To celebrate the start of the podcast's 20th Season, playwright and author Andrew Moorhead returns to talk about his play This Purple F***ing Pot, a new office comedy now getting a limited site-specific run off-Broadway. Andrew reveals the ah-ha moment when the play's title first came to him; how he loves the sound of characters speaking; the various inspirations that helped inform his voice (including a certain three-person vaudeville theatre company); what made him become a playwright; the dramaturgical value of archetypes; and how a day job in marketing enables you to write not only great plays, but great descriptions of your plays. (Length 22:09)

Chicago's Improvised Shakespeare Company celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025, and founder/director Blaine Swendiscusses the company's humble origins and how it now performs regularly in Chicago and Los Angeles and tours all across America. Blaine shares performing secrets; the nature of the high-wire act of improvising in iambic pentameter; how this stuff can be learned; how several of every performance's signature moments began as an attempt to solve a technical problem; and how the audience is the key ingredient to the alchemical magic that makes each performance work. (Length 19:39)

The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), an irreverent celebration of “the greatest story ever accepted as fact” that was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and Matthew Croke, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor reminisce about its creation and how much the world has changed since it premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1995. The original cast members reveal how they bent over backwards to make an entertaining innoffensive comedy; the genius of Steve Smith, the former director of Ringling Brothers Clown College; rave reviews from a Virginia nun and a minister from the Church of Scotland; and how, perhaps paradoxically, some of the show's biggest fans are the most religiously devout. (Length 19:24)

Stage actor Shannon Cochran (August: Osage County) brings her horror movie bona fides (The Ring; The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) to the phenomenal new stage play Paranormal Activity, an original new story based on the successful film franchise now running at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (followed by the Ahmanson Theatre in LA, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington DC). Shannon discusses the precision with which playwright Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett ratchet up the tension; how everyone has demonic qualities they struggle to suppress (or, as actors, tap into); how to not play the ending; the importance of keeping audiences literally and metaphorically in the dark; and how making audiences laugh in a theatre is not even as great as making audiences jump, scream, and then laugh in a theatre! (Length 20:13)

A hundred years on from the Harlem Renaissance, Gerrad Alex Taylor has adapted Langston Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem, which is having its world premiere this month at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, running from October 30 to November 9, 2025. Taylor shares how he's collaborating with both Hughes and Shakespeare to canonize the Black experience; how we call upon our ancestors, both personal and literary;  the power of the written word, from dramatic poetry to a letter written to your city council; how Shakespeare takes us, in his "Seven ages of man" speech through a man's life, while Hughes takes us through a man's blues; and finally, Taylor’s mission to turn Shakespeare into a verb! (Length 21:48)

The Q Brothers Collective (Othello: The Remix; Funk It Up About Nothing) have created Rome Sweet Rome, a wild and satirical new “add-rap-tation” of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar now running at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through October 19, 2025. Bri Sudia and Danielle Davis are stand-out members of a glorious ensemble, and they discuss how they've gotten comfortable with rapping and the “Q Vibe”; how having a percussion background really helps; how joy and satire are sometimes the only tools we have in troubled times; and how a comedy about the unintended consequences of political violence feels more necessary than ever. (Length 13:40)

RSC artistic directors Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor are directing college productions of their comedies William Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (abridged) and The Comedy of Hamlet! (a prequel), and they discuss the differences they discover in their scripts when other actors are performing them. Reed and Austin share how different actors bring different energies; the difference between a vaudeville and a play; how directing these young actors is like looking in a mirror; and how certain things just aren't necessary when you cast more than three actors. (Length 19:37)

RSC artistic directors and co-authors Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor discuss how they've updated All the Great Books (abridged), which embarks on a US tour this fall. Reed and Austin share what changes they've made to this script (and all the RSC scripts) and how our scripts, like all plays, develop new meanings depending on the personnel performing them and the times in which they’re being performed. (Length 15:04) (PICTURED: Tré Tyler (Coach), Michael Faulkner (Professor), and Doug Harvey (Doug) in the Reduced Shakespeare Company production of All the Great Books (abridged), written and directed by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor.)

Our conversation with Nina Ruscio, the production designer of The Pitt, continues this week with further details of how unprecedented her design for HBO's Emmy-winning Best Drama really is. Nina compares her work on this show with other large projects she's designed; reveals the incredible amount of interior and exterior detail she puts into her designs, and how shooting The Pitt is very much like filming a play that’s happening live; gives props to fellow Cal alum Cathy Sandrich Gelfond on her Emmy win for casting The Pitt; shares the pleasure of working with star and executive producer Noah Wyle; and revels at how highly regarded The Pitt is by the medical community they’re depicting. (Length 15:14)

Nina Ruscio, the Emmy-nominated (for The Flight Attendant) production designer of The Pitt on HBO, discusses how her design helped create this enormous – and enormously popular – show. Nina reveals how producer John Wells (The West Wing; E.R.) tasked her with creating a ground plan before the writers even started writing episodes; the joy of living a freelance, project-based lifestyle; how her background as an English major allows her designs to express literature visually; how memories from the musical she designed in college remain in her sedimentary layer; and the remarkable privilege of creating the world in which stories are invented. PART ONE OF A TWO-PART CONVERSATION. (Length 18:11) (Photo of Nina on her set for The Pitt by cinematographer Johanna Coelho.)