It started as a sort of experiment, an off-season diversion for theatre enthusiasts interested in staging Shakespeare’s more serious works, the ones that are often skipped over in favor of his lighter comedy fare during the carefree summer months. In the fall of 2007, Nicole Galland teamed up with Chelsea McCarthy to tackle some of the great Shakespearean tragedies and spin their stories into something accessible for all.

The result would be a show built upon a single day of rehearsal; script-in-hand performances, no sets and no costumes. Actors would be unpaid, admission free.

The series was dubbed Shakespeare for the Masses, and it enjoyed a steady first winter, staging modified versions of plays like Hamlet and Macbeth. “Our original premise was really very humble. It was like, let’s just try to tell the story as plainly as possible,” said Ms. Galland this week.

“Once we started doing it, we just got on this roll ... and then all of a sudden it was the spring of ’09 and we were doing King Lear, and it was our seventh play in seven months.”

This season, the series really erupted, and audiences grew steadily with each performance. A video clip from the troupe’s performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which they staged a scene from the classic plot against the backdrop of a game show, garnered attention from a national literary agency, which immediately picked them up as a client. They’re now attempting to get a publisher interested.

The project has sparked the attention of another publisher as well. Ms. Galland, author of three novels, found inspiration for her newest book in the troupe’s performance of one of her favorite Shakespearean plays.

“There is a novel that is now coming into existence that I’m more excited about than anything I’ve ever written since my very first book, that wouldn’t have come into being if it wasn’t for the experience of the group doing Othello,” she said.

When Shakespeare for the Masses decided to stage Othello, they enlisted an actor named Billy Meleady to play the villian Iago. “He didn’t know the play,” said Ms. Galland. “That never happens. Every actor in the universe wants to play Iago.”

But his lack of knowledge turned out to be a blessing for Ms. Galland. “It was like every director’s dream. I get this blank slate to work on Iago from the ground up.”

And in preparing Mr. Meleady for the roll, Ms. Galland began to see a whole new side of the familiar antihero. “For me, it was just this goldmine,” she said. “The writer in me just got so into the character, and why does he do this?

“All of a sudden, I felt like I understood Iago in a way that Iago had never been understood before.”

After a couple of long, reflective walks in the woods with her dog, Ms. Galland decided to set her ideas to paper. “All of a sudden, I knew exactly how to tell the story of Othello from Iago’s point of view. So that’s what it is,” she said. “I wrote about 20 pages. That’s it, 20 pages.”

She sent the unfinished draft to her agent alongside the longtime project she’d been working on, and asked the agent to try to get it picked up by a publisher. And as luck would have it, Harper Collins agreed to buy both.

“I’m so jazzed. I know exactly what I want to do with it,” she said. “But the thing is it never would have happened if Chelsea and I hadn’t done this madcap thing.”

The madcap project to bring Shakespeare’s more serious work to the quiet winter Vineyard doesn’t seem so madcap anymore. But the troupe is still taking risks, pushing the envelope, and injecting life and humor into some of Shakespeare’s sadder and stuffier stories. This weekend, they will take their biggest gamble yet — staging a performance of three of Shakespeare’s famous history plays, Richard II, Henry IV Part One and Henry IV Part Two, all rolled into one.

The plays together would span some nine hours if performed in their entirety, but Ms. Galland and Ms. McCarthy worked hard to make sure it sticks to their hour-and-a-half limit. It wasn’t easy.

“Earlier in the season, Chelsea was doing the first edit and said ‘We can’t do it, this play is not going to work for us,’” said Ms. Galland. But when she managed to cut it down to 20 pages, Ms. McCarthy’s confidence was somewhat restored. Still, they’re not sure if it will follow the pattern of this season’s string of successes.

“We’re terrified. We’re scared it’s going to be our first flop,” said Ms. Galland. “But I have literally said that for every show.”

It’s a gamble, but so was the entire premise of the series. And after a whirlwind two seasons, 14 shows and the various other opportunities they have sparked, one thing has remained constant; she’s always pleasantly surprised in the end.