Marissa Chaffee starts her shift by housing a Five Guys burger with pickles, mustard and ketchup. It’s 6:15 p.m. on a chilly March evening, and she’s perched in the seats of a tiny downtown Washington theater. There’s a side of fries, but she’s saving some of them to dunk into the witches’ brew: a concoction consisting of a High Noon (“Surprise me on the flavor,” she tells her stage manager), Snoop-Dogg-branded rosé and sour gummy worms.
Later tonight, she’ll chug this potion while half-dressed in Spider-Man underwear and knee-high boots in front of 85 theatergoers. The test is not whether she then vomits, or texts her ex, or blacks out and overnight-ships a new wardrobe online. It is whether she can remember her iambic pentameter.
For over a decade, Drunk Shakespeare has created alcohol-soaked renditions of the Bard. The gimmick goes like this: One actor begins by drinking three shots of straight liquor (Chaffee chose raspberry vodka). As a choppy production of “Macbeth” ensues, four other performers try, and increasingly fail, to keep the script on track. Eventually, the performer drinks another shot and, toward the end, the witches’ brew, which changes every night. In reality, Chaffee says, the show is about 50 percent scripted. The other half is improvised, with plenty of opportunities built in for the actors to fall off script.
“I do try to keep my Shakespeare as good as I can for as long as I can,” she says. “But the liquor’s gonna do what the liquor’s gonna do.”
Here in Washington and in four other cities across the country, Drunk Shakespeare has become something of an underground phenomenon, attracting new types of crowds that may never set foot inside the Kennedy Center. It’s advertised on social media, but much of its longevity comes via word of mouth. With such a small audience, the performance feels intimate — and despite the booze-fueled raunch and improvised mayhem, the actors know how to make Shakespeare sing.
Chaffee finishes her burger in the immersive theater designed to look like a library — 2,000 books, stripped of dust jackets, arranged in a gradient rainbow on dark wooden shelves. They range from “The Canterbury Tales” to werewolf smut to the Bible.
From left, Drunk Shakespeare actors Joshua T. Street, Marissa Chaffee and Kit Krull debate the danceability of Lady Gaga’s new album while they get ready for showtime. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
The library-themed immersive theater has books by the Bard, but look closer and you’ll also find young adult dystopian fiction and fantasy smut. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
She applies her makeup the same way she did in high school, packing on eye shadow while holding up a compact mirror. She leaves her freckles untouched but lines her eyes a bit darker than she might on a night she’s performing sober; she’s putting in the extra effort now since it’ll be more likely to come undone later.
As “Wonderwall” blares from the bar, which will be open throughout the performance, the actors gather to discuss details. Chaffee’s walk-up song tonight, she decides, will be One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.”
She moves to the backstage dressing room, which is crammed with mementos from hundreds of performances, bottles of hair spray and boxes of cereal shoved on a vanity alongside phallic sippy cups that wouldn’t be out of place at a bachelorette party. Chaffee slips on her lacy red dress and applies a mauve lipstick, popping a finger in her mouth to remove the excess. At 6:45 p.m., it’s time to start welcoming guests. Everyone gets a shot on their way in.
David Hudson created his first alcohol-themed Shakespeare adaptation, “R and J: Star-Cross’d Death Match,” with his New York City-based troupe Three Day Hangover in 2013. The beer-pong-infused, expletive-ridden show, which expanded the following year to fringe festivals (including Washington’s), was the result of “Romeo and Juliet” being in the public domain and the Midtown bar Harley’s Smokeshack being free to use.
Initially, the productions experimented with different ways to modernize Shakespeare. “Over time, that morphed into the actors drinking because people responded really well to the idea that anything could happen when a drunk performer is running the show,” Hudson says.
He was eventually approached by Scott Griffin, an Australian theater producer who saw an opportunity to scale up the idea. Together in 2014, they created Drunk Shakespeare, partially inspired by “Drunk History,” the web series and Comedy Central show featuring inebriated narrators. They chose “Macbeth” as the main play, since it was one of his most well-known.
After a successful five years, they expanded to a Chicago stage before the pandemic shut it all down. But by 2021, they ramped back up, opening a D.C. company in July 2023, Phoenix in September 2023 and Houston in January 2024. Today, Hudson estimates, Drunk Shakespeare puts on close to 2,000 shows a year nationwide — shows that this year will include drunk “Romeo and Juliet” and, near Halloween, drunk “Dracula.”
Last fall, all but the Houston companies unionized. (Chaffee says she’s paid $110 per show and performs at least eight times per week.) Surprisingly for Hudson, the requisite alcohol consumption was not a focal point; workers were more concerned with consistent scheduling and fair wages. “We may have the first union in the country that requires drinking on the job,” he says.
Every patron gets a shot of whiskey with blackberry liqueur and lemonade on the way to their seat. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
“I do try to keep my Shakespeare as good as I can for as long as I can,” Chaffee says. “But the liquor’s gonna do what the liquor’s gonna do.” – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
There are precautions: Only one actor can be drunk at a time; they rotate each day. A stage manager monitors their consumption, makes sure the actor is fed and watered, and, once the curtain falls, sends them home in an Uber.
For Chaffee, a founding member of the D.C. cast, Drunk Shakespeare felt like a perfect fit. She’d been acting since her theatrical debut as baby Jesus in a Nativity play, and she spent her college years at Shenandoah Conservatory traveling with her bread-themed improv troupe, the Loaf. After a stint with the Maryland Renaissance Festival, she saw the casting call for Drunk Shakespeare on TikTok.
“I was like, ‘That is exactly what I want to do,’” she says. “That’s basically what I did in college. I drank, and I did Shakespeare.”
For weeks, she stressed about wearing the right outfit and playing the right song on her ukulele. At her audition, she went through the same monologue several times, with different accents and impressions.
Rehearsals started before a renovation at the Sage Theatre downtown was finished. The old comedy club was being gutted, so the cast and crew began sorting through the 10-year-old script in a D.C. conference room, analyzing the characters and lines and looking for additions to show off the performers’ unique talents — headstands, opera singing, sword fighting.
Finally, a missing sink piece and the liquor license arrived, along with their first shows. Not that Chaffee remembers. She knows her parents were there, but her first performance as the “drunk actor” is a vodka-soaked blur.
Tonight is Chaffee’s 654th show. She’s performed 128 times as drunk Lady Macbeth and 12 as drunk Macduff, all in her lucky sparkly socks with tarot card designs and holes in the heels. For those without their calculators out, that’s 560 shots of liquor, plus whatever gag-worthy concoction the witches stir up for her.
The audience laughs as “Macbeth” unfolds. Many of them pregamed the performance. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
By now, tipsy or stone-cold sober, she’s seen it all: drunken audience fights, first-date flops and a loose chicken wing she pulled out of a randomly selected attendee’s purse. She’s not afraid to be the origin of the chaos. At the New Year’s Eve shows, she temporary-tattooed her breasts with guns and flashed the crowd. She’s ended evenings covered in whipped cream. Anything to get the guests to laugh.
Tonight, the crowd includes several couples, a mother-daughter duo who seem unsure whether to chuckle or cringe, and a group of five middle-aged women loudly celebrating a birthday. They’re all welcomed by the actors and shown to their seats, where they scan QR codes and order cocktails with names like Strumpet and Drowning Ophelia.
When the performance gets underway, Chaffee takes her vodka shots with a Coca-Cola chaser in between, dedicating each to Catholicism or her outfit or the lovely audience. No one in the crowd bought the two premium throne seats at the top of the stage ahead of time, so they’re auctioned off now for $40 apiece. The winning audience members serve as the play’s king and queen, and whenever her majesty’s name is uttered in the script, the crowd is encouraged to respond with a raucous expletive in the affirmative.
What follows is 90 minutes of pop-culture gags; acoustic guitar serenades; and swinging, flopping sex toys. Sword fights are reimagined as dance battles. Puppets fill in for missing performers. There’s a Jennifer Coolidge impression and a monologue delivered in a Shrek voice and a glittering gold cape with “MAC-B” emblazoned on the back. Chaffee fails a sobriety test and is ordered by the king to take yet another shot. In between, the play’s plot vaguely speeds on, with breaks to make sure everyone understands that, yes, Macbeth actually did just murder the king.
Drunk Shakespeare is a break from how most Shakespearean tragedies are experienced today, with no talking and cellphones off and everyone dressed up for the occasion to claim their $800 seat to see Denzel Washington on Broadway. But in some ways, it’s a return to the Bard’s roots.
In early modern London, when sewage flowed freely through the streets and the Thames, you’d be hard-pressed to find a sober Globe Theatre guest. According to Ashley Buchanan, associate director of fellowships for the Folger Institute, groundlings — the poorest attendees of Shakespeare’s plays — had little access to fresh drinking water. Even middle-class theatergoers would have had cheaper and easier access to ale than to fresh water, and it was brewed in most homes and taverns.
“Ale was consumed by young and old, rich and poor, as it provided essential calories and was, in most cases, safer and more accessible than water,” Buchanan says via email. “Given the ubiquity of ale in late-16th-century London, it is safe to say ale was purchased and consumed in the theater.”
Chaffee writes “drunk” on the foreheads of willing patrons. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Chaffee downs the “witches’ brew” as the crowd chants at her to “chug.” Is this a frat party? – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Even if the actors weren’t drinking onstage, they probably were doing it after the show. The Globe was located in a disreputable part of town, near taverns such as the Elephant, which is mentioned in “Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare’s own father was an official safety-control ale taster in their hometown of Stratford.
At the Globe, crowds were boisterous. The productions were rowdy, filled with innuendos and references to daily life — they had to be, to compete with bear baiting and other bloody entertainment of the time. In the text, heavy drinking, Buchanan says, sometimes drove plots. The opening of “The Taming of the Shrew,” set in a tavern, suggests to her that the play is meant to be viewed through its drunken main character’s beer goggles.
“What we’re doing taps back in to that idea of Shakespeare for the masses,” says Hudson, the Drunk Shakespeare founder. “It’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be edgy and bawdy. We take some liberties that, you know, maybe the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] would not be super excited about.”
Buchanan, for one, is all in on anything that makes the Bard more accessible. “Because,” she says, “at the end of the day, what’s more human than drinking and storytelling?”
After her genuinely compelling “Out, damned spot!” monologue, lit by the glow of dozens of audience phone flashlights, Chaffee redresses in fuzzy slippers and an oversize “Midnight Memories” T-shirt for her final bow. She laps around the room, slapping hands and stumbling. The guests file out, thanking her for her performance. One asks if she’s using cocaine.
“There’s always an opportunity for any job to get tedious, especially when it is repetitive,” she says. “But when you’re sharing it with people who are also passionate about it, like me and my castmates, it keeps it alive. It keeps it fresh.”
Later tonight, after the company sends her home in an Uber, she’ll take an hour to get out of “Drunk Shakespeare mode.” Her boyfriend might heat her up some leftovers. She’ll play a bit of “Baldur’s Gate 3,” drink several cups of water and swallow a preemptive ibuprofen.
But now, at 8:30 p.m., the tiny troupe retreats back to its dressing room for 15 minutes of quiet. A barback brings Chaffee a plate of pita bread and hummus. Props are restaged. She finds her shoes and dress, fixes her makeup, and checks her phone. It’s time for another show. And four more shots.
Chaffee lets the vodka win. In 30 minutes, it’s time for another performance. – (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)