Chicago’s Goodman Theatre announced Monday that Susan V. Booth, a former Goodman literary manager and currently the artistic director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, will be the new artistic director of Chicago’s most prestigious theater company.

Booth, 59, will replace Robert Falls, who announced in September that he was stepping down after 35 years in the job.

Booth, who is directing the season opener at the Alliance, will take over at the Goodman at the beginning of October, although she said she has already begun speaking with Goodman staffers in preparation for her new role.

“There is so much to figure out,” Booth said in a phone interview Monday. “This is a time of seismic change, both in Chicago and in the American theater as a whole. That’s actually a widely appealing time to step into new leadership. Past practice is not prescriptive.”

That said, Booth is as close to an internal hire as the Goodman could have made without actually making one.

She has remained close to Goodman staffers, and other arts leaders in Chicago, during her roughly two decades in Atlanta.

Even in 2001, with Falls firmly entrenched at the Goodman, her departure after eight years at the theater was seen as a smart and strategic decision to get more experience in running a major institution and change her personal branding from literary manager to artistic director, even possibly returning someday.

Demonstrably, that trajectory played out, boosted by Booth’s very successful and audience-friendly tenure at the Alliance, where she became known for producing a lot of pre-Broadway tryouts (including “The Prom,” “Bring It On” and “Tuck Everlasting”) while also promoting greater visibility for local playwrights.

During her years in Chicago, Booth was the first Goodman point of contact for playwright Rebecca Gilman, who went on to produce most of her works at the theater. She also worked extensively with Regina Taylor, still part of the artistic collective, and was known as a champion of quality new work.

For the Goodman board, well aware of the fiscal challenges facing major regional theaters in the prolonged pandemic recovery, Booth surely represented a desire to find an artistic leader who also had direct experience steering a large and sometimes contentious institution. Booth’s hiring is quite different from the tack a previous Goodman board took in 1985 when it took a risk on hiring the maverick 33-year-old artistic director of a small, Chicago-style theater called Wisdom Bridge. Falls had rave reviews in his pocket from this newspaper and elsewhere for his artistic work, but had no experience whatsoever running a major arts institution.

Similar candidates, sources said, were in the diverse pool this time around.

But as well as that bet worked out for the Goodman with Falls, Booth is much more of a sure thing.

“The Goodman has a long tradition of artistic excellence and maintaining that was very important to us,” said board chair Jeff Hesse, who headed up the process with Goodman President Maria Wynne. “Susan brings experience in Chicago early in her career and now also a long history of community engagement and outreach in two very diverse cities.”

Hesse said the committee had decided Booth was “someone who’d really engage our community at a challenging time.”

“Once we got to know her,” said Wynne. “Susan quickly became the number-one candidate.”

For her part Booth (who was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up in Canton) said there were very few jobs in the American theater that would have tempted her to leave Atlanta, but that this was the top of her very short list.

Part of the appeal, she said, is being part again of a major theater center where no one theater quite dominates, as is the case in Atlanta. “Being part of this community again delights me more than I can say,” she said.

As one might expect, Booth generally demurred when it came to offering specific plans for her upcoming role, saying “I need to know what Chicago wants and expects from its flagship theater.” She spoke similarly about how she might work with the artistic collective of directors and writers that Falls created. But she said she already knows their value.

“I need to find out what the members of the artistic collective want their relationship to the Goodman to be,” she said. “But you’d be an idiot to walk into this place and not appreciate the value of artists like Mary Zimmerman and Henry Godinez. They’re part of a group of rock stars.”

Booth is married to the popular former Goodman technical director Max Leventhal who, she says, successfully proposed marriage at Booth’s going away party from the Goodman in 2001, left with her for Atlanta and now returns to Chicago.

“Max says he enjoys leading a life of leisure,” Booth said, dryly. “We’ll see how long that lasts.”

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com