Twelfth Night: The Back Room Shakespeare Project

Laura Kolb (Baruch College) 

About two-thirds of the way through the Back Room Shakespeare Project’s first production in New York, a one-night-only performance of Twelfth Night, one of the actors threw back her head and bellowed, “LINE!” Before the company’s prompter could supply the missing words, another actor in the scene shouted back: “Oh! I think I said a line from a later scene!” The prompter chimed in, the scene reset itself, and things continued smoothly—which is to say, frenetically, with comic exuberance and occasional improvisation.

Founded in 2011 and based in Chicago, the Back Room Shakespeare Project puts on plays according to a simple set of rules: “Serious Actors. No Director. One rehearsal. In a bar.” The rationale behind this is a kind of loose and cheeky claim to original practices: the company notes that Shakespeare’s troupe lacked anything like a modern director, and had a rehearsal process very different from the six-to-ten-weeks of intensive polishing that leads up to contemporary professional productions. But the real benefit of putting on a play in the backroom of a bar, with a young and energetic troupe who’ve had a few hours of rehearsal, is the palpable sense of shared discovery among the cast, and the unpredictable exchanges between the players and their audience.

The actors seem…