On Monday, August 12, every seat in the main stage theater at The Armory will be full. There will be an excited, even giddy atmosphere in the room. The lights will dim, and everyone in the crowd will look around, curiously and expectantly, at their fellow theatregoers. And then one of them, or maybe several, will stand up and begin to speak: “Two households, both alike in dignity. . . .”

Almost every year for the past twenty-two years, Anonymous Theatre Company has undertaken a remarkable feat: to cast, design and rehearse a classic play in total secrecy, such that at the production’s first and only performance neither the audience nor the performers know who will be on stage. Actors arrive at the theater in street clothes and make their entrances from their seats, joining fellow cast-members they may never have met before. And somehow, each year, it isn’t a disaster.

“There are mistakes every year, more than the audience ever realizes,” says Darius Pierce, one of the cofounders of Anonymous Theatre and codirector, with Liz Young, of this year’s show. “But there’s so much joy in the reminder of the immediacy, you know? Our goal is to do the best production of the show that we can.”

Anonymous Theatre’s Darius Pierce and Liz Young. Yes, you can see their faces before the show.

Pierce, Young, and their collaborators have many such productions under their belts. Over the past 22 years, Anonymous Theatre has worked through the theatrical canon, covering comedies (The Skin of Our Teeth, 2013), tragedies (The Crucible, 2014), farces (Rumors, 2008) and Broadway musicals (You Can’t Take It with You, 2011) from Shakespeare and Moliere through Gilbert and Sullivan (The Pirates of Penzance, 2023) to 20th-century favorites and even a world premiere (Fezziwig’s Fortune, 2021). This year, the company will tackle Romeo and Juliet, their third Shakespeare production and arguably the single best-known work of drama in the English language.

“We hope that audience is coming in ready to be as present as the actors are, to come open-hearted and ready to be transported,” Young says. “Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, because people die, but we also happen to think it’s really funny until it’s not. We’re letting it be as funny as it naturally is, and it creates deeper shadows with the brightness of the joy and laughter and light.”

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While Anonymous Theatre’s annual productions are now among Portland’s most beloved theatrical traditions, alongside the likes of the Portland Revels and Ten Tiny Dances, the idea was conceived more than 2,500 miles away, in Providence, R.I., by four seniors at Brown University determined to tear down the fourth wall.

“We were trying to find a way to bring the performers and the audience as close together as possible,” says Pierce, the last of the four founders still actively involved in the company.

The first Anonymous Theatre production, a staging of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was the last of a series of experiments intended to shrink the divide between audience and performer. “They were all interesting, but none were nearly as successful as when we stumbled on this,” says Pierce.

After graduating, Pierce and cofounders Sam Kusnetz and Kerry Ryan moved to Portland, where they continued to make theater together. (The fourth collaborator, Rebecca Curtiss, moved to Boston and now works at American Repertory Theatre.)

“We were like, let’s see: Was that a fluke or a real thing?” Pierce says. “And we tried it again, and the second year was very successful, and we just kept crossing our fingers and doing it until, here we are, lo these many years later.”

Since the first Portland production, in 2003, Anonymous Theatre has returned nearly every summer, usually to a sold-out house. In 2007 the production moved to the brand-new Gerding Theater at The Armory, home of Portland Center Stage, which has been its home ever since.

What keeps the crowds coming is a theatrical experience unlike any other. Anonymous theatre combines the spontaneity of improv comedy, the comforting familiarity of a beloved script, and the vicarious thrill of a gymnastics routine. It seems impossible that the show should work at all, and it is immensely gratifying when, year after year, it does.

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Anonymous Theatre manages to stick the landing, so to speak, thanks to careful planning by the production team. “You really have to visualize everything before you start,” Young says. The directors plan out the blocking for each scene in advance and rehearse one-on-one with each performer for an average of eight hours. Shows with choreography or fights add complications.

“This is not the first show we’ve done stage combat in, but it is definitely the most intricate stage combat. The first scene has five people fighting all at once with rapiers,” Enfield says. The show’s fight choreographer, Kristen Mun-Van Noy, enlisted her partner and apprentices to record videos to help actors learn their parts. Young has used a similar technique for dance choreography, recording herself performing moves and presenting them in split screen.

As with any show, there are always hiccups. Young recalls “a very intricate chase sequence that went off the rails” in the 2007 production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for which both Pierce and Young were performers. “I think it was really fun for the audience and terrifying for the actors,” she says.

This year, Young is excited to see what the Anonymous format will contribute to the romance of Romeo and Juliet. “Juliet will see Romeo from her seat in the audience. And so she’ll have a little moment of, ‘Oh man, it’s that guy,’” she says. “And likewise, Romeo will be able to see from the wings who Juliet is before they actually meet in that first scene, but they have no idea how they’re going to say those lines that everyone knows.”

The possibility for surprise is what makes Anonymous Theatre’s productions so enticing. Especially with a work as well-known as Romeo and Juliet, the audience will likely be as versed in the text as the actors. With luck, everyone in the room will discover something new in the familiar words.

“Anonymous Theatre takes advantage of the ways in which theater is unique, of being live and unrepeatable,” Pierce says. “It feels like all 600 people in the room are telling the story together, and it just so happens that about 20 of them are the ones who get to say the lines.”

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 Anonymous Theatre Company presents Romeo and Juliet at 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 12, at Portland Center Stage’s home space, The Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave. Tickets, $40+, at pcs.org or 503-445-3700.