The UnScripted Shakespeare
Festival 2027!!!!!
WE ARE BACK!!!! Applications for USSF 2027 are now open! Boy, do we have some exciting news!
This festival will be a week long, May 24-30th, and in an incredible new venue!!!
On top of that, we are hosting one of the most legendary Shakespearean Improv ensembles of all time, The School of Night, who are traveling from the UK to perform and direct our festival ensembles. If you want to learn from them,
APPLY HERE before DECEMBER 4th:
Established in 1972 by an innovative collective, A.R.T./New York has matured into an indispensable cornerstone for over 475 theatres and more than 150 individual producers and artists throughout all five boroughs of New York City and across the state. As the singular membership organization dedicated to encompassing New York’s entire not-for-profit theatre sector, A.R.T./New York’s reach extends from playwriting collectives and developmental labs to producing organizations and pioneering independent artists. A.R.T./New York continues to serve the field through four essential service areas — Funding, Space, Professional Development and Advocacy — in order to help theatremakers put their creative ideas on stage.
We are excited to announce that the 2027 festival will take place at the....
Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
at the
A.R.T./New York Theatres.
502 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
Six Week Training
We are offering a brand-new course for local improvisers to learn how to improvise in the style of Shakespeare.
This class will meet on Sundays from 6:00 - 8:00pm
in the weeks leading up to the festival, and the gorup will perform on opening night!!!
Applications close on December 4th
THREE-DAY PERFORMANCE LABS
Learn to improvise Shakespeare! This year we are offering three performance intensives for folks who want to experiment with a deeper dive into the the world of Improvised Shakespeare. They are taught by the legendary UK improv ensemble: The School of Night.
MEET THE SCHOOL
Meetings of the School of Night are unlike any other theatrical event you are likely to experience; the Rhapsodes explore the minds of poets, novelists and playwrights both ancient and modern, creating new works on the fly.
The School is interested in the spirit of the esoteric, the hidden, the obscure, so they might embody the spirit of the Muses, ancient or modern; they might sing a song inspired by a member of the gathering; or it might be that an entire act or more of a lost Shakespeare play be performed.
Every night is different, everything is created on the spur of the moment according to ideas and suggestions proffered by the audience.
Oliver has been acting for 35 years, and improvising Shakespeare for over 20. As well as being an original member The School of Night, he is also one of the founders of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical (the only improvised show to win an Olivier award) and a regular participant in the London Improvathon, an annual 50-hour non-stop improvised drama. He has worked in London's West End (Mamma Mia!, Mischief Theatre's Peter Pan Goes Wrong), for the Royal Shakespeare Company (All's Well That Ends Well, Coriolanus, A Christmas Carol, and most recently the title role in King Lear), and the National Theatre (another Coriolanus). Selected screen credits include Call The Midwife, White Heat and Trigger Point on TV, Wimbledon on the big screen, and the voices of Mr.Freeze and Egghead in Lego Batman: Legacy of The Dark Knight. He has taught improv at RADA, LAMDA and, for 15 years, at Drama Studio London.
Dylan has been performing, teaching and directing improvised theatre and comedy for more than 20 years. He is the co-creator of Olivier award-winning Showstopper! The Improvised Musical (www.showstopperthemusical.com) and a co-founder of the improvised sketch group Grand Theft Impro (www.grandtheftimpro.com) as well as being a member of The School of Night. He appears regularly in London’s glittering West End, has performed at The National Theatre, The Royal Court, The Bristol Old Vic and many times at the Edinburgh Fringe; he has performed for various TV and radio programmes and hosted the BBC Radio 4 series of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical.
Slightly randomly, he has also written some songs for HBO’s House of the Dragon. He trained primarily under Alan Marriott and Ken Campbell.
You can find him on Bluesky at @dylanmarkemery
Alan is an actor, improviser, director and teacher, and a member of The School of Night, with whom he has performed internationally from Edinburgh and Amsterdam to Edmonton and Kronborg Castle, Elsinore. His stage work includes the RSC, National Theatre, the Tony-nominated Broadway revival of Translations, Claudius in Hamlet at Washington DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company, Passion Play at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, The Caretakerat BAM, Cornelius at Brits Off Broadway, and the US tour of Frost/Nixon. Screen credits include Magic Mike's Last Dance, Contagion, Young Sherlock Holmes, John Adams and The Good Wife.
A veteran of London's 50 Hour Improvathon, he has guested with Die-Nasty and Second City. With Improbable Theatre, he appeared in Opening Skinner's Box at the Lincoln Center Festival and directed The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
Joseph has performed at the RSC, Bristol Old Vic, Sydney Opera House, The Guthrie Theater Minneapolis and Det Andret Theatret Oslo. He is a member of The Society of Strange, improvisers of weird tales from the Lovecraftian to the contemporary, and one of the founders of The Apocalypse Players, the award-winning horror gaming/actual play podcast of the same name. Joseph also toured with the all-male Shakespearean company Propeller from Hampstead to Istanbul, playing women, fairies and wedding guests.
His credits include: Twelfth Night, The Taming of The Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The Woman in Black, Jeeves & Wooster, Sherlock Holmes and The Whitechapel Fiend and no less than three productions of Cyrano de Bergerac...
Robert is an actor, writer and director, trained at RADA where he won the Lilian Baylis Award and has performed in productions at the Royal
Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, National Theatre and London’s West End as well as making many television & radio appearances for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. He has appeared in over twenty Shakespeare productions taking on roles as varied as Macbeth, Prospero, Parolles, Orlando, Aguecheek, Jaques and even played both Rosencrantz & Guildenstern at the same time! In
2027 he will appear in the Orange Tree, Richmond’s double bill of King Lear & Richard II.
He has toured the US extensively performing and giving workshops in over twenty universities here and appeared in New York City in Alan Bennett’s
The Habit of Art. In 2017 he was nominated at the UK Theatre Awards for Ayckbourn’s House and Garden. His Solo Show – Vagabonds – My Phil
Lynott Odyssey has played to sell-out audiences in Edinburgh, Dublin & London and he regularly appeared for Read not Dead at Shakespeare’s
Globe.
