As a director, author, actor, and educator, Frank Galati has been a prominent American artist since the 1980s and continues to create new and innovative work for the theatre. The focus of this book is the remarkable Chicago years, between 1969 and 1996, in which Galati's values and commitments were embraced and enhanced by the new theatre that emerged in his home town-a style he helped shape even as he was shaped by it. By 1990, the city was widely perceived as ground zero for the next generation of significant innovation in American theatre. There were a great many iterations of the Chicago style in those years, but Frank Galati's theatrical inclinations, ensemble strategies, and brilliant showmanship touched them all. As this study explores, his reach extended well beyond the professional stage.

Featuring exclusive interviews with Galati, selections from his unpublished notes and speeches, the observations of colleagues on his rehearsal process, and in-depth case studies of productions written, conceived, and directed by Galati, including The Grapes of Wrath (1988–90), The Winter's Tale (1990), and The Glass Menagerie (1994), this work offers theatre historians, patrons, scholars, and students a unique source of primary information about a pivotal figure in a significant era of American theatre.