As I re-view the 200 or so shows I saw this year, the bad ones, as usual, spring to mind sooner than the good ones, maybe because there are almost always twice as many turkeys as swans. Unlike past seasons, 2004’s triumphs had something in common besides their inherent excellence—sheer intimacy. As usual, Chicago’s all-purpose, multi-faceted, free-ranging make-believe defies trend spotting or king making.

Developments that I thought would surface—like more political plays because it was an election year—didn’t materialize, though a few anti-Bush shows like Tom Mula’s marvelous W! proclaimed the true blueness of Chicago. One trend continues—the comparatively rapid revival of recent shows, like Serendipity’s Being 11 and TimeLine’s Hannah and Martin, perhaps a sign of theatres seeking an economic security to match their artistic success. And, more shows than I care to mention returned to the past to explain the present or to fear the future. (Interestingly, two were by Orwell, Bailiwick’s Animal Farm and Lookingglass 1984. You could add Defiant Theatre’s swan song A Clockwork Orange.)

One ugly trait seemed more muted—the insecurity of opening nights. Maybe I’m mellowing, but the claques appeared less manic in their insincere and insistent laughter, obligatory applause during scene changes, and knee-jerk standing ovations. Maybe they’re finally tired of their act within the acts. Whatever the cause, the result is welcome.

My 10 selections may not have been the best (“best” means so many things, it ends up meaning nothing). But they certainly stood for the creativity and drive that lifted many others. The strongest stuff seemed to be the most, well, devoted. These productions more than met you half-way, like Victory Gardens’ Trying, in which a famous statesman and his amanuensis created an entire world, including a fully felt past and present, out of a cluttered study. Likewise, Steppenwolf’s The Fall to Earth enlarged an ordinary hotel room into a battleground between a monumentally miserable mother (memorably played by Rondi Reed) and the unseen gay son who paid dearly for her neuroses.

Those stunners were intimate in numbers as well as feeling. But an inspired ensemble can be equally intense. TimeLine Theatre made that abundantly clear with its superbly felt and deeply drawn Hannah and Martin and This Happy Breed, a domestic epic so perfectly conceived you felt you were eavesdropping on a story that HAD to be performed whether there was an audience or not. Unlike Steppenwolf’s phony, cluttered, unfocused and meretricious Our Lady of 121st Street, I Never Sang For My Father and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune were marvels of concentration. In return for our attention, they returned to us memories almost as vivid as our own.

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine many more moments in real life when we’re less engaged than when we’re sucked into a strong show, then released with compound interest. Bailiwick’s magnificent musical Parade used a solid score to reenact an ugly hate crime that summed up a community; we’re defined, it implied, by what we will or won’t do in extremis, which is just how we find out what courage or cowardice we’re capable of.

An even more twisted community teemed in Porchlight Music Theatre’s Sweeney Todd, no mere revival but an attempt to recreate a nightmare from the inside out.

Then there are the shows that seem re-felt from start to finish, offered up as if there was no precedent for their discoveries. Such revelations are even more wonderful when the source is as deceptively familiar as King Lear, happily not so familiar when Vitalist Theatre reinvented the ultimate dysfunctional clan. Famous people can become newly familiar too: Thanks to Hershey Felder’s electric portrayal at the Royal George, George Gershwin instantly became our new best friend.

Far from a definitive hit parade, these 10 shows are happily typical of vintage Chicago stagecraft; the fine fare you get when a controlling vision—the playwright’s inspiration melded to the director’s ingenuity, the actors’ resourcefulness and the designers’ expertise—leave nothing to chance or even to the imagination. (Theatre is not radio, after all.) These were shows that they HAD to do—and not for the wrong reasons of funding calculations, resume enhancement, audience demographics, press coverage, novelty for its own sake, or because they were dared to do it. Call it the thrill of the known: A theatre senses that a script can bring out the best in everyone involved and works to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know it when you see it. The trick is to recognize it six weeks before.

Finally, there were two distressing developments involving critics, one publicized, one not. I won’t add much more to the Tom Williams scandal, other than to add that his plagiarism, however off-limits, was also a weird part of a love of the theatre that got the worst of him. Williams, I think, wanted his soon-to-be-sold website to be so complete that, well, he completed it the wrong way. He’ll soon retire from the trade, leaving it to the rest of us uncredentialed critics to prove our merit deadline by deadline.

The lesser known scandal is equally regrettable. Contrary to established journalistic practice, Windy City Times (one of whose critics helped to expose Tom Williams) directly markets an annual theatre series before the season has even begun. In effect the theatre, including the theatre editor and the sales staff, decide months in advance just what the hot shows will be for gay and lesbian audiences. Then they peddle tickets and receive ads for productions that, of course, the paper will eventually have to review. (They could recuse themselves from covering them, but then they’d deprive their readers of necessary opinions. It’s a no-win situation.) Whether in appearance or reality, it’s an “advertorial” conflict of interest you can drive a truck through. As vice-chair of the ethics committee of the American Theater Critics Association, I’ve registered a complaint. The problem is as blatant as any prohibition against plagiarism: you don’t profit from shows you review.

Lawrence Bommer is theatre editor for Chicago Free Press, a theatre columnist for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago contributor to Plays International, and a regular arts writer for Chicago Footlights.

2004 YEAR-IN-REVIEW

Headlines-In-Review

Trends in Chicago Theatre in 2004

Annual Report: A Healthy Year in Chicago Theatre

Proletariat Theatre: 2004

2004 Theatre Season Gets a B

A Year of Scattershot Splendor

The Literature of the Stage

Five Reasons to be Optimistic and a Couple, Three More Not to Be