The Improvised Shakespeare Company

What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that’s never been written—and will never be performed again? For more than two decades, The Improvised Shakespeare Company has performed entirely unscripted plays in the style of Shakespeare. Founded in 2005, the long-running ensemble has built a devoted following through performances in Chicago and Los Angeles and tours across the US and internationally.

Blaine Swen, the company’s founder, and company member Ross Bryant share how their performances take shape in real time, beginning with a single audience-suggested title that unfolds into a full-length play that will never be repeated.

Drawing on techniques from long-form improvisation and a deep familiarity with Shakespeare’s language, structure, and themes, the ensemble creates stories that balance poetry, comedy, spontaneity, and lots of fun. Bryant and Swen explore the mechanics of their process—how they listen, build on each other’s ideas, and embrace mistakes as opportunities, showing why committing fully to the moment often leads to the most surprising and meaningful results. They also reflect on what makes Shakespeare particularly well-suited to improv, from his larger-than-life characters and emotional intensity to the flexibility of his language and cultural references.

>> Learn more about The Improvised Shakespeare Company and find a performance

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 6, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Paola García Acuña. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Ross Bryant is a writer/performer from North Carolina. Ross is a performer on Dropout.tv and can be seen regularly at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater in Los Angeles. Ross also tours the country and performs monthly at The Largo in LA with The Improvised Shakespeare Company. Ross began performing in Chicago where was a member of the resident cast of The Second City Mainstage. Ross is a writer for Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has co-written original television pilots for Pop TV, Warner Bros and the Showtime network.  TV credits include The Good Place (NBC), Crashing (HBO), and I Think You Should Leave (Netflix). Ross also the host of the horror/comedy/improv podcast Push the Roll with Ross Bryant. Instagram: @rossbb

Blaine Swen is the creator and director of The Improvised Shakespeare Company®. He is a writer/actor based in Nashville where you can catch him in the two-person improvised musical Erica & Blaine. Blaine also performs regularly in Chicago where the Chicago Reader named him the “Best Improviser in Chicago.” His iO Chicago credits include the two-person group Blessing with Susan Messing and the one-person improvised musical BASH! Additional Chicago stage credits include Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pegasus Players Theatre, The Back Room Shakespeare Project, and The Second City. He has appeared on Dropout.tv and has developed original pilots with NBC, Universal Cable Productions, and Pop TV. You can hear him as Arnor the Warrior on the podcast Hello, from the Magic Tavern. Blaine also has a PhD in philosophy from Loyola University, Chicago. Instagram: @blaine_swen

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From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[MUSIC fades]

One of the pleasures of going to a Shakespeare play is seeing a new interpretation of familiar material. The text stays more or less the same, while everything else changes from production to production.

But what if it didn’t work that way? What if each time you showed up at the theater, you got a brand-new play—never to be repeated?

That’s what you get at a performance of the Improvised Shakespeare Company: a new play, made up on the spot by expert improvisers. All they require is a title suggested by the audience, and they’re off and running.

For the past two decades, Improvised Shakespeare has performed regularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as touring internationally.

The idea to improvise an entire play in the style of William Shakespeare came to founder Blaine Swen in 2005. At the time, Swen was a Philosophy PhD student at Loyola University… and a comedy student at Chicago’s Second City. Fellow actor Ross Bryant joined the company in its early days.

Here are Blaine Swen and Ross Bryant, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

—————————–

BARBARA BOGAEV: Blaine and Ross, I’m so glad you’re here.

BLAINE SWEN: Us too. Thanks for having us, Barbara.

ROSS BRYANT: Yes, so happy to be here.

BOGAEV: I don’t know if this is an obnoxious thing to ask you straight off, but I was thinking since your shows always start with a suggested title from the audience, maybe we could start the way you start your performance, and maybe I could throw out some titles, and you could pick the least bad one—because they’re all bad—and do an opening scene. How does that sound?

SWEN: Wow, right out of the gate. Okay.

BRYANT: Wow, really putting us on the spot.

BOGAEV: Yeah, right, I hope you’re warmed up.

BRYANT: Okay, let’s give it a try.

SWEN: Sure.

BOGAEV: Okay, so how about Othellostein. Wuthering Blights. If I Had Tights, I Would Kick You. Macbethula. Henry IV, Part II, Electric Boogaloo. Orange Julius Caesar.

SWEN: Oh, my goodness, yes.

BOGAEV: This is an oldie, but a goodie from The Good Place: Tempest 2, Here We Blow Again. And then I was remembering that we had a guest on the show, a very wonderful writer, Margo Hendricks. She’s known for her endless Shakespeare puns and one of hers is, Now is the Winter of Our Disco Tent.

SWEN: Oh, wow.

BRYANT: Since that’s the one we’ve heard most recently, so that your listeners don’t think we’re just sitting here thinking, why don’t we take Now Is the Winter of Our Disco Tent.

SWEN: I think that’s a great idea, yes.

Welcome all to the first, the last, the only time The Improvised Shakespeare Company will ever present:

BRYANT AND SWEN: Now Is the Winter of Our Disco Tent.

BOGAEV: I’m getting chills.

[Laughter.]

SWEN: Here now, alas, a crown I desire upon my head,
But to obtain such a crown the king must be dead.
A king who reigns upon me like no other,
For the king who is there is now yet my brother.
And yet, if I desire to have my regal chance,
I must strike down my brother and then I can dance.

BRYANT: Most noble brother, goodly brother Richard. It is well that thou hast come to see me upon this golden and lustrous day of my coronation when I do ascend upon the golden throne with this coronet upon my head. And our entire household doth rise in all its fortunes.

Aye, indeed, for we, in noble battles, there did strive.
And I can trust that for many years, I shall be staying alive.

SWEN: Ah, ah, ah, ah, staying alive. Ha, ha, staying alive.
So, you shall be my brother, and ever you shall thrive.
Ah, yes, staying alive.

BRYANT: Yes, good times are ahead of us, most noble Richard, and this very eve, the queen and I shall make merry. We shall set our pavilion upon the verdant field, and there make light our heels in nightly reels and dancing to an irresponsible lateness.

And I do hope that thou shalt join us in these festivities, though thou art not fitted for dancing. I have not known thee to cut a caper in the past.

SWEN: And so, I have not, my brother. My body was not made for such things. You were made for higher glories than me, and I but bask in your collateral light.

BRYANT: Then in my collateral light I beg thee, thrive, for after this night, I will survive.

[Laughter.]

BOGAEV: You know, I had to bet with myself how long it would take you to say “Staying Alive”—and I lost.

[More laughter.]

BRYANT: Is that enough of a taste, Barbara?

SWEN: Yes, yes, yes.

BOGAEV: Yes, that was perfect. “I Will Survive.”

SWEN: Oh, good, oh, good. That’s great, right? Good, good, good.

BOGAEV: Oh, man. Okay, so let’s roll it back, right to the beginning.

SWEN: Okay.

BOGAEV: Blaine, how do you choose your titles? What do you look for and what do you avoid?

SWEN: Well, what I try to do is I typically take the first thing that I hear clearly. I ask for a title out of the gate. I say, “Would someone so moved or inspired shout out a title of a play that has never been written?” And people start shouting.

If people have seen us before, it’s a cacophony. If we’re in a brand-new place where we’ve never performed, sometimes there’s this beat of silence where the audience goes, “I think they really do want us to shout something.” And then somebody will sometimes even raise their hand and I’ll ask. But if people have seen it before, we get a lot of shouting at once and it’s hard to hear anything. So, I’ll take the first thing I can hear clearly.

BOGAEV: So really, if you heard “Bad Clam,” you’d just go with it?

SWEN: I would take it.

BRYANT: Absolutely.

SWEN: I would just take it. And sometimes if I can’t hear anything, somebody has a sign up and I can read their sign. Or I look for somebody who has sane eyes. I try to pick an audience member with sane eyes and I ask.

BOGAEV: Well, in LA that might be hard.

SWEN: Usually, you can find somebody. I take their title and then we’re off and running.

BOGAEV: Okay. So, you grab onto something you hear clearly. How do you then arrive at a structure and what is the scaffolding that you’re working with? Beyond 90 minutes, is it always five acts? Is it a classical structure or Shakespearean structure?

BRYANT: Yeah, we hold ourselves to a hard, Aristotelian structure.

[Laughter.]

No, no, no, not at all. There is a structure and if you see the show several times, you will see the very light scaffolding upon which the show rests.

Both Blaine and I come from the world of Chicago improv. We both took classes out there and were in that community for a very long time, and one of the classic structures of improvisation, of long form improvisation, of the type that we’ve done for a long time is something that your listeners may know of as “The Harold.”

The way that usually works in its broadest strokes is that the audience yells out a suggestion, and then the entire ensemble does some sort of opening where they sort of try to pick apart that suggestion for themes and ideas, almost like a brainstorming session. And then you see three scenes connected to those themes. Then you see a group scene where people revisit them as a whole ensemble again.

BOGAEV: So, this is evolving in the open as you listen to each other?

BRYANT: Very much so.

SWEN: Yes, for sure.

BRYANT: Absolutely. And that sort of loose structure of opening scenes, group scene, that’s as much of a structure as our show has.

BOGAEV: So, you don’t have Shakespearean plot points or beats that you’re hitting?

BRYANT: No.

SWEN: Well, not specifically.

BRYANT: Not specifically.

SWEN: We don’t plan anything except that we know that somebody is going to introduce the show with a prologue. We don’t know who it’s going to be. We know that it’s going to rhyme. We know that it’s going to be inspired by the title of the play.

BOGAEV: So, it’s the first person to have the idea?

SWEN: Yes, it’s the first person to step forward and claim it. If you come see one of our shows, you’ll see after we shout the title, there’s a blackout and you might see this unspoken negotiation between silhouettes in the dark as to who’s going to step forward and take the prologue.

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s what I thought was the huddle.

BRYANT: Yeah, there is no huddle, so to speak. What you may think is a huddle in the dark is really usually one or three of us lunging for that center spot.

SWEN: Yes, there are never any elbows to get to the prologue. People step forward, and then if three people step forward, two people will quickly pull back. For one reason or another, they’ll just yield it to someone. Then the prologue will begin, and that counts as our opening, which is usually in The Harold a brainstorm that you do inspired by the suggestion.

So, for us, the opening prologue is our way of brainstorming the suggestion in front of the audience. They’ll hear the suggestion explored through rhyming couplets. They might hear some themes. It also gives them the opportunity to acclimate their ear to the style of speaking that we’ll be doing throughout the show, because when you watch a Shakespearean play, for me, it takes 15, 20 minutes to sort of really acclimate myself to Elizabethan dialogue, and then I’m immersed more in the play. For us, I think the curve is more like 90 seconds, and we spend that 90 seconds in the prologue helping the audience to tune their ear to what they’re about to hear.

BOGAEV: So, kind of warming us all up. We heard the language that you use, but maybe you could elaborate on that because you stick with a Shakespearean language but that means more than “thou” and “doth” and “codpiece” and stuff.

SWEN: Yes.

BRYANT: Hopefully, at our best. I mean, no other improv show that I’ve ever been a part of featured vocabulary quizzes as part of its rehearsal process, except this one.

BOGAEV: Seriously?

SWEN: Yes, yes.

BRYANT: We really did study hard on what you said—at the very basics, the rules of “thou,” “thy,” “thine”—but also, really trying to expand our vocabulary to include as much of the esoteric Shakespeare vocabulary as possible. We do read and reread the plays to try to get ourselves on the wavelength of the rhythms, and the syntax, and all that, and so, yeah, we try, to the best of our ability, to imitate the grammar and the vocabulary and hopefully the lyricism of that speech—and in particular, I think that’s trying to work in as many fun and interesting similes and metaphors as possible.

SWEN: Yeah, and even, to that end, in line with studying our vocabulary, we’ve tried to explore developing metaphor by going outside of Shakespeare’s plays, reading as a group Plato’s Republic and trying to give more depths to our metaphors and lean into the poetic element that the form lends to us, as well as the comedic element that is part of it.

BOGAEV: World’s geekiest improv group.

BRYANT: Put it on the poster, Barbara. Put it on the poster.

[All laugh.]

BOGAEV: Well, Blaine, as the founder and the leader, are you also a director of sorts during the performance? I mean, do you nudge your group in certain directions? And how do you do it?

SWEN: You mean during the performance?

BOGAEV: Yes.

SWEN: That’s a good question. I think that it’s important when we play that we are all just players and the goal is to purely support whatever is on stage. That’s the key, I think.

BOGAEV: “Yes, and?”

SWEN: Yes, to successfully improv. A lot of people think when you improvise, “Oh, the key is you’ve got to really think of something funny to say. You’ve got to have a great idea of what to say.”

For us, the key is: I’ve got to empty my brain and listen and just really concentrate on what’s happening on stage and what the other person is saying because my goal is to make that person look as good as possible. That’s what I’m after. My goal is to take whatever they’re saying, treat it like it’s poetry and genius and build on it as best as I can.

BOGAEV: Wow. To empty your brain, though, you have to fill it with stuff, so you said you’re always reading the plays.

BOGAEV: Do you prepare, in a sense, that way for improv? For your kind of performances, do you dwell or think about certain themes before each show?

BRYANT: That’s a really good question and kind of emblematic of a broader question that you sometimes hear, “How do you rehearse for improv?”

BOGAEV: That actually was my question.

[Laughter.]

BRYANT: Yeah, yeah, it sounded like the question you actually asked.

[More laughter.]

I think the good comparison is, weirdly, from sports, where no basketball team plays the same game of basketball each time. They have to be reactive to each other and play to the moment of that particular game. But there’s a set of fundamental skills that a basketball team can practice to hopefully ensure that they’ll play a better game of basketball each time.

The way you rehearse for improvisation is very similar where there’s fundamental skills that we practice and dedicate ourselves to as a group so that we can, like you say, empty our mind during the show and play it as it lays. So, we do a lot of exercises that have to do with listening, and retention and memory, and loosening up, and being silly.

BOGAEV: Like what?

BRYANT: For example, we stand in a circle, and we begin going around listing Shakespearean names. It could be a name from an actual play or it could be one that could be, you know? We go all the way around the ensemble one or two times listing names, with the goal being they should be names that would be in the same kind of world of a play, right, that imply a Shakespearean setting.

So, for example, if the first person says Lysander, then the next person would probably say something like Helena or Demetrius or Pericles, rather than Duncan. The way this exercise would work is we’d go around the circle listing names until the last person declares their name and the location the play is in. So, the rhythm of it would be like: “Lysander,” “Demetrius,” “Helena,” “Pericles,” “Hippolyta,” “Sparta.”

BOGAEV: But everybody has off nights and improv is such a high-wire act. What’s an off night like for you guys? I always wondered about that. Do you pick up the slack for each other? And do you always know why it’s off?

SWEN: Well, you know, you mentioned something very interesting: Do we pick up slack for each other? I’ll say this is something that gives me so much encouragement going into our shows because I know that Ross has my back. We literally, before we go on stage, look each other in the eye, pat each other on the back, and say “I’ve got your back.”

BRYANT: Yes.

SWEN: This is a popular thing to do in improv. When Ross does that to me, I know he means it, and when we go on stage, I can play with a sort of fearlessness, even if that day, I’m off for whatever reason or I’m tired. I know that no matter what I do Ross is going to support it, and so, I can play with a sort of fearlessness and not worry about myself as much and that really frees me up in a very exciting way.

But there’s also this interesting thing that happens when I think a show is so spectacular. Sometimes I’ll think a show couldn’t have been better. You know, I can think of specific shows that seem to map a real Shakespearean play in a very interesting way. We did one that sort of mapped Twelfth Night in Denver or The Winter’s Tale (in Denver as well) and we did one in DC, I remember, that sort of mapped As You Like It. These are some of my favorites because they so genuinely reflect a real Shakespearean play. It feels like we’re firing on all cylinders and reading each other’s minds and the characters have cool depth and I think, “This is so great. This is a great play.” We’ll get done and the audience will applaud and cheer. It’ll feel like, “No, no, it’s even better.” And I would be like, “That was really good.”

But then there’s ones that we do where it’s like, “Oh my goodness, how are we going to pull this together?” We are stretching the strings of the storyline, and we are barely tying the ends together and hoping they’ll hold. We will get done and we will be pouring sweat, and the audience will leap to their feet screaming, you know, like, “This was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

BRYANT: What Blaine is describing as emblematic of something we’ve experienced where that first play that felt to us like, “Oh my God, the Muses were speaking through us. We were telepathic with each other. It felt so smooth.” And the one where we’re like, “How do we land this plane where the engine is falling off?” I think the audience kind of loves to watch the struggle. They like to see some of that math being done.

BOGAEV: They like to see you suffer.

BRYANT: Yeah, or work.

BOGAEV: Or feel the suspense.

BRYANT: Yes, yes. You kind of get two plays. There’s the play of the story that we’re telling as performers. But there’s also the play that is this sort of meta conversation of the show as we’re trying to actually tell this story. There’s the story of the story, and then the story of the improvisers trying to tell the story.

SWEN: Yes.

BRYANT: And there are shows where that meta conversation sort of overtakes the other one for a moment.

SWEN: It’s really dramatic.

BRYANT: Yeah. The audience sees us with our hammers and levers trying to force the thing into shape and I think that can be also really, really fun.

BOGAEV: I think the audience must thrive on that. It’s that “show that goes wrong” feeling.

BRYANT: Totally.

SWEN: Sure, sure, yeah.

BOGAEV: Who knew how meta this could be?

BRYANT: Some of my favorite moments from shows are moments where maybe the listening suddenly fails for a moment, or someone mishears something, or a turn of phrase slips out in a peculiar way. What’s fun in our show is we like to think of that thing you always hear that Shakespeare coined words, like, the first instance of “moonbeam” and “eyeball,” and we’re like, “Okay, great, in our show, this weird turn of phrase is just something everyone says. This thing that you accidentally stumbled into we’re really going to heighten that now and make your quote-unquote “mistake” extremely important and keep bringing it back over the course of the show.”

So, the things that might be considered mistakes or things going “wrong” quote-unquote are actually enormous gifts because they give us so much fuel to power the show.

BOGAEV: Happy accidents, as they say, wabi-sabi.

BRYANT: Exactly.

SWEN: Yeah.

BOGAEV: This is something I was thinking about beforehand. And now, as you speak, when you see Shakespeare performed straight, not improv Shakespeare, when you go to Shakespeare performances, do you see them differently than I do? Or hear them differently? Do you look for different things because you’re so attuned to improv?

BRYANT: I think I’m just trying to tune my ear. Like Blaine was saying, get that 15, 20 minutes to sink into the play and kind of acclimatize your mind to Elizabethan dialogue. I try to do that.

I’m looking for turns of phrase and interesting poetic dialogue that has not resonated with me before when I’ve read or seen the play. I just try to grab it and hold on to it. “Oh, I would love to try to bring something like that into the show.” Not as if I’m writing it in a journal to plan for later, but I just try to put it in some sort of mental back pocket to see if it could come out at an appropriate time.

BOGAEV: What’s the last play you saw?

BRYANT: I think the last play I saw was Love’s Labor’s Lost. The Shakespearean comedies are really cool. I’m always impressed and interested in how different ensembles and theater companies bring the comedies to life—and bring the comedy to life. Some of the comedic dialogue in the play still hits. It really does still resonate and is sincerely funny. And there’s some, just because of the gulfs of time that separate the topical humor of Shakespeare’s time with ours, where I think it’s extremely difficult to connect with an audience. Love’s Labor’s Lost, like the clowns in there, Holofernes and Moth and all, like some of the clownish comedy scenes in that play have a lot to do with how well the audience can recognize Latin malapropisms.

BOGAEV: Right.

BRYANT: Which is, you know—

BOGAEV: They’re right top of mind.

BRYANT: A pretty big lift for a contemporary audience.

BOGAEV: So, you need a lot of physical comedy or it’s all in the performance to bring them alive, right?

BRYANT: Exactly, exactly.

SWEN: That is something that strikes me as well when I’m watching Shakespeare: how the groundlings probably must have experienced it differently. Shakespeare’s references were so present and available right off the top of their head without having to go away and study, you know, it was just culturally available. And Shakespeare was relying on cultural touchstones of his day, making references to things that were happening, you know, right then in pop culture, or politics, or daily life.

That’s something that we, in our shows, get to take advantage of. We can make a reference to a disco song in our show that you get immediately. You don’t necessarily have to go away and research it. You get it immediately and you get the laugh from the reference. Sometimes I say Shakespeare had scripture and Shakespeare had Greek mythology, and in an Elizabethan context, people were very ready for those references. We can still reference scripture and Greek mythology, but we can also reference Beatles lyrics and Disney mythology.

BRYANT: Or Taylor Swift or whatever.

SWEN: Yes, and the audience will get it right away in the way a groundling would. So, we can get that sort of raucous energy going in our shows that I imagine Shakespeare had going with his.

BOGAEV: Well, Blaine, 20 years of this show, going on 21, right?

SWEN: Yeah.

BOGAEV: You started this troupe in 2005 in Chicago?

SWEN: Yes, that’s right.

BOGAEV: So, why an improv group and why Shakespeare?

SWEN: So, I was in Chicago in 2005. I was in grad school at Loyola University, and I was studying philosophy. I auditioned to be in the conservatory at Second City and got into the conservatory there. They had a great stage where they encouraged students to experiment, called Donny’s Skybox. I thought that would be a really fun place to put on a Shakespearean improv show. I’d had some experience doing Shakespearean improv before I moved to Chicago with different groups in California. notably a group called the Backstreet Bards, which in 1999 was very topical.

[Laughter.]

BOGAEV: Backstreet, I get it.

SWEN: And so, I thought, “Well, I can put together a group to do Shakespearean improv and lean on some of the things that I’m learning in improv classes.”

Also, I had been touring with a troupe that went into Chicago public schools and encouraged students to write plays as a creative outlet. I thought, “We can use some of these techniques for playwriting and some improv techniques and I think we can really put together something special.”

So, I started a group that we called the Improvised Shakespeare Company that was going to perform a fully improvised Shakespearean play for five shows at Donny’s Skybox, the student stage at the Second City.

BOGAEV: Were you already a big Shakespeare guy though?

SWEN: I would say I was an improv guy first. I liked Shakespeare a lot. I had performed Shakespeare. I’d been Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet in high school and really loved doing that and then performed in The Winter’s Tale in college. So, I had done some Shakespearean plays and I enjoyed watching Shakespeare. But I would describe myself more as a Monty Python guy at the time than a Shakespeare guy, and so, the show started out, at first, as more of a parody of Shakespeare. And the way that it evolved to become better was when we started to lean into the Shakespeare portion of the show more seriously. We would start to try to write a love letter to Shakespeare instead of a parody of Shakespeare, and that’s when the show really started taking off and the comedy got better.

BOGAEV: Wow, because it was richer or deeper?

SWEN: I think so.

BOGAEV: So, there’s more for you to draw on? Or you’re really tapping into essential, universal themes and ideas that the audience could relate to?

SWEN: I think all of the above. In Chicago, in our comedy training, there’s this phrase called, “truth in comedy” where instead of trying to be funny, you go for something honest. You try to be honest, you try to be true, and the comedy follows, that’s the idea. The more we tried to do something honestly Shakespearean, the harder the comedy would land, and the more we pursued the poetic side of what we were doing, the funnier the show got.

BOGAEV: How about you, Ross? How did you end up with these guys?

BRYANT: Much like Blaine, I had done a play in college. I was “Shakespeare-curious” but I was not a full Shakespeare devotee.

BOGAEV: What role had you played?

BRYANT: I had been in Hamlet, double-cast as the Gravedigger and the Player King.

BOGAEV: The Gravedigger, great part.

BRYANT: Great part.

SWEN: Yeah.

BRYANT: Yeah, very, very fun.

I think the thing that keeps coming up when we reminisce about this is that we started to just invest emotionally in the plays more, really, really lean into the character’s emotional wants, and it made the stories more rich. It made plots just happen without a lot of thinking. And the amount of emotional intensity that Shakespeare gives you license to bring to a show is one of the things that makes this so much fun for a performer and hopefully for an audience.

SWEN: Yeah.

BRYANT: Shakespeare characters don’t feel things halfway so you have license to go so hard.

BOGAEV: Well, building on that, harkening back to the beginning of our conversation and your opening scene, The Winter of Our Disco Tent, how would that plot deepen? How do you think that plot would go?

BRYANT: Gosh, yeah, it’s interesting.

SWEN: Wow, yeah

BRYANT: This is a cool question. To kind of beat out a show. So, all we know—we know that title and the first scene. We’ve got Richard, who—

BOGAEV: He wants to dance, that’s all he wants! It’s very Monty Python-esque.

BRYANT: He wants to dance and he wants the crown.

SWEN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it could go any number of ways. One thing that would likely happen in this show— we like to point out that Caesar was killed in the middle of Julius Caesar—sometimes when you’re improvising, you have this temptation to procrastinate a lot of the action, and so we think, “Oh, Richard won’t kill Henry until the end of the play.” But in our show, we found that staying on the front lines of the improv keeps things very exciting, so, instead of kicking something down the line, we’ll have a beat that we’re going to get to. Richard would probably kill Henry in Winter of Our Disco Tent early on and then, the fallout.

BRYANT: Yeah. I want to say that if we’d allowed that scene to go on maybe one minute longer, Richard probably would have killed him in the first scene.

SWEN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And then he would have just said, you know, “We are family.”

BRYANT: Yep, “We are family!”

BOGAEV: At the risk of just wringing all of the comedy out of this conversation, why? Why is it better to not procrastinate? What does that do for you, improv-wise?

BRYANT: Because it gets you out of planning brain and gets you into active brain. The more you’re delaying a payoff like that, the more building up suspense for something that’s going to happen later rather than playing the immediacy of what’s right in front of you. It’s always good to have a character that is actively pursuing the thing that they want. So, if that thing is destroying someone, then unless there’s a reason, like a real compelling narrative reason not to, why not just go and do it? Because that is what happens in the Shakespeare plays.

When you’re coming up in improv, that’s something that you’re very much told not to do. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, if people here are not just fans of Shakespeare but also The Office, when they do an improv class on The Office Michael Scott is pulling a gun on everyone, and that is sort of a parody of a type of person that you get in an improv class who wants to, like, shoot everyone he’s in a scene with. So, we can kill characters in these shows, and there’s kind of a liberty to that.

SWEN: Yeah.

BOGAEV: So, it’s freeing you from all of those strictures and all of the expectations, too, it sounds like.

BRYANT: Yeah.

BOGAEV: You know, it’s really opening up the whole, bringing in oxygen.

SWEN: Yes, I think so. Like Ross said, really keeping us in the moment where we can find that sort of magic of the spontaneous.

BRYANT: Yeah. There’s the scene taking place, but there’s also other actors on the sidelines watching and listening. It’s impossible not to plan a little bit when we’re listening. There’s parts of your brain that are like, “Ooh, it could go here. It could go here. I could maybe bring in this kind of character. I could maybe take it in this direction.”

But you’ve got to know that there’s this difference between established fiction in improv and potential fiction, and everything that you are imagining as potential fiction could go away and change in a heartbeat if it were to contradict with the established fiction of what’s going on onstage. So, all your plans, as much as you might have them, you have to hold very lightly knowing that you’re going to discard them in a second if it veers off in another direction.

Some of my favorite moments in these shows are when you’re on the sidelines and a two-person scene is being improvised in front of you. And then suddenly one of them will turn and look at you and be like, “Steward, what do you think?” Or “Aristophanes, get in here.” And you, who are like “Wait, me?”, you suddenly step on stage, and it puts you in this place where you’re pure reaction, pure reactivity, and that’s the best place to be improvising from. You just respond to what’s happening.

SWEN: You might even enter the scene thinking you’re going to be the king and they’ll say, “Steward, what do you think?” And you immediately you have to think, “I’m not the king anymore. I’m the steward. And here’s what I think.”

BRYANT: That is a very frequent thing in our shows. A person enters with this very high-status swaggering energy, the other character has not noticed that, and they’re like, “Yeah, Lady Anne, are you here to fetch the scullery?” And then you’re like, “Okay. I guess Lady Anne kind of walks like a quarterback.”

[Laughter.]

BOGAEV: This is maybe an obvious question, but what is it about Shakespeare that really suits improv? You could do Brecht improv, you could do Stephen Sondheim improv, I’m sure you’d be really funny.

SWEN: Oh, yeah.

BRYANT: And there are people who do.

SWEN: Something that relates to what Ross has mentioned earlier is that one reason Shakespeare and improv go so well together is that Shakespeare gives us a list of passionate archetypes that we can play with. And I think improv is great when performers can play characters that have strong points of view and passionate desires. Shakespeare characters are big and they’re bold and they’re rich and they’re hungry for power or they’re desperate for love. Some of them would die for money or some would die for honor. Some would kill for revenge, or some would just kill for any reason, you know? So, it really lends itself to improvisation. On top of that, you know, Shakespeare affords us the ability to play with poetry as well. We can be goofballs and we can be poets in the same scene.

BRYANT: My favorite shows are ones where there will be scenes and moments that are just so profoundly silly and stupid and we’re barely holding it together, like almost crying laughing. And someone will improvise a piece of dialogue that seems so appropriately Shakespearean and poetic and true that it could have come from the canon, and you can feel this little murmur ripple through the audience of, “Wow, that was actually kind of profound.” I love that the show can contain both.

SWEN: On top of that, you know, I mentioned cultural touchstones. I mentioned we have Disney mythology, but we also have the Shakespearean canon where people have experience. People know, whether you love Shakespeare or you really wrestled with him in high school, you know who Romeo and Juliet are.

BRYANT: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Yeah, you know them.

BRYANT: Everyone has a relationship. Everyone’s at least been forced to read Shakespeare at some point.

BOGAEV: Everyone’s brushed up against Shakespeare.

BRYANT: Yeah, yeah. So, I feel like almost everyone has, like Blaine was saying, a relationship with Romeo and Juliet. Where they might not have the same kind of relationship with Mother Courage or the characters of Merrily We Roll Along.

BOGAEV: Well, Blaine, just one last question for you. There is so much concern about the financial health of theater right now in America. General belt tightening and the political turmoil that keeps people away from the arts in general and theater in particular. What is your experience on that front with improv, your thoughts about it?

SWEN: Well, these are big questions. You know, our experience is that interestingly people are still coming to the show and people still want to laugh. You know, for us as performers—and I think even for some of the audience—sometimes there’s a sense of, almost, you know, feeling guilty for laughing, especially because the news cycle is 24/7 and we’re very aware of heavy, heavy things going on. And so, some people come and very explicitly tell us, you know, they’re looking to laugh as medicine and escape, you know, and a break. I think there’s always going to be a place for joy and there’s always going to be a place for laughter, even if the joy and laughter is part of your effort of resilience or resistance. I think that people crave that.

BOGAEV: Well, Ross and Blaine, I just love talking with you and I can’t wait to see another performance.

SWEN: Oh my gosh, great to talk to you too, Barbara. Thank you for having us.

BRYANT: Yes, great to talk to you. Our pleasure.

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That was Blaine Swen and Ross Bryant, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

You can catch the Improvised Shakespeare Company at Chicago’s iO Theater every Friday and Saturday. They also have upcoming dates in Los Angeles, Princeton, Brooklyn, Denver, and Ann Arbor. For tickets and more information, visit improvisedshakespeare.com.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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