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 Bluesky at @nancyb.bsky.social. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.
Two nights ago I finished reading the marvelous and peculiar 2001 novel—Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish—by Australian author Richard Flanagan. In his pages of colorful prose, […]
Last week, the Russian government erected a new statue of Joseph Stalin in Moscow. Apparently Vladimir Putin is resurrecting the image of the brutal dictator. And this week, a Chicago […]
Next week Physical Theater Festival Chicago presents its annual weeklong exploration of physical theater from around the world. This year there’s a local twist. The festival, which runs June 2-8 […]
“The house is a house, but it is also a metaphor; it has been described as a quantity of air trapped between floor and roof, … as a glass cage, […]
The Antiquities at Goodman Theatre is a panorama of human invention and storytelling beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the 23rd century, when humans may be .extinct. These scenes […]
Will robots or humanoids some day rule the world? A play written 105 years ago predicts the rise of the robot over its human creators. You can see the clever, […]
Mistaken identities. Lovers or fathers? Girlfriends or daughters? It’s not something out of Shakespeare, the master at such mixups, but a renowned 1968 play by Alan Ayckbourn, an English master […]
Serge buys a painting. Marc hates it. Yvan is verklempt over his friends’ feud and his coming wedding. That’s the plotline of Yazmina Reza’s comic drama Art, now being staged by […]
Theater fans can get a new appreciation of theater of the absurd this month with eight short plays being staged by Gwydion Theatre over the next few weekends. We saw three of […]
Saturday, May 3, is World Press Freedom Day. We celebrate that because in the US we are fortunate to have a strong Constitution that protects press freedom and other forms […]
This is a review of a new play by David Mamet…. Although any mention of David Mamet today can turn into something else entirely. For instance, how many playwrights attract […]
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 […]