It's something like Shakespeare, but it's also something like Monty Python," says Blaine Swen with a laugh. "This show isn't as highbrow as some people may think."

The creator and director of the Chicago-based Improvised Shakespeare Company is bringing his bawdy band of knaves to the Walton Arts Center to perform their unique long-form improvisation show based on the language used by the Bard himself.

"Learning to speak in Elizabethan English has definitely expanded my vocabulary," Swen says. "We translate everything in our show. On occasion one of us may slip up and say something like cellphone and the rest of us call him out on it. But we try to keep things very up to date. So a car becomes a carriage. And Facebook is a wooden post put up somewhere around town where people can carve messages or poke the board."

The show will open with a request from the players. The audience will be given an opportunity to call out the title of a play which the players will then be responsible for performing. The title is completely made up on the spot, Swen says.

"We ask for the title of a play that's never been written," he says. "Then we perform the first one we hear. We make up the play from the start. We have gotten some pretty great titles from audiences," he says. "We've gotten 'Rocky Hamlet Picture Show' and 'Mid-Summer Night's Menopause.' But sometimes we get more interesting titles. Once we had to perform a play titled 'Justin Bieber.' But it wasn't too bad. He ended up being killed in the end by the Jonas Brothers."

While pursuing a graduate education at Chicago's Loyola University, Swen formed Improvised Shakespeare in 2005. The Ph.D. now relies on those contacts he made at the university to help mold the group during rehearsals.

"One of my profs is now a consultant on the (Shakespeare) canon for the show," he says. "We read the sonnets as well and some things from Shakespeare's contemporaries, like Ben Johnson. I can't say that I've read all of Shakespeare's plays, though. I haven't read 'Pericles (Prince of Tyre).'"

Like the popular improvisation TV show "Whose Line is it Anyway," Improvised Shakespeare Company employs topical and physical humor to entertain the audience.

"I really like that audience to leave thinking 'I haven't laughed that hard in years,'" Swen says. "It's kind of a morbid goal, but I would like them to leave in pain from laughing so hard. We like to embrace an element of seriousness, which makes the funny parts even more funny, I think. And there's some physical comedy. We do jump around and climb on each other, but we're in our 30s now, so we do it more tenderly.

"Every time we perform, the play is new and fresh and different," he adds. "It is the only time it will be performed. It will be performed once and then go away forever and never performed again. The audience should try to trip us up with a strange suggestion. There's no such thing as a bad title.

"We accept the challenge."