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.
It may be hard for today’s online news consumers to believe, but there was a day when newspaper columnists—certain newspaper columnists—were Masters of the Universe. The Political Universe anyway. The […]
Chicago has been blessed with several visits by Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in recent years. Some of them have been fairly traditional renditions (Tuta Theatre Chicago in 2009 and Strawdog […]
You know the scene. “A country road. A tree.” Samuel Beckett couldn’t have been more succinct in the scenic direction for his existential classic, Waiting for Godot. That tree takes […]
Marina Carr’s 1998 play, By the Bog of Cats, is set in a ghostly bog in the Irish midlands. Hester Swane (a fierce and determined Kristin Collins) has lived in […]
Matt rejects the American dream, but his father and brothers will have none of it. Straight white men rule the world. Matt has to be happy, use his skills and […]
Irish Theatre of Chicago will present staged readings from three emerging Irish playwrights three weekends this month at Chief O’Neill’s Pub on Elston Avenue. The plays, never before produced in […]
It’s the end of the evening, the end of The Wolf at the End of the Block. The lead character, Abe (Gabriel Ruiz) is in a bar, thinking about what […]
Jennifer Haley’s very contemporary play, The Nether, is set in a world we may find all too familiar. Neither real nor unreal. Mostly virtual, in fact, rather like our social media […]
Three sisters. Estranged from their climate scientist father. Their lives each upended by climate change. And dozens of other characters. Steep Theatre’s U.S. premiere of Earthquakes in London spans eras […]
Have you ever worked in an office—creative or otherwise—where a bunch of young associates groused over their bosses, gossiped about their colleagues, and desperately sought promotion to the next step […]
The Harlem Renaissance was an era of great creativity in the arts that progressed through the 1920s, but the Great Depression hit many artists hard. Jobs were scarce and salaries […]
A Disappearing Number is a multi-layered, complex story of love and math over the course of a century. Timeline Theatre’s new production of the script by Complicité is mesmerizing, sometimes […]