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.
Themistocles was a military hero and a political leader, born to a working-class family just outside Athens around 524 BCE. He rose to lead Athens in war and peace but […]
Stage Left Theatre, a Chicago company with 40 years of history, is redefining storefront theater with its new production, The Distrikt of Lake Michigun, in an empty retail space on the […]
Eephus is a film about an amateur baseball game played languidly over several hours at Soldiers Field, a treasured old baseball field in small town Massachusetts. The film is named for […]
The three drowning girls are young women in their 20s and 30s, desperate to marry and avoid spinsterhood. The time is the early 20th century, and Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham […]
A Lie of the Mind, Sam Shepard’s 1983 play about two families and the tragedy that binds them, is a sizzling 2.5 hours of solid acting, direction and pacing. At […]
Was the heroine of Hedda Gabler an early feminist or just a spoiled brat? In the new production of Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 play, Brookelyn Hebert plays her as a bit of both. […]
A triangle has three sides. But the three sides are not always equal, as we learn in maths. Or geometry, if you’re an American. And so it is in Betrayal, the […]
The new production of The Mannequins’ Ball at Trap Door Theatre is a whole lot of 1930s agitprop choreographed with music, singing and dancing. Nicole Weisner and Miguel Long direct 90 minutes […]
Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero blends working relationships tested by an ethical dilemma in this comedic drama that gets a timely staging by Shattered Globe Theatre. Is the titular Lobby Hero the loopy […]
Fat Ham, the prize-winning play by James Ijames, is now on stage at Goodman Theatre in a co-production with Definition Theatre. Ijames’ script was inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and incorporates some of the original’s […]
It’s time for the 7th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival! Every year, the puppets brighten our January and remind us of the amazing joy and ingenuity of puppetry storytelling. The performers […]
Playwright Andrea Stolowitz’s extended Jewish family lived in Berlin in the 1930s during the rise of the Nazi party; they emigrated to New York City in 1939. Stolowitz’s parents believed […]