UnScripted Shakespeare Festival

The UnScripted Shakespeare Festival is an annual improv comedy festival held over Memorial Day Weekend in New York City, organized by Thorn and Petal Stick, an independent improv company founded by Hal Munger, John Mistele, and Nick Zimmerman. The festival offers approximately 30 hours of workshops, jams, and performances inspired by the works of William Shakespeare, drawing improvisers from across the country. Performances follow a format in which the audience provides a title that inspires a fully improvised comedy in Elizabethan language, featuring iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets, and themes of love, marriage, scheming, and mistaken identities. The festival also includes workshops and performance intensives led by instructors with backgrounds at institutions including LAMDA, Lincoln Center Theatre, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.