John Reed

I had just decided to name my new play “A year Without Shakespeare,” to express my weariness with the recurring unimaginative return again and again to the Bard. Then I came upon John Reed’s NEW/old play, and I feel fired up! What a dramatic re-imagination is herein offered us!  

—Richard Foreman

The literary Trick of the Year! 

—Page 6, New York Post

I can’t quite believe “All The World’s A Grave”: Such an Original idea. 

—Ian McKellen

It’s a shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled times.  

—Spalding Gray 

An inspired bit of bricolage ... This “remix version” of Shakespeare proves fascinating and entertaining. Reed clearly loves the Bard. His pastiche contains many of Shakespeare’s best passages, which are always a delight to reread. More impressive, though, Reed fashions from this familiar material a story containing enough surprises to delight even those well versed in the Bard.  

—Jack Helbig, Booklist 

What's destabilizing—and often wildly comical—is not just the rude mash-up of characters and settings violently plucked from their canonical sources but the way in which the power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts. 

—Christianity Today, Favorite Books of 2008 

We haven’t experienced this much haughtiness since college!

—Timeout New York

A proven Thomas Edison ... sophisticated fun.

—Allan Jalon, Huffington Post

Reed caramelizes the Bard’s plays into a great and terrifying world ... a dizzying feat of writing and scholarship, and uncannily contemporary in its brew of constant trouble. 

—Lynne Tillman

This is the Frankenstein's monster of Shakespearean tragedy. 

—William S. Niederkorn

The power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts. 

—John Wilson, Books and Culture

Reed has brought music's remix culture to literature with stunning results.

—David Gutowski, largeheartedboy

All the World’s a Grave alerted the world to a timbre of postmodern genius never before seen in American letters. 

—Rami Shamir, Evergreen Review

A wicked illusionist. 

—Los Angeles Journal

This send-up of the bard is both new yet familiar; by using a literary form of montage, Reed plays with our understanding of some of the best known characters from Shakespeare's oeuvre and creates a work that is eerie in its timeliness. 

—Finn Harvor, Rain Taxi 

Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we're mired in today; in the process he's created his own masterpiece. 

—John Grooms, Creative Loafing, Charlotte 

The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage.                 

—Fictionwise

The resulting story is both familiar and fresh, and the characters are energized and enlightened. Reed’s juxtaposition allows him to give added depth and dimension to characters. ..  Shakespeare fans can expect classics, like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy or Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” lament. But Shakespeare fans will have particular fun catching all the familiar Shakespeare lines that come in surprising contexts. It’s not Juliet, for instance, who cries “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?”          

—scholarsandrogues 

Reed skewers our early 21st century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.  

—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine

With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare's own words and characters into an entirely new play. ... Reed has tapped into that muse and produced a re-envisioned Shakespeare that proves to be both provocative, substantial, and entertaining.              

—hipsterbookclub

A new and invigorating interpretation ... electrifying and comprehensive.  

—Zoe Rosenthal, BatesStudent