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.
Furniture. Textiles. Toys. Home goods. Buildings. Photography. Theater design. Typography and graphic design. It’s hard to exaggerate how much the visual design that surrounds us is influenced by the work of the Bauhaus, […]
Four young women in a small-town Wisconsin bar, with a bowling alley beyond. It’s a story of their lives, their sorrows, their limited futures. Bowling is a side activity for most of […]
What does fulfillment mean? The playbill for A Red Orchid Theatre’s Fulfillment Center gives us more than a clue. Artistic director Kirsten Fitzgerald’s note lists definitions and describes what fulfillment means to her. […]
It’s just a plain old flip phone. Not one of those computer-in-your-pocket devices that runs your life today. But when Jean takes possession of the phone, it enables her to meet new […]
The pipeline in Dominique Morisseau’s play is the school-to-prison path followed too often by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds because of harsh school and police policies. The route is explored in Morisseau’s […]
The Father by French playwright Florian Zeller is a play about aging and dementia. But it’s not your typical touching human story designed to gain your sympathy for a troubled person and […]
The Red Rex Theatre Co. rehearses a play about characters drawn from their own Rightlynd neighborhood in Ike Holter’s play at Steep Theatre. They hope this will be the play that will […]
The Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, created for the 30th year by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, is presenting a full schedule of 41 plays in a six-week performance marathon in its home […]
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 […]
