CHICAGO, IL.- The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.

While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.

Based on John Berendt’s bestselling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Georgia, the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.

Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.

Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then director Rob Ashford and choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.

The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).

The juxtaposition of those two strains is not always smooth, especially since Brown’s jazz-inflected score is closer to his lesser one for “Honeymoon in Vegas” than to his superb one for “The Bridges of Madison County.” Yet the show is as intriguing as it is unwieldy and so close to working.

The audience also factors into “The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale,” which is at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through Sept. 1. Anticipating active cosplay, the visitors’ guide specifies that “although Hobbits don’t wear shoes, we ask that all our patrons do!” (The show’s hobbits actually wear sandals.) While I did not see much audience costuming besides the occasional cape and elf ears, Paul Hart’s production does use the auditorium’s nooks and crannies to immerse theatergoers into the plot.

While Peter Jackson needed three very long movies to tell J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga, here book writers Shaun McKenna and Matthew Warchus have just a little over three hours, so naturally there is a lot of pruning. This makes the story tough to follow if you aren’t already familiar with it, but the audience could fill in the blanks. (A shoutout to Tom Bombadil was greeted with a hearty laugh.)

The musical’s first iteration premiered in 2006 in Toronto (“very expensive, largely incomprehensible,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times) and moved to the West End in 2007. It was retooled last year for the small Watermill Theater, in Berkshire, England, and it’s a version of that production that’s now in Chicago.

As it turned out, going small and allusive was the way to tackle Tolkien’s enormous canvas, since you can’t render those large-scale episodes onstage anyway. Generally the action scenes and even the musical numbers — which are driven (or not) by the folk-inflected score by A.R. Rahman, Värttinä and Christopher Nightingale — are less effective than when the show simply lets the main characters interact with one another. Spencer Davis Milford, for example, is an affecting Frodo Baggins, and Tony Bozzuto gives an impressively athletic performance as Gollum, appropriately toggling between creepy and darkly funny.

This also applied to the design. The best part of Simon Kenny’s set is a relatively simple design that, aided by Rory Beaton’s lighting and George Reeve’s projections, can go from looking like a wood knot to the Eye of Sauron to an evocation of the erupting Mount Doom.

Audience expectations of a very different sort were swirling at Steppenwolf Theater: At long last, Laurie Metcalf, a local hero, was back. Would her connection to her old stamping grounds still be there?

The new play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” running through Sunday, centers on two main characters, but Metcalf alone is on the poster. It’s easy to understand why: After a 14-year absence, she has returned to the influential company whose ensemble she joined in 1976.

Metcalf is considered one of the brightest lights of the American stage, and she is, indeed, extraordinary as the gruff Sarah, a nurse who is reunited with her equally gruff nephew, Ethan (Micah Stock, a Tony nominee in 2015 for “It’s Only a Play”). The actress and her character are so intimately connected that it is impossible to detect any seams. If Sarah feels tailor-made for Metcalf it’s because she was: After the actress and director Joe Mantello, a longtime collaborator, expressed interest in doing a show together in Chicago, Steppenwolf commissioned Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale,” “Greater Clements”) to write one. It’s a wonderful throwback to the days of custom writing for a star, though in this case Hunter has created much more than a mere vehicle.

Like most of his stories, “Little Bear Ridge Road” is set in a hardscrabble small town in Idaho. Ethan left, only to flounder in Seattle and be drawn back to sell his late father’s house. His and Sarah’s brusque, often impatient tone barely conceals their mutual affection. Metcalf and Stock are especially good at drawing laughs from lines whose sting hits with the tiniest of delays. “All this time you’ve thought I had an issue with you being gay?” Sarah tells Ethan. “That’s the most interesting thing about you.”

The show has too many riches to explore in this space, so let’s just say that some of the funniest scenes involve the characters bonding over the TV shows they watch together. Delighting in those moments, I realized how little theater deals with our relationship with television. Hunter exposes how we comb through TV’s fabricated stories (and “reality”) to avoid directly bringing up what we actually go through. But he also underlines how that process can help us express what’s on our mind. In any case, “Little Bear Ridge Road” is an emotionally potent reminder that we are not passive audiences.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.