Based on one audience suggestion (a title for a play that has yet to be written) The Improvised Shakespeare Co. creates a fully improvised play in Elizabethan style.  Each of the players has brushed up on his "thee's" and "thou's" to bring you an evening of off-the-cuff comedy using the language and themes of William Shakespeare.  Any hour could be filled with power struggles, star-crossed lovers, sprites, kings, queens, princesses, sword-play, rhyming couplets, asides, insults, persons in disguise and all that we've come to expect from the pen of the Great Bard.  The night could reveal a tragedy, comedy, or history.  Nothing is planned-out.  Each play is completely improvised, so each play is entirely new!

Directed by Blaine Swen and Produced by Don Moore.

When:  Saturday May, 13, 7:30 PM

Where:  The Mendelssohn Club

Tickets:  $15 general admission; $10 for students

Tickets may be purchased in advance at the Rockford Area Arts Council 815 963-6765 or at the door the night of the performance.

The Improvised Shakespeare Company

Fully Improvised Plays Using the Language and Themes of William Shakespeare

RECENT PRESS

The Chicago Reader

"Critics Choice" - March 31, 2006

"Seven strapping men in swashbuckler shirts improvise a two-act Shakespearean play based on a title suggested by the audience.  At the show I saw, 'The Taming of the Jew' inspired the Bard's usual themes (religion, family, betrayal) and plot devices (murders, disguises, fortunes gained/lost) as well as an uncomfortably funny circumcision.  Director-performer Blaine Swen, a veteran of long-form Shakespearean improv who swears they don't conspire during the intermission, has assembled a vigorous ensemble of actors and proven improvisers.  Their experience doing Shakespeare flowers in the language: they relish iambic dialogue, execute perfectly timed asides, occasionally utter rhyming couplets (some hilariously forced: "Let us be quick-sa, and get to the bar mitzvah!), and drop parodic phrases ("scurvenous knave," "midfortnight report") and well-placed anachronisms (the bar mitzvah had a DJ).  Even the ending echoed the real plays: story lines resolved tidily-and uproariously." -Ryan Hubbard

The Chicago Tribune

March, 2006

"...Armed with enough Elizabethan nays, thys and morrows to choke a fishmonger, the cast arrives in matching peasant shirts and chinos rolled to the knee to simulate the look of 17th Century pantaloons. Their British accents range from plummy to Cockney.

A one-word suggestion from the audience sends the actors off to devise a completely ad-libbed play that incorporates "the language and themes of William Shakespeare." As with all improv, each night begets an entirely different result. On the night I attended, the story centered on a Viking invasion of England.

Perhaps inevitably, the show channels Monty Python as often as the Bard, and frequently with sly-witted results. Combine pomposity and silliness and the laughs are sure to follow&

...All the world's an improviser's stage." --Nina Metz