Year-end superlatives are a bogus endeavor. Unless you’ve seen every last one of the roughly 200-plus productions that graced Chicago stages in 2018, you can’t credibly decree which were the absolute best. And even if you did see every last show, comparing multimillion dollar musicals with cash-strapped off-Loop dramas is a ridiculous exercise in apples and oranges.
The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Volume 2, Hell in a Handbag Productions Let it stand as a testament to the kind of year this was, what sort of swill we had to wade through just to get out from under it, what kind of singleness of purpose it took just to let our hair down for one night and have fun even, that the show I recommended most to people in 2018 was a fake episode of The Golden Girls in an attic in Andersonville. —Max Maller
The Safe House, City Lit Theatre Kristine Thatcher, a graceful writer with a fine ear for dialogue and a gift for subtle character development, premiered her heartfelt memory play about a steely but aging grandmother and her troubled daughter at City Lit Theatre in November. At once funny and moving, this bittersweet work looked the world straight in the eye, revealing in its too brief time on stage the terrible beauty and paradox of living, that life is at once painful and wonderful, terrifying and amazing, awful and too short. —Jack Helbig
