CHICAGO — The CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” ended seven years ago, last May. Where, an enquiring mind might wonder, has Johnny Galecki, who played the experimental physicist Leonard Leakey Hofstadter on the show, been since then?

The answer? Living quietly on a farm in Tennessee with his wife and two children. Plus assorted cows and chickens.

“It was very puzzling to me that I didn’t miss working for so long,” Galecki says, a tad cryptically, late on a recent Friday night in Chicago. “Because I hated all the hiatus weeks from the show. So it was very strange to me that I did not feel frustrated.”

Pushed for more clarity, he says, “I still loved the work, but the machinery around the work had come to eclipse it. And I think I was afraid to return to a perspective on life that was unhappy for me. After I got married and had two children, I learned what I wanted to avoid. So I have just been observing life for seven years. You could say I’ve been staring into the wood grain of life. And it became really hard to leave the farm.”

Galecki, 51, certainly had plenty of time to observe the machinery of television. He played David Healy on “Roseanne” between 1992 and 1997 and on Seasons 1 and 2 of “The Connors” in 2018 and 2019. Between the two, there were a bunch of movies and other TV shows and some stage work in New York. But it was “Big Bang Theory” that really made Galecki’s financial and creative ship come in; the sitcom — essentially a bunch of nerds talking about interesting stuff — was a long-lived hit, running for 12 seasons and 279 episodes, arguably the last of its kind when it came to the old dominance of network television and the synchronous viewing habits it spawned.

But this month, Galecki has put his toe back into the waters in Chicago by way of a play called “Kowalski,” wherein he plays Tennessee Williams, a character who is a far cry from Leonard Leakey Hofstadter, but who has proved to be a remarkably good match for Galecki.

It is a return to his Chicago theater roots. Galecki grew up in suburban Oak Park, and his history in Chicago theater goes all the way back to his 1985 appearance in director Ann Fournier’s production of “The Member of the Wedding” at Stage Left Theatre, then located in Wrigleyville. He played John Henry and made quite the impact.

“Tiny, 10-year-old Galecki is already a master scene stealer,” former Tribune critic Sid Smith wrote. “His line reading isn’t perfected yet, but his quicksilver movements and vivid facial expressiveness are worth a thousand lines. And when he dons Berenice’s hat and high heels and struts around the kitchen like a peacock in full feather, he is a little comedian with a real future.”

A prescient review, indeed. “My family viewed my theater work back then as a childhood interest,” Galecki says. “They saw me as doing that in much the same way as my brother played hockey.”

But it stuck.

“I didn’t find any other place to fit,” he says.

Returning from an early departure for Los Angeles, the adult Galecki went on to appear in both “Pot Mom” with Laurie Metcalf and Rondi Reed at Steppenwolf Theatre in 1998 and “The Drawer Boy,” with Frank Galati and John Mahoney at Steppenwolf in 2001, credits that light up his face.

“I grew up here,” Galecki says. “Working at Steppenwolf was a bucket list thing for me.”

But Hollywood sitcoms became his bread and butter, although they’ve also now freed and empowered Galecki to do only what he wants.

In “Kowalski,” which imagines what happened when Williams first met the actor Marlon Brando, he brings his decades of sitcom-honed timing when it comes to the one-liners, but he is also not shying away from playing a larger-than-life character who anyone can watch talk on YouTube. He also decided to enter a production that already had a history. “Kowalski,” which is written by Gregg Ostrin and directed by Colin Hanlon, played off-Broadway in 2025. The addition of Galecki, a bonafide star name, to its cast in the most important role logically can be read as preparation for a Broadway run.

“Tennessee operated with a multitude of layers at all given times,” Galecki says, referencing the revelations found in Studs Terkel’s famous interviews with the writer, conducted in Chicago in 1961, when Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana” was playing at the Blackstone Theatre. “He was both very fragile and ruthless. He was very suspicious of endings in general and also of any tidiness, which is why he has been labeled as a disrupter. So I felt like I owed him that same complexity. I mean, we all are full of contradictions.”

Galecki has left the cows and the chickens in Tennessee and brought his young family to Chicago. “This is an experiment for me to see if I love doing this,” he says. “Chicago was the right place for it because it is where I first fell in love with acting. So I am treating this work like this is my first gig and possibly my last.”

If you go

“Kowalski” continues through Oct. 25 at Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works, 163 E. Pearson St.; 312-595-5600 and lookingglasstheatre.org

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