The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)

Using questionable scholarship and street-performer smarts, playwrights Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor weave together most of the famous speeches and plot devices of Shakespeare’s thirty-nine plays to create a fast, funny, and fictional fortieth, filled with witty wordplay and vaudevillian variety.

In this strange-yet-familiar narrative, an ancient grudge pits Puck (from Midsummer) against Ariel (from The Tempest) and turns Shakespeare’s canon upside-down, creating such strange bedfellows as Hamlet and that master motivator Lady Macbeth, Viola and Richard III, King Lear and the Weird Sisters, and (of course) Dromio and Juliet.