I can officially say that I’ve been to the one place in town where the audience can chant “Chug! Chug! Chug!” while watching a Shakespeare play. 

Technically, I suppose, that you could chant that at any Shakespeare play, but it’d be frowned upon and you’d probably be asked to leave. 

At Drunk Shakespeare, however, it is mandatory. 

You’re greeted with a double shot of a fruity cocktail and then get to sit down and order more alcohol, while you wait to watch some professional actors *sort of* do Shakespeare. As they would say, “we are professional actors, with a Shakespeare problem.”

Drunk Shakespeare goes as follows: a company of actors perform a Shakespeare play completely sober, except for one of the actors who takes on a principal role while super drunk.

The rest of the actors are bullshitting their way through it while the one actor is fighting for their life. 

An actress took four tequila shots back to back and instead of being on the floor, as I would be, she proceeded to play Lady Macbeth. A bachelorette took a shot along with her in order to prove that she was in fact doing hard liquor. 

From there, madness ensued. 

A black actor who was wearing a white sheet as one of the ghosts, pulled up the white sheet to form a hood and declared “look, I’m Clarence Thomas.”

One actor was told to deliver his lines through the medium of various different impressions, including, Jim Carey, Jack Nicholson, Hannibal Lecter, the woman from the porno, every MTA worker ever, and my personal favorite, John Mulaney.

In case you were wondering what the “woman from the porno” and “every MTA worker ever” sounded like, just know that the actor did the first one by moaning in a high pitched voice, before flinging water in the air, and did the second one by delivering his lines directly into a drawer so that they were completely muffled and incoherent. 

At times they had to dip into the audience for their props, which created the iconic line, “Is this an inhaler I see before me?” followed by the actor mumbling to himself, “you did four years at Carnegie Mellon, you can do this,”

Likewise, Macbeth broke character again to address the audience by asking a woman to please stop clapping by hitting her ring against her wine glass, because, and I quote, “this is not a wedding in Vermont.”

Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, did at one point take an audience member’s head in her hands and press it against her chest while delivering the line “come to my woman’s breast, and take my milk for gall,” or whatever she thought the line was in her inebriated state. 

Jokes aside, one of the most impressive things about this is seeing how much work these professionals actually put into their craft. It shows how much work actually goes into putting on a performance like this, because it was apparent that they all knew the play backwards and forwards.

The actress playing Lady Macbeth, who was mild to moderately wasted, still managed to pull it together enough to deliver a perfect monologue from Julius Caesar, and then later another one from Hamlet. 

Anytime the audience chanted “chug, chug, chug,” she had to imbibe some more. Again, I would have needed the emergency room. 

Subjecting yourself to a pretty nasty hangover, which would possibly involve rushing to a toilet as soon as you wake up, to entertain a room full of people, shows some kind of crazy level of dedication. I hope she earns a fat check for regularly doing this.

I had loads of fun watching a sloppy drunken Shakespeare play, as the bard intended, and I think you should all do the same. 

Please drink responsibly!

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

P.S., check out my previous blog post on All of the Books I Read in 2023