On the night of October 20, the back room of Canteen Brewhouse on Aztec Road NE will hold a ghost story. Duke City Repertory Theatre's Bard Crawl returns with Hamlet, and the company's own billing is blunt about what that means: serious actors, no director, one rehearsal, in a bar. The show runs 7 to 9 p.m., admission is free, and there is no reserved seating. Albuquerque audiences have a habit of packing these rooms to standing room only, so arriving early is the only reliable way to get a good spot.
Bard Crawl is not a reading with beers in hand, and it is not a conventional production squeezed into a taproom. It is a deliberate attempt to rebuild the conditions Shakespeare's plays were written for. Amelia Ampuero, Duke City Rep's founding artistic director and this production's Gertrude, traces the idea to the Back Room Shakespeare Project in Chicago. The point, she told the Albuquerque Journal, is that the playhouses of Shakespeare's England were rowdier than modern theaters, with the audience right there and taking an active role in the show. That is the basis for how Bard Crawl works.
The Chicago project that inspired it was built on the belief that Shakespeare's plays were written for livelier, more interactive rooms than the formal theaters where they usually land. Its actors work without a director, because in Shakespeare's day there was no one in charge who we would recognize as a director. Duke City Rep adopted the model with the Chicago company's blessing and has been running it since 2017, which the company describes as New Mexico's original bar Shakespeare.
What that looks like in practice is a company of actors who arrive having read the play together and rehearsed once. Evening Star Barron, who is first mate on this production and plays Ophelia, told the Journal that going without a director is wild but gives the actors a strong sense of agency. It lets them approach the work without someone else's idea of how the play or the character should look, she said. Everyone is individually responsible for digging into the text and figuring out how these characters exist in the bodies of the actors they actually have.
That approach suits Hamlet unusually well. The play is a machine for uncertainty, and a production with no outside eye has to solve its problems in the room, in front of an audience that is drinking and eating a few feet, or inches, away. The company is staging it as the world's most well-known ghost story, a tale of revenge, grief and political intrigue, and it is the third tragedy Duke City Rep has put through the Bard Crawl format. The cast includes Kane Distler as Hamlet, Stafford Douglas as Claudius, Jeff Andersen as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, the Player King and the first Gravedigger, Ampuero as Gertrude, Katie Farmin as Polonius and the second Gravedigger, Barron as Ophelia, Josh Browner as Horatio, Noe Field-Perkins as Laertes, Joanna Furgal as Rosencrantz, Caroline Toby Graham as Guildenstern and Osric, Jayla Franklin-Sullivan as Reynaldo and Fortinbras, Vee Council as Marcellus and the Captain, Ana Rios as Marcellus and the Player Queen, and Mackenzie Aguilar as prompter.
This Hamlet is a limited run of seven performances across seven breweries and other non-traditional spaces between October 12 and 25, timed as temperatures start to drop. Each venue changes the show. The Canteen date is one stop on that crawl, and the room will not be the same as the one the night before or the night after.
Canteen Brewhouse is a fitting host in its own right. It bills itself as Albuquerque's original brewery, brewing since 1994, which makes it older than most of the city's craft beer scene and a natural room for a company that has spent nearly a decade arguing that Shakespeare belongs in the places people already gather.
Admission works on Duke City Rep's Pay What It's Worth model. The company's reasoning is that traditional theater can feel inaccessible, bougie or simply boring, and that a night out is a risk. So instead of charging up front, it asks audiences to pay what they think the show was worth afterward. The event listing offers a free Pay What It's Worth RSVP and a separate pre-pay option that explicitly does not guarantee a seat.
One practical caveat: Bard Crawl performs in establishments that serve alcohol, and admittance of minors is at the discretion of each brewery. Anyone planning to bring someone under 21 should call Canteen first.
For anyone who has wanted to see Hamlet without the formal hush of a theater, or who has simply wondered what the Prince of Denmark sounds like with a pint in the room, the October 20 performance asks nothing but a Tuesday evening and whatever the night turns out to be worth.