Blaine Swen is the creator and the director of the Improvised Shakespeare Company, a comedy company that will be performing at Theater 80 in New York from October 3rd-5th.
Noel Gutierrez-Morfin sat down with Swen to talk about his work and all the fun that comes along with Shakesperean improv.
How did you get the idea to start it in the first place?
I started doing improv in California years ago when I was a teenager, and I played for comedy sport, a show that does short-form improv, or short-scene games that have some sort of twist or goal, like what you would see on “Whose Line is it Anyways?”
One of the games we played was a game where you do a scene in the style of Shakespeare, which was a style that came up a lot. I was part of a group out there that decided to take the Shakespeare scenes and turn them into a longer show. We did that a couple of times.
When I was in LA, some people from that group started another group called the Backstreet Bards that performed Shakespearean improv shows at iO West [Theater]. When I moved to Chicago, I started a Shakespearean improv group in 2005, which was the ISC.
