On Thursday, October 24, I sat on a wooden bench in a small, dark Chicago theater and watched an actor down three shots of mezcal back to back to back before breaking out into a monologue from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Little did most of the other theatergoers know, this intrepid performer was a newly minted union member, along with everyone else at the Chicago branch of Drunk Shakespeare, from Lady Macbeth to the server who brought me a cocktail.
Drunk Shakespeare, if you aren’t lucky enough to have been to a performance, is a multicity theater troupe that operates exactly as advertised: One performer downs five shots before jumping into a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The other actors try to keep the performance on track while chaos ensues in the form of beer-chugging, burpees, and monologues.
READ MORE
