“What is the city but the people?” Performing Coriolanus with Chicago’s Back Room Shakespeare Project

I played Cominius in Coriolanus with the Back Room Shakespeare Project last week, in a one-night only performance at the Hideout Inn, a Chicago tavern. Co-founded in 2011 by Samuel Taylor and Kelley Ristow, Back Room Shakes was born from a belief that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed in livelier and more interactive spaces than the formal modern theaters in which they’re frequently produced, and because in Shakespeare’s day there was no person we’d recognize as a director in charge, Project productions should be entirely actor-driven. (Hence their motto: “Serious actors. No director. One rehearsal. In a bar.”) I played two small roles in The Merchant of Venice with them in 2015, but playing a larger role this time allowed me to more fully appreciate how the unique relationship between actor and audience in a Project performance enhances the power of Shakespeare’s work.

Less of a company and more of a collective, the Back Room Shakespeare Project is, as it says on their website, “most essentially a culture and a set of ideas run chaotically by a large group of people: partners for the big stuff, stakeholders for the fun stuff.” This production of Coriolanus was put together by stakeholder Gage Wallace, who played Menenius, and actor Sam Pearson, who cut almost two-thirds out of Shakespeare’s script and also played the title role. As they explained on my Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast, they sent out emails to hundreds of actors who’ve performed with the Project over its 14-year history, as well as new folks who had submitted their names and emails. Sam and Gage chose a cast that balanced people who’d never played with the Project before with, as Gage likes to call them, “heavy hitters” who understand the Project’s methods of making every performance “clear, concise, and fun.”

The “one rehearsal” in the Project’s motto is a slight exaggeration, as we met in early May for a read-through of Sam’s edited script and a discussion of the six values that guide every Back Room Shakes performance: Clarity (make the text audible and clear), Authenticity (use your own voice, not some phony Shakespearean patois), Actuality (react to what is actually happening in the room), Courage (take the stage boldly), Generosity (serve the play, the audience, and your fellow actors), and Velocity (move forward at the speed of thought and earn your pauses). At the time, I argued that the most important of these values, for me, and the one from which all others derive, is Generosity, a technique also practiced by improvisers who embrace the goal of making their partners look good. But this process made me realize that the Project’s chief value is actually Actuality—embracing with both arms and all your heart the reality and truth of the moment in which you’re performing.

Project co-founder Samuel Taylor (pictured with Austin at Coriolanus) calls this “Shakespeare’s Actualist aesthetic.” He describes it passionately in My Life with the Shakespeare Cult, a book I’ve written about, interviewed Taylor about, and re-read multiple times. But it wasn’t until Coriolanus that I fully understood his point. Using the example of the Chorus’s opening speech in Henry V, Taylor argues that Shakespeare asks his “audience directly and in no uncertain terms to participate as theatrical partners in creation: not to suspend disbelief, but to create belief.” He clarifies:

In our case with Coriolanus, the living, breathing Actuality was the blurred truth of over a hundred people crammed into the Hideout’s back room, with actors physically and emotionally navigating an audience who, in addition to spectators, became at various times accomplices, confidants, and a mob that had to be shouted down. The audience, a mix of longtime attendees and first-timers (just like the cast), were encouraged to participate vocally in the evening’s performance by a series of pre-show exhortations, toasts, and “bear-baiting,” in which volunteers play a round of blind-man’s buff. The actors had had a single rehearsal in a different, much larger space, which gave us some idea of what the overall narrative felt like on its feet, but in no way prepared us for the heat and energy of the crowd in that smaller, cramped room on the night of the performance.

Catherine Reedy, professor of English at Lake Forest College, told me that Coriolanus was her first experience seeing the Back Room Shakespeare Project, and its “fully immersive” style deepened her understanding of Shakespeare’s play. “The dynamic of being blended in with the actors scurrying past you, and watching the crowd respond in real time while you’re responding with them,” put her in “a very interesting position.” On the one hand, she was enjoying “being caught up by the fun of being part of the crowd” in “Shakespeare’s exploration of mass psychology;” on the other, seeing how easy it was to get swept up by the force of Shakespeare’s words spoken passionately by actors in such close proximity, she realized she was “going along with the mob” in a not-altogether agreeable way. “The relaxed boundary between performer and spectator creates greater engagement for the audience,” she concluded, something that’s equally true for the actors.

Courtney Abbott, a Chicago stakeholder with over 20 Back Room Shakespeare productions under their belt, echoes the value of the audience to the actor. “It would be a shame to ignore all that vibrant unpredictable human material,” they told me in an email, “and talking over their heads to an imaginary point in the distance dismisses their immediate accountability and opportunity to emotionally engage.” Courtney played Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia, and in the previous two Project productions played both Julius Caesar and Lady Macbeth, in which actors actually “chose to assign lines to audience members,” making them citizens, apparitions, and even Birnam Wood itself (where various folks held up pieces of paper with words like tree, branch, and stick written on them). “This is definitely a quirk made available to us by the Project’s format,” Courtney explains, “and a surefire way to reinforce the utter lack of a fourth wall.”

Gregory Linington played Coriolanus’s nemesis Aufidius and, as a veteran of twelve seasons at Oregon Shakespeare Festival who’s done several Project productions, finds “the Back Room process to be at once terrifying and inspiring” and “an immense confidence-builder.” As he tells it, Shakespeare’s words, the other actors, and the audience are “your only tools” to tell the story, “without any of the creature comforts we’re used to” like sets, costumes, lighting, sound effects, or a director’s vision. He explains:

I’ve  written before how the most electric moments in a play are occasionally when something happens you can tell is unrehearsed; well, this happens constantly in a Back Room Shakespeare performance, and it’s as exciting for the actors as it is for the audience. We’re calibrating our performance in real time, responding to a scene partner’s new energy (so different than it was in our one rehearsal!); apologizing to that guy in the front row whose foot you kicked on your entrance; discovering that one character isn’t exiting like you thought he would, so now you have to incorporate his presence into your delivery; or discovering all the other actors have exited, so now you must modify your intention because you’re saying your final couplet to the audience. You can never recapture this exhilarating improvisational energy on a second night—another reason why these one-off Project performances are so special.

This grim-visaged warrior actually got a few laughs in last Monday's CORIOLANUS by the Back Room Shakespeare Project, cut to a fleet & fierce 85 minutes by Sam Pearson (bloody C himself) and performed in Chicago's tiny Hideout tavern. #TheFaultDearBrutusIsNotInOurBars

— Austin Tichenor (@austintichenor.bsky.social) 2025-06-22T15:35:09.469Z

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is famous for abridging Shakespeare for comic and satiric purposes, but I would argue (and have) that abridging Shakespeare also heightens his dramatic power by focusing the narrative and accelerating the play’s momentum. (In the case of Coriolanus, Robert Falls, the Tony-winning former artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, agrees with me, saying on Bluesky that “85 minutes is a *perfect* length for that terrific fierce play.”) It’s always a privilege to speak Shakespeare’s words, in any context, but it was particularly rewarding performing this play on that night in front of that audience in the incredibly close confines of the Hideout Inn. Samuel Taylor says, “Producing Shakespeare’s plays as social events, not merely entertainment events, has been so damn meaningful to so many people.” The proof is in the Project’s growing popularity. Performances are free but seating is first-come, first-served, so people line up hours before the show begins, and on the same night we performed Coriolanus in Chicago, two other branches of the Project also performed: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in New York and Richard II in Los Angeles. To paraphrase the Roman tribune Sicinius, what is the Back Room Shakespeare Project but the people—audiences and actors alike —sharing space and creating theatrical magic together.