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.
The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh is a story of two Irish brothers, locked in a codependent relationship of affection and hatred (mostly the latter). Throughout the course of the 100-minute play by […]
Frankenstein opens with an exquisitely staged birthing scene. The Creature is shrouded in a sheer fabric sac, a metaphoric womb. He struggles to free himself and emerges naked, covered in scars and suture […]
The three plays I saw last weekend in New York provided insights into how theater works, and emphasized language and physicality. Two are one-person performances and the third strongly highlights a single […]
Tom Stoppard stirs up his personal brew of European political ideology, love, death and pop culture in his 2006 play, Rock and Roll, now on stage in a stirring production at the […]
Zürich by Amelia Roper at Steep Theatre is a tantalizing 105 minutes of tension, laced with some smart dialogue. Directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, the play’s five scenes are so cleverly constructed and interrelated […]
Mendoza, a thrillingly raw and earthy adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is being presented this week at Goodman Theatre in collaboration with the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance. This very graphic and bloody production […]
Theater history, immigration, censorship and persecution are some of the ingredients in Paula Vogel’s compelling play, Indecent, which just opened at Victory Gardens Theater. Gary Griffin directs a multitalented cast of nine […]
It’s Rome in 1922. In his play Naked, Luigi Pirandello, the Nobel Prize-winning author, concocts a puzzling tangle of death and passion. Directed by Kay Martinovich, Naked is now on stage at Trap […]
City Lit Theater’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play, Arms and the Man, takes full advantage of its broad humor. Perhaps Shaw’s most frothy script, director Brian Pastor directs it with […]
Edward Albee’s 2002 play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, hasn’t been performed very often in Chicago. I told my plus-one, rather casually, that it’s a play about a man who falls […]
Dostoyeksky’s Crime and Punishment is a thriller, a slow-paced intellectualized thriller. If you haven’t read the novel since college days, Chris Hannan’s 2013 adaptation—on stage at Shattered Globe Theatre—will sneak up […]
Chicago Crime and Sex Trafficking Stories Explode in Monger at Her Story Theater Mary Bonnett’s play Monger: The Awakening of J.B. Benton tells a complicated Chicago crime story with several threads seemingly […]
