“Good theatre” is whatever entertains, moves, enlightens an audience. But what strikes one viewer as good, others will find stupid or inaccessible, cheesy or artsy, offensive or boring.

When I saw Pegasus Players’ recent revival of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, I was touched by its quietly profound depiction of two people finding redemption in each other—and by the rich passages of African-American storytelling. But a middle-aged black woman next to me complained to her companion, “Well, the acting was good—but there wasn’t much plot.”

Steppenwolf’s 1996 mounting of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney—about a blind woman who suffers a breakdown after her sight is restored— stunned me with its exquisitely nuanced performances (Jenny Bacon, Rick Snyder, and Robert Breuler under Kyle Donnelly’s direction). Yet others found the play dull because the script is structured as a series of monologues rather than as naturalistic drama.

When Peter Sellars’ multiracial Merchant of Venice played the Goodman in 1994, viewers walked out in droves during—hell, before— intermission. But I was engrossed: Sellars’ approach attuned me to Shakespeare’s complex, controversial text in a new and illuminating way.

Conversely, when I saw Les Miserables on Broadway, the woman next to me was in tears by the end, deeply moved. I found the show to be bloated and tedious. So what do I know?

I’ve made a list of some of the best work I’ve seen in 45 years of theatregoing here—a representative cross-section of 33 shows that made a particularly strong impression—in hopes of identifying the qualities that define my concept of “good theatre.”

1960s: Marcel Marceau and his mime ensemble in Gogol’s The Overcoat.

1970s: Paul Sills’ hippie-esque “Story Theater” fairy-tale adaptations at Body Politic (now Victory Gardens); Godzilla Rainbow Troupe’s fantastical gender-fuck spectacle Whores of Babylon at the old Kingston Mines, featuring the great J. Pat Miller; Paul Zindel’s domestic drama The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, starring Irene Dailey at the old Ivanhoe Theatre; Organic Theater’s 1974 premiere of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, starring Warren Casey and Roberta Custer, directed by Stuart Gordon at the Uptown Hull House space now inhabited by the Black Ensemble.

1980s: In the Belly of the Beast, featuring William Petersen’s head-banging, heartbreaking, performance under Robert Falls’ direction (Wisdom Bridge); Frank Galati’s Stein/Picasso collage She Always Said, Pablo (Goodman); Lysistrata 2411 A.D., Dale Calandra and Donald Coates’ fanciful, futuristic rock adaptation of Aristophanes’ antiwar satire (Center Theater); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom starring Harry Lennix—the first Chicago production of an August Wilson play—and the outrageous religious satire Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends: A Final Evening With the Illuminati by Atlanta’s Southern Theatre Conspiracy (both at Pegasus Players); Joan Allen and Danny Glover in Athol Fugard’s A Lesson From Aloes (Steppenwolf); actor Jim Ortlieb and director Bob Meyer’s minimalist one-man adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie (Chicago Actors Studio); and the English Shakespeare Company’s epic “Wars of the Roses” cycle, presented at the Auditorium Theatre by the Chicago International Theatre Festival.

1990s: Once in Doubt, with William Petersen and Amy Morton’s stunningly visceral performances (Remains Theatre); Robert Falls’ staging of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, starring Petersen and Cherry Jones (Goodman); The Gospel at Colonus, Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s all-black retelling of the Oedipus legend (Goodman); William Pullinsi’s in-the-round staging of Into the Woods with Ross Lehman, Shannon Cochran, and Hollis Resnik (Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre); Girls, Girls, Girls, Live on Stage, Totally Rude, Sharon Evans’ witty comedy about a performance artist in an Uptown strip joint (Live Bait); American Divine, producer Matt Tauber and Dolphinback Theatre Company’s painstaking three-part cycle of plays by Joe Pintauro (Theatre Building); director Terry Kinney’s white-knuckle ride on A Streetcar Named Desire with Laila Robbins, Gary Sinise, and Kathryn Erbe (Steppenwolf); West Side Story, in a potent touring production that restored Jerome Robbins’ original fusion of dramatic movement, jazz dance, and symbolically charged design (Chicago Theatre); Wings, Jeffrey Lunden and Arthur Perlman’s musical version of Arthur Kopit’s drama about a stroke victim, starring Linda Stephens under Michael Maggio’s direction (Goodman Studio); David Cromer’s bare-bones mounting of Angels in America for the Journeymen, infinitely superior to the high-tech Broadway premiere; and two productions at the old Cafe Voltaire basement theatre: Judgment, starring Larry Neumann Jr. as a World War II soldier confessing to cannibalism, and Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, in directors Michael Barto and Peter Cieply’s hauntingly dreamlike rendition.

2000s: Gary Griffin’s stripped-down stagings of My Fair Lady (Court Theatre at Chicago Center for Performing Arts) and A Little Night Music (Chicago Shakespeare Theater); Antigone (Greasy Joan & Company at Storefront Theatre); director Kate Whoriskey’s magic-realist rendition of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (Goodman); Mark Nutter’s wacky musical Le Comedie du Bicyclette (ImprovOlympic); and three one-man shows: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife starring Jefferson Mays at the Goodman, The Mystery of Charles Dickens starring Simon Callow at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays at the Cadillac Palace.

Straight plays and musicals, ensemble pieces and solo shows. What are their common ingredients? All these shows were rooted in poetry—whether the eloquent movement of Marceau, Dylan Thomas’ lyrical verse, or the songs of Bernstein and Sondheim or Lerner and Loewe. These shows combined contradictory elements: minimalism and extravagance; humor and pathos; whimsy and rationality; spontaneity and calculation; respect for tradition and irreverent innovation; raw passion and well-honed technique. (The last quality is in too short supply. The reason there’s more theatre than dance in Chicago is if young dancers launched their careers with the same level of technique most young actors possess, they’d break their necks the first time on stage.)

Most important, these productions celebrated the liveness of theatre—that unique experience of 3, 30, 300, or 3,000 people sharing the same space in a certain period of time, breathing the same air and processing the same material. Good theatre is like life—immediate and ephemeral.

I’m struck by how many artists on my list have relocated to Hollywood or New York, trading the hard, low-paying job of being “the same yet different” night after night on a local stage for the fame and fortune of TV (whose top-rated shows are packed with the presence of Chicago-bred stars). I’m also struck by how the “young turks” who built Chicago theatre have grayed—or, worse, died. The experiences I recalled above will never, ever be repeated. New generations of artists will have to create their own good theatre.

Albert Williams writes on theater, film, and music for the Chicago Reader, where he also assigns theatre reviews and oversees the theatre listings. He has also written for the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Entertainment Weekly and many other publications. He is the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism as well as two Peter Lisagor Awards for his arts journalism. Formerly active as a performer and writer in off-Loop and off-Broadway theatre, he is a faculty member at the Theater Department of Columbia College Chicago.

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