed. This short run production, done […]
Pink crosses spread across the front of the stage. Many of them are marked “Desconocida” (unknown). Unmarked graves of young women who wanted to better their lives by working in the new […]
Knock Knock Who’s there? HAIRY — Hairy Who!!! That silly kid joke is the text on a cocktail napkin used at a Hyde Park Art Center exhibition in 1966-67. And it’s emblematic […]
In case you think brooding suggests gloom and doom, think otherwise. Trap Door Theatre’s The Old Woman Broods is chaotic, cacophonous and more than a little cuckoo. The 1969 play by Polish playwright Tadeusz […]
