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’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 […]
The invisible hand in Steep Theatre’s new play does not refer to terrorism or ghostly acts of murder. Steep gives us a clue by including a quotation from Adam Smith’s […]
Euripides’ The Trojan Women may be the greatest anti-war play ever written. And the timing is certainly right for an anti-war play. The new production of The Trojan Women by […]
October is a crazy month for arts and culture in Chicago. We have plenty of theater openings, and in addition there are festivals such as Chicago Ideas Week, Open House […]
Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in what is often described as a three-week burst of creativity. He typed furiously (100 words a minute) on his Underwood portable typewriter and […]
The scene is Purgatory and it’s a big trial, presided over by a judge who was with Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox. Pontius Pilate takes the Fifth. A motley […]
Chicago’s American Writers Museum is launching two new program series this fall among their range of public programming relating to all forms of American writing. Tuesday First Books highlights the first […]
If you go to the theater to get away from the nasty divisiveness of today’s news, then Stage Left Theatre’s new production, Building the Wall, is not for you. Robert […]
The Rembrandt slips back and forth in time from a contemporary art museum to a Renaissance-era artist’s studio, a Greek temple, and the room where an aging poet is dying. […]
CENSORED! We Read Banned Books, an ACLU benefit, will be an evening of readings by Chicago authors from their favorite banned books, sponsored by Third Coast Review and Kill Your Darlings Live Lit. Censored will […]
Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge is performed on the most minimal of stages with few costume changes (and no shoes), thus proving that it’s really the script and […]
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, was considered science fiction when it was published in 1949. Almost 70 years later, in an era of alternative facts and so-called fake news, […]