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.
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 […]
Familiar at Steppenwolf Theatre rings true as a familiar story in one way or another for most of us. An immigrant family struggles with education and culture in its new country, and tries […]
“This is Major Tom to Ground Control I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I sitting […]
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a 1957 play by William Inge, is set in a small town in 1920s Oklahoma. The play tells the story of the Flood family—Cora […]
The Revolutionists is feminist history laced with an argument for the value of art in revolution. Playwright Lauren Gunderson describes it as a “comedic quartet about four women at the height of the […]
“Once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely […]
Wrightwood 659 is a stunning new art gallery in Lincoln Park and its current exhibition is a great way to get acquainted with the new space if you have not been there […]
Manual Cinema is presenting a weirdly enchanting version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Court Theatre. Nine puppeteers and musicians display the original story of Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature, combined with Mary Shelley’s […]
I admire experimentation in theater, whether it’s setting a familiar Shakespearean tale behind a vinyl screen in some post-modern setting (as Gift Theatre did with Hamlet recently) or telling the Frankenstein story […]
Earlier this week I reviewed a darkly hilarious Kurt Vonnegut satire on stage in New York. The other two plays I saw last weekend are powerful dramas about family tragedy. They aren’t comedies, […]
