The company started in 1988 as the Shenandoah Shakespeare EXPRESS, founded by James Madison University professor Ralph Alan Cohen and director Jim Warren. Their first show was Richard III, performed fourteen times in rural Virginia by a young ensemble drawn from JMU students and alumni. The two-hour version they staged challenged a Shakespearean orthodoxy: that the plays needed lavish productions and grand theaters. SSE's first principle was the opposite. Strip the productions down, put them on the road, and let the language do the work. Within five years they were touring the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, London, Edinburgh. By the late 1990s they had played in nearly every U.S. state and several countries. They needed a home.

The original Blackfriars Theatre stood in London from 1596 until it was demolished in 1655 - the indoor counterpart to the Globe, where Shakespeare's company spent its winters. No reliable plans survive. To rebuild it in Staunton, architect Tom McLaughlin worked from plans of other 17th-century theatres, stage directions in the plays themselves, and theatre historian Irwin Smith's research that suggested the dimensions: roughly 50 by 70 feet. Construction began in 2000, with the timber sourced by Virginia firm Dreaming Creek. The playhouse opened in September 2001 - the same month Shakespeare's Globe was experimenting with its first indoor candlelit performances in London. (Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which shares many features with the Blackfriars, would open thirteen years later, in 2014.) The Staunton building remains the first modern re-creation of Shakespeare's indoor theatre in the world.

The American Shakespeare Center commits to what scholars call Original Practices. Universal lighting - audiences and actors share illumination throughout. Doubling - actors play multiple roles. Cross-gender casting. Minimal sets and props. No interval between scenes; the action flows. Music plays before and during productions, often performed by the actors themselves. The 2005 Actors' Renaissance Season took the experiment further: actors self-direct, self-design, and rehearse only briefly, recovering some of the conditions under which Shakespeare's own company worked. The result feels surprisingly close to a rock concert at times - electric, intimate, communal. Audiences sit on stools onstage if they want; gallant stools, the company calls them. Lines come out into the room. Laughter is loud. The plays were built to work this way.

The ASC produces eight to nine shows a year, with seasons that include Shakespeare's contemporaries - Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher - alongside more modern work, like a staged Pride and Prejudice or a comic Dracula. In 2017, the center launched Shakespeare's New Contemporaries, an international playwriting commission that asks living writers to create new plays in conversation with specific works in the canon. Recent ASC productions have included new responses to The Winter's Tale, Othello, Cymbeline, and Twelfth Night. The center also partners with Mary Baldwin University on a unique graduate program in Shakespeare and Performance, training the actors, directors, and scholars who will carry the practice forward. In a brick playhouse on Market Street in Staunton, a 16th-century theatrical idea is still being figured out, one show at a time.