Chicago is a play of vivid stage imagery, slippery symbols and an unbridled indulgence of imagination. It possesses the barest outline of recognizable reality…. [I] think Mr. Shepard intends by it only to lend a minimal credibility to his stage action. The hero, for example, spends all but the final moments of the play in a bathtub, but I don't think the device is meant to do more than locate him and render his existence recognizable…. The tub and the hero in it are stage images, vivid and forceful, and Mr. Shepard gives no indication of wanting them to stand for specific ideas.

Chicago, however, is not without intellectual content, consisting in the interaction between the hero and several acquaintances who wander past his tub and in a long mockheroic monologue—a quite extraordinary evocation of carnal picnicking on the beach that midway along assumes a life of...