The Reduced Shakespeare Company was born in California in 1981, when three young men who had watched too many hours of Bugs Bunny cartoons began performing half-hour versions of Hamlet in the street, alleys, and rubbish bins of San Francisco. The resulting mixture of classic theater, left-wing literary analysis, and punk-rock sensibility proved exhilarating, as the company members rejected traditional approaches to theater and began bouncing props off audiences' heads.
Encouraged by their success, they quit their day jobs, went broke, and wrote their first full-length show, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), which played to 50 weeks of sold-out houses in London's Arts Theatre.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company Radio Show: Volume 3 contains two half-hour episodes (The Comedies and Shakespeare's Little Known Trip to America) of the Company's infamous BBC World Service radio series, in which they chronicle the life and work of William Q. Shakespeare.
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