Nancy S. Bishop is publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review. She’s 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. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.
Steppenwolf Theatre’s world premiere of The Minutes by Tracy Letts takes place during a small town city council meeting. It’s a satire of small-town politics, individual grievances and so much […]
The set is an old taxi. That’s all. An old Checker taxi, number 4538, with an Illinois license plate. The top is removed and its back wheels are on blocks. […]
Pioneers of German Graphic Design by Jens Müller is a deep dive into the early history of graphic design and demonstrates why Germany (and Austria and Switzerland) are so important […]
Trap Door Theatre is staging an expressionistic, phantasmagorical tale of eastern European drama. Their new production, Occidental Express, by Romanian-born playwright Matei Visniec, is a sometimes wacky, often chilling, always […]
Third Coast Review went to New York last week—mainly for a theater critics conference. The schedule provided plenty of time for great theater, and I took advantage of that by […]
Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White is a powerful drama of black-white relations in 1918 South Carolina, soulfully directed by Cecile Keenan at the Artistic Home. The […]
It’s a woman’s play, about an era when women’s physical and emotional needs and desires were not only misunderstood, but completely ignored. Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the […]
Note: Windy City Blues has been selected by Spertus Institute for its One Book One Community book of the year. Spertus has several events planned around Rosen’s book. If you […]
Tucked away on a stretch of Indiana dunes beachfront are five homes built to showcase innovation and industrial progress for Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair, the Century of Progress International Exposition. […]
Bertolt Brecht is an interesting, if often didactic, playwright. And so it is with The Last Days of the Commune, a play that was incomplete when he died in 1956. […]
Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth is the story of the universal family, beset by war and catastrophes but enduring despite all. In a way, The Skin of Our Teeth (written […]
It’s all about the names. Early in The Crucible, set in colonial Salem, young girls caught dancing in the woods name other girls who were involved to save themselves from […]