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When Austin Tichenour joined the Reduced Shakespeare Company in 1992, founder Reed Martin told Tichenour he couldn't guarantee how long the gig would last.

"Reed said he didn't know if it would be three weeks, three months or three years," Tichenour says.

Now, 11 years later, the troupe is not only still going strong, it has become a Pittsburgh tradition.

For the third year in a row, the Reduced Shakespeare Company will spend 10 days surrounding Christmas as a presentation of the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

"It's nice to be a tradition," Tichenour says. "Pittsburgh audiences have taken us to their collective bosoms, and I'm always happy to be nestled in a bosom."

On this return visit, they will offer seven performances each of "The Complete History of America (abridged)" and "The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)."

"The Complete History of America (abridged)" romps through 600 years of the country's history in 6,000 seconds, taking audiences from New World discoverers to New World Order, from the Bering Straits to Baghdad, with lots of comedic stops in between.

The American history show was first written a decade ago as Bill Clinton was about to take over the presidency from George H.W. Bush. But the show is almost constantly being re-written as events progress from current news to past history.

With a new election year at hand, the material changes almost daily, Tichenour says. "If something happens during the day, it's sure to be in the show that night," he says. "The American history show stays fresh because we have a question-and-answer period. We will answer any question the audience asks, so we have to be on our toes. Mostly, it's political science questions, and Reed was a political science major at (The University of California at) Berkeley." The history questions fall to Tichenour, because that was his major at Berkeley.

In "The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)," the self-styled bad boys of abridgement take an irreverent but not irreligious look into great theological concerns such as Did Adam and Eve have navels? Did Moses really look like Charlton Heston? And do audience members look absurd when portraying animals about to accompany Noah onto the Ark?

The Bible hasn't changed much since the King James edition appeared in 1611, so that show doesn't need updating as often.

"It's a fun celebration of the book," Tichenour says. "We specifically stayed away from commenting on beliefs because that's private."

The Reduced Shakespeare Company began its present life with a show called "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)." Over time, it has tackled the history of Western civilization, which debuted here in 1998 as "The Millennium Musical" and is now known as "Western Civilization: The Complete Musical (abridged)." The company also has done "The Ring Reduced," a half-hour version of Richard Wagner's monumental three-opera Ring Cycle, and "All the Great Books (abridged)," a comedic condensation of world literature.

"The subtext of all Reduced shows is the arrogance of three Americans who think they can reduce topics into an evening - that we're simply unaware it's impossible," Tichenour says. "We try not to cater to people's tastes. We write what we think is funny. We don't have to debate it. We try it on an audience. If it gets a laugh, it stays."

Over time, they've also gotten a fix on which subjects are promising candidates for abridgement and which aren't.

"It needs to be a topic that defies easy reduction," Tichenour says. "Anything that's silly or sounds like a joke - it's not funny."

The O.J. trial earns his veto. He likes the idea of staging theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's book as "A Really Brief History of Time" or doing "The Encyclopedia (abridged)" one letter or one word at a time. "We've never had any takers for that," he laments.

As usual, they're kicking around a couple of ideas for development. The problem is finding time and money. "We've never written anything that we were not paid for in advance," Tichenour says. "There are tons of people who want to read anything when we write it. But nobody is saying 'Here's the money to do it.'"

In the meantime, they are going ahead with a project to record "All the Great Books (abridged)" and release it as a DVD, writing a series of "Reduced" books for a New York publisher and condensing five works of literature from the top of a list of 100 greatest books in the English language compiled by BBC listeners into one- to five-minute performances. Strangely, one of the books they're condensing is Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." That's right, Tichenour says, "We're now satirizing satire."

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