Episode 329. History of Comedy

Published by austin on March 24, 2013March 24, 2013

“Playwrights Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor discuss their eighth “Complete (abridged)” collaboration The Complete History of Comedy (abridged), which will have its Reduced Shakespeare Company world premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in November 2013. Reed and Austin talk about what the show is going to be, how excited they are to return to Cincinnati, gratitude for extraordinary leaps of faith, the primary reason everyone thinks he can be a comedian, overrated theatrical genres, and ways in which we hope to not write a dead frog. (Length 18:28)

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Categories: Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast

Tags: Austin TichenorBackstageBlake RobisonComedyMichael HaneyPhysical ComedyPlaywrightPremieresProductionReed MartinShelterhouseWriting

2 Comments

austin · January 3, 2014 at 3:40 pm

Hi Suzanne – Thanks for your interest in our work! We’ll be performing “The Complete History of Comedy (abridged)” exclusively for the next few years so the amateur licensing rights won’t be available until then. Subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Twitter or Facebook or listening to our podcast are the surest ways to find out quickly when the rights will be released. Until then, our five other scripts up to “The Complete World of Sports (abridged)” are available from Broadway Play Publishing now. Hope this helps. Many thanks again!

Suzanne Boles Grove Community Playmakers · January 1, 2014 at 3:17 pm

We have produced your “…complete Shakespeare”… and ” History of America.” The 2014-2015 (july/june) season will be our 20th. Would love to celebrate it with your latest work.. “The Complete History of Comedy.” We actually teach 6th graders about Commedia dell’Arte each year and have a contest in which they can do their favorite stock character.
The Ok Arts Council major support grant application is due Feb 1. I just saw your new play in the Nov issue of Amer. theatre mag…yes I’m a bit behind in my reading… any idea when it will be available and a script would be available???

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Michelle Ephraim – a Professor of English and (with Caroline Bicks), the cohost of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast and the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas – joins us this week to talk about her frank and funny new book, Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare. Michelle reveals she discovered Shakespeare surprisingly late; how “fun” is a a perfectly fine description of her sometimes fraught memoir; the shared curse of meeting hero Stephens; how Shakespeare became a source of both pain and solace in the wake of a parent’s death; how her relatively cushy job became surprisingly hazardous; and, finally, how Shakespeare – a dead European white man – became a very relatable force for inclusion. (Length 19:31)

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Richard Schoch discusses Shakespeare’s House: A Window Onto His Life and Legacy, his wonderful new history of not only the building in Stratford-upon-Avon that William Shakespeare was born in, but how that building survived and became ground zero in the Shakespeare tourism industry. Schoch reveals how he discovered the dual focus of his book; how it took almost 200 years for people to realize the treasure that still stood in their midst; the shenanigans played by people who first depicted Shakespeare’s birthplace; the important distinctions between restoring a house and remaking it; the trick of hitting that sweet spot between writing an academic history and a popular one; and how the most important person in Shakespeare’s birthplace is not Shakespeare but the visitor. (Length 18:52)

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