Drunk Shakespeare Is NYC’s Newest Must-See Theatre Experience

Josephine is a staff writer at Junkee Media. You can…

There’s a new five star theatre company in New York City and it throws class, style and tradition out the window. It’s Shakespeare, but drunk.

Theatre is the artistic backbone of New York City, which makes it the best and worst part of being a tourist in the city. As in, the cultural calendar is so jam packed with things to see that it’s almost impossible to squeeze it all in on a regular trip. FOMO at its worst.

But if there’s something that NYC has in spades, it’s unique experiences. And nothing is more unique than a tipsy actor trying to figure out the linguistically challenging play MacBeth. The Drunk Shakespeare Society uses a rotating roster of actors (with one ‘designated drinker’ per show) as hilarity and mayhem ensues.

When you attend a Drunk Shakespeare show, you shouldn’t be too precious about the text. With the ‘designated drinker’ driving the plot progression, the other four actors are sober and have to try and keep them on track. You can imagine how this goes.

There’s also a fair bit of audience participation too, with the cast getting patrons to help out with the delivery of lines.

Each performance is delivered in an underground library of 15,000 books. Sacred grounds, then, for a pretty sacrilegious adaptation. But it’s probably how the Bard himself would have wanted it. He did write that drink “was a great provoker”, after all.