The Reduced Shakespeare Company is a company without a building, so it relies on the hospitality of stages throughout the world, including one of its homes away from home, Pittsburgh Public’s O’Reilly Theater.

Austin Tichenor, a writer, performer and managing partner for RSC, noted that the company’s first Pittsburgh appearance was in 1995, and the troupe has continued to bring its reduced shows — about subjects from Shakespeare to the Bible to Hollywood -— ever since. On Thursday, in its first appearance here since 2011, Pittsburgh will be introduced to the latest in “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” 

“It’s like family, a little bit. We’re very lucky to have such a great ongoing relationship with the Public and with audiences in Pittsburgh,” says Mr. Tichenor. 

Each city where the company performs is treated to local references and jokes that are as up to date as possible, “not only to keep the material current, but theater should be immediate, theater should be absolutely what’s happening right now, and that’s our way of doing that.”

There are times when that’s a challenge, for instance, when the company is on a multicity tour. Mr. Tichenor gives as an example the RSC show about the Bible (abridged, of course) that has several places to insert local references. “It’s hard when you are looking at each other every other night and going, ‘Wait, what city are we in?’”

The company will be in Pittsburgh for almost five weeks, which will make it easier to be timely, something Mr. Tichenor says is very much in the spirit of the Bard.

“You read Shakespeare’s plays, and sometimes you go, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ Well, sometimes he is making a 400-year-old joke that meant quite a lot to his audience but didn’t mean anything a year later.”

The idea for the show at hand came in 2010, when the company was given a private tour of the vaults of the Folgers Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Among the priceless artifacts and relics housed there, “we saw dozens of folios,” recalls Mr Tichenor, who does a weekly podcast and was taping the tour. “My wife asked, ‘If you were doing a ‘Da Vinci Code’ movie about Shakespeare, what would the treasure be?’ And they said, ‘A manuscript in his own handwriting.’”

Such a prize does not exist -— at least, not as far as we know -— so he suggested to his writing partner, Reed Martin, “What if we wrote it? And what if it’s a hundred hours long, because he’s a young writer and he doesn’t know how to edit himself? And what if it’s his first play …”

That was the conception, but they were already writing “The Complete History of Comedy” as their ninth show. They decided to return to their Shakespearean roots with this, their 10th show, which premiered in 2016, the year the world marked 400 years since Shakespeare’s death and the company celebrated 35 years in the Bard business — day one was at a California Renaissance fair.

Mr. Tichenor says “The Long Lost First Play” can be viewed as a companion piece to Reduced Shakespeare’s first play, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).”

“What makes this different from all of our other scripts is ‘The Long Lost First Play’ tells a single story from beginning to end,” he says. “The other shows have tended to be sketch shows with a theme.” Having the audience follow the story, to the point where the cast can hear gasps at a certain plot point, “that’s a new thing for us. We are usually just looking for laughs, but now we are looking for laughs and for the audience to follow the surprising turns that the narrative takes.”

This is the playwright as a newbie — “first-draft Shakespeare,” Mr. Tichenor calls him — and he’s working out who goes where, or with whom, and what might sound better in another story down the road. Some of those gasp-worthy moments may or may not have to do with the pairings of characters from different works — star-crossed lovers are nothing compared to some of those who cross paths in this play, “which contains every character and every famous speech.”

Luckily, Reduced Shakespeare has abridged it for us, strutting and fretting an hour or two upon the O’Reilly Theater stage, with a short break, signifying intermission.

Momentum Festival: New Plays at Different Stages

City Theatre’s annual Momentum Festival of plays in different stages of development, May 31-June 3, includes one play scheduled for the upcoming season (“The Burdens” by Matt Schatz) and another (“P.Y.G or The Mis-Edumacation of Dorian Belle” by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm) picked as a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference.

New to the Momentum Festival, which launched in 2003, is In Their Own Voices, part of City Theatre’s continued partnership with the Dramatists Guild Foundation. Local writers and national Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow Eric Micha Holmes (Momentum ’18 Playwright in Residence) will read excerpts of their own work at 4 p.m. Saturday in the event, co-hosted by City Theatre Directing/Producing Fellow Spencer Whale and regional Dramatists Guild representative Gab Cody.

Tickets to Momentum ’18 are complimentary, but RSVPs are required at citytheatrecompany.org. Tickets will be issued at the box office of the theater on the South Side. 

Not opening

Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Festival in Black and White will not run May 31-June 10 as scheduled. New dates and details are TBA.

Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.

First Published: May 31, 2018, 10:00 a.m.