1992
1994 
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 1993 goes to Shakespeare Repertory's King Lear. Exceptionally staged, with focus on the bleak suffering of the common people of the kingdom and highlighted by the transforming Lear's strobe-lit, amplified raging on the heath.
The Best Director award for 1993 goes to Barbara Gaines for Shakespeare Repertory's love-at-first-sight The Taming of the Shrew, narrowly besting her own work in King Lear. Gaines showcases the wonderful intellectual battle of wills and wits via adroit splashes of color and comedy and with the theatrical energy of a carnival.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 1993 goes to Katherine Thatcher as Kate in Shakespeare Repertory's The Taming of the Shrew. Thatcher's picture-perfect heroine shrew is blazing, smart and beautiful, mature enough to combine strong intelligence with a fiery spirit and young enough to be very attractive with flashing eyes and long auburn hair.
The Best Actor award for 1993 goes to Richard Kneeland for his title role in Shakespeare Repertory's King Lear. Kneeland depicts a gamut of emotions from haughty pride and violent fury to shocked dismay and insane raving, finally emerging tragically too late as a loving father and a humble man.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 1993 goes to Kevin Gudahl as Edgar in Shakespeare Repertory's King Lear. From an easily fooled dupe to wild-haired, half-naked madman, scuttling across the splintered stage like an insect, Gudahl's Edgar parallels the title character but emerges solemnly as a soft-spoken champion and future leader of England.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 1993 goes to Margo Buchanan as the empathetic chorus Gower, a 14th-century poet in Pericles at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Buchanan's Gower speaks her role while signing to the audience in the traditional sense, for the most part spot lit alone onstage, at times moving to center stage with the other characters frozen in place, or following the characters' movements across the stage.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 1993 goes to Michael Philippi for Shakespeare Repertory's King Lear. A flat, barren stage represents the political England during the time of Lear, but a large section of flooring sinks unevenly lower than the rest, and more sections of the stage gradually give way until the set is splintered in ingenious metaphors for the hazardous countryside and the fragmented political condition of England, as well as for Lear's fractured state of mind.
The Best Costume Design award for 1993 goes to Nan Zabriskie for Shakespeare Repertory's The Taming of the Shrew. Gorgeous costumes on loan from the National Theatre of Great Britain include beautifully jeweled and embroidered gowns and tunics of velvet and brocade.
The Best Lighting Design award for 1993 goes to J. William Ruyle for Pericles at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Striking designs bolster an imaginative and moving production, including the memorable image of deaf performer Peter Cook in the title role, trembling on his knees before his daughter's tombstone: the "grave" is a spotlight in a stage-trap that intensely whitens the features of the grief-stricken Pericles and casts his enormous shadow against a white backdrop upstage.
The Best Sound and Music Design award for 1993 goes to Rick Peeples for A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Sound effects contribute to the jungle-forest atmosphere with reverberating drumbeats and scattered animal noises, and the fairies make owl calls and high-pitched chirping noises much like crickets, before Puck blows a shrill whistle to signal the concluding launch of a barrage of fireworks that bursts into the sky from behind the stage.