Shakespeare for all.

Mission

Mission Statement: Shakespeare for all.

At Brevity, we love Shakespeare. Hooray Shakespeare!

We also find that from time to time we are bored with Shakespeare because we are not sure what the people onstage are saying, who they are, how they got there, what is happening to them, and why nearly all of them are white.

Many of us have also had the occasional experience of playing one of those roles in Shakespeare called ‘extra’ or ‘supernumerary’ or ‘spear-carrier’ or ‘colossal waste of time’.

Three approaches address these matters.

First, while we seek always to faithfully tell the stories Shakespeare told, we do so via scripts that run approximately seventy to eighty minutes in length. The language is all Shakespeare’s, all from the play at hand, the story is told, and the characters true.

Second, since performers in community theater have other jobs (sometimes two or three), our scripts have no superfluous characters. Everyone gets an arc and no one’s time is wasted.

Third, a true collection of community members reflects all the cultures of our time and place. Therefore, we will always explore Shakespeare’s work with a multiracial cast. Brevity will never stage a production in which more than half of the actors are white.

We debuted in 2019 with Hamlet. Why not start at the top?

After a brief global pandemic break, we return in the late spring of 2023 with an outdoor staging of the love-sick and pheromone-drenched As You Like It. In winter 2024, we performed Richard III in the gorgeous First Methodist Church in downtown Ypsilanti. He is a very bad, very delighted man. Merry Wives of Windsor, set in 1970s Los Angeles, followed at Mix Studios in summer of the same year.

We opened 2025 with a reading of Julius Caesar as part of First Methodist’s 200th anniversary program. Next up: a gender-reversed Taming of the Shrew at the Ypsilanti Performance Space (tickets here); then, in November, in collaboration with PTD Productions, we will stage Othello in the Riverside Arts Center.

We are a community theater group with a mixture of experienced performers and people who thought this looked like fun (which is also how the experienced performers got into this racket). Please join us as we joyfully share Shakespeare with all.