The last time we spoke, back in June, Daniel Singer boldly stated that the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which he founded in 1981, “invented an entire new genre of entertainment.” As the RSC’s co-artistic director, that’s not a claim I’d feel comfortable making myself—but Daniel might be right.

Inspired by both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Tom Stoppard’s 15-Minute Hamlet, Daniel had the idea 45 years ago to form a small ensemble of players who would perform a comically reduced half-hour version of Shakespeare’s tragedy with a cast of only five at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Northern California. Two years later, the company added a short two-person Romeo and Juliet to their repertoire, and were eventually persuaded that they should reduce all of Shakespeare’s plays. (There were only 35 left; how tough could it be?)

This became, of course, the play that started it all, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), which Daniel co-created with Adam Long and Jess Winfield and took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987. Their success there launched the script and the three-person Reduced Shakespeare Company on its international journey.

In the ensuing 39 years, The Complete Works has played Off-Broadway and the West End multiple times, including a record-breaking nine-year run at the Criterion Theatre in London, and has been translated into over 30 languages and performed all over the world. In the last 10 years, Broadway Play Publishing has licensed the performance rights to hundreds of professional productions and thousands of amateur ones in the U.S. alone. In the film version of The Complete Works, which we shot for PBS in 2000, Daniel is immortalized as the audience “volunteer” who’s pulled onstage to play Ophelia’s Ego. Earlier this year, Daniel’s co-founder and co-author Adam Long directed an updated version for the RSC that toured the U.K. and reinvented the show for a new generation.

The Complete Works remains the template for the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s expanded repertoire of stage comedies abridging American history, the Bible, all the great books, Hollywood films, the world of sports, the history of comedy, and every winter holiday. Even our most recent scripts, which return the company to its Shakespearean roots—William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) and The Comedy of Hamlet (a prequel)—are in conversation with the original conceit Daniel, Adam, and Jess developed at Ren Faires in the 1980s.

When Daniel left the RSC in 1988 to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming an Imagineer at Disney, he continued to follow his theatrical impulses. He co-created the Flower Street Players at Disney, a company made up of Imagineers that donated its proceeds to charity, and founded QuarterMaster, a pirate band that still performs at numerous pirate festivals. He also continued to write: In addition to his 2013 play A Perfect Likeness, which imagines a fictitious meeting between Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens, Daniel was excited about his new play Louisa@Fruitlands: The True Story of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats,’ the premiere of which he was able to attend last summer.

But it is undoubtedly The Complete Works and the company Daniel founded that will have the greatest cultural impact, as the RSC’s comic approach—reverently irreverent send-ups of beloved and/or sacred subjects performed by small casts of fast, funny, and physical performers playing multiple roles—has influenced a generation of theatremakers. In his book Shakespeare in the Theatre: Reduced Shakespeare Company, Ronan Hatfull cites Mischief Theatre (The Play That Goes Wrong and its sequels), the HandleBards, and Pantaloons as British companies that have been inspired by the RSC’s performance style, and plays like The 39 Steps, Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), Spymonkey’s The Complete Deaths, and the more recent The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Abridged as direct descendants of Daniel, Jess, and Adam’s original work.

Daniel Clarkson, the co-creator of the Potted Potter phenomenon, told me on the Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast that it’s the RSC’s “fault that [he] even started doing” theatre, and that we’re his “comedy heroes.” He went further in a recent online interview, confessing that seeing the RSC perform Singer’s The Complete Works showed him “that with enough imagination, a handful of props and a ridiculous amount of energy, you could stage absolutely anything.”

In fact, one of the many pleasures of the RSC Podcast is hearing so many artists I admire share how the RSC and The Complete Works has inspired them: folks like director and critic Sara Holdren, playwright Madhuri Shekar, rapper Devon Glover, cartoonist Mya Gosling, and author Ian Doescher. I thanked Daniel myself on the podcast back in June; if it wasn’t for him, it’s doubtful I’d have my career as a practicing Shakespearean—and I’m not alone. Daniel José Molina, whose his first experience seeing Shakespeare performed was watching the VHS tape of our film of The Complete Works in a high school drama class, will play Hamlet next season at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, another example of Daniel Singer’s extraordinary legacy.

Austin Tichenor is a playwright and actor who serves as co-artistic director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and as host of the Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast.