Madness Most Discreet will Perform Wednesday and Thursday. Submitted photo

Shakespeare is timeless, and that is why his plays and poems are still relevant today as they were when he wrote them.

Madness Most Discreet makes his material accessible.

And Madness Most Discreet will be honoring the Bard Thursday with a pop-up preview performance Wednesday at the Pine Cone Creamery, 209 Pine St., at 7 p.m. and another pop-up preview performance at The Reg for Jumpstart to Third Thursday at 5 p.m. Thursday.

Then the collective will perform “Moonlight Revels” (adapted from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) at the Wintergarden Plaza at 6 and 8 p.m., Thursday.

Madness Most Discreet founder Emily Drew said she and the other members, Rusty Allen, Julie Reed, and Matt McWilliams, met some time ago while performing summer stock Shakespeare in New Hampshire. They performed for two summers and decided they wanted to keep working together, so they thought of an idea for a company where it would only be four artists performing all the roles in a Shakespeare play.

“It was one of the first plays we did together. … So it’s very near and dear to our hearts. It’s always sort of been on our list for Madness Most Discreet to cut (edit) it and do it in our style,” Drew said.

The performance is part of the Renaissance Corp.’s Third Thursday series at the Wintergarden Plaza. In 2024, Madness Most Discreet performed during the successful series, and was asked back for 2025.

“Last May, we started thinking about what we wanted to do, and this was at the top of everyone’s list. So we just, we went with it, an oldie, but a goodie,” Drew added.

Drew noted that the concept is the same as in 2024 where each actor memorizes the entire script, and then audience members pick which actor will play what part. With this concept there could be very different interpretations of each show.

“Our real goal as a company is to illustrate that the themes and the characters in all of Shakespeare’s work are highly relatable, highly universal – they belong to all of us, so we can see and we can see them from different perspectives. And it all works, and it all makes sense,” Drew said.

In full disclosure, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is my favorite Shakespeare play because it’s a play within a play.

The founder said because Shakespeare plays can be long, the company trims the scripts, so the performance is about 60 minutes. She said it is a full play, but shorter than one would experience at some other venues. Drew suggests that people bring chairs because there will be only a limited amount available. She wants to make audience members feel a part of the show.

“I think it’s certainly a primary focus of Madness Most Discreet to make sure that audiences feel like the performance belongs to them – that it’s accessible, that it’s not high art that is inaccessible or untouchable in any way,” Drew noted. “We want our audiences to feel like they’re part of the performance, like they have a say in what happens, and like it belongs to them.”