The Donkey Show

Welcome to Oberon

By JONATHAN DONALDSON

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Diane Paulus is about to sprinkle fairy dust over Harvard Square. As the American Repertory Theater's new artistic director, Paulus will open her tenure with The Donkey Show, the deliriously modern and sexy adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that she and husband Randy Weiner created in 1998. Opening at the newly christened Oberon (formerly Zero Arrow Theatre), The Donkey Show refracts Shakespeare's notoriously enchanted forest through the fantastical lens of a Studio 54-esque disco (not coincidentally called "Club Oberon")—where the divas become the damsels, the songs of the '70s become the soliloquies and the audience becomes the ambiance. "The show goes on around you, behind you, on the stage, all around the club," says Paulus of The Donkey Show's environmental theater approach. "And you, the audience, are on the floor, and you are part of the show. You are the environment."

Paulus recalls the grassroots, off-off-off-Broadway beginnings of The Donkey Show in New York, as inspired by a mutual reverence for Shakespeare's stories and disco, plus the desire to create joyous and innovative theater. "We started it downtown on Ludlow Street in a little place called The Piano Store," she says, "which was a front for a speakeasy. We borrowed the red ropes from the restaurant across the street and made it into a club. The actors would parade up and down the street, having to change in the bathroom at the coffee shop. We had no seats. We took all the seats out, but people came and stood as if it was a nightclub." What began then as word of mouth spiraled quickly into a six-year run off-Broadway, as well as a number of international productions.

What does Shakespeare have to do with disco culture? "For me and Randy, we just looked at Shakespeare as an amazing source of stories," says Paulus. She and Weiner specifically honed in on how Shakespeare's lovers (Hermia and Lysander) run away to the forest to create their own identities; essentially the reason why the lovers of The Donkey Show (Mia and Sander) escape to the disco. Says Paulus: "This is very much what Studio 54 was. You had characters like [the Puckish] Rollerina, who was a Wall Street guy by day and by night he put on roller skates and handed out drugs out of a bowl. That was his persona at Studio 54." Paulus and Weiner also looked at the love, lust and cruelty in Shakespeare's text and saw a match in '70s music. "Listen to disco songs," says Paulus. "They're all 'I want you,' 'I need you,' 'I can't have you,' 'Don't leave me,' 'You turn me on'—it's all in the lyrics: passionate love, lust and wanting."

It is in this sincere reverence for disco that The Donkey Show goes beyond the hubris of reinventing Shakespeare. The "low culture" of our time is shown with equal footing as the legitimate art form it really is—one capable of hitting you, mind, body and spirit. "You're in the club and the DJ is spinning disco songs, and the character is singing along to disco songs because they just so happen to capture what the character is thinking," Paulus says. "Helena sings 'Don't Leave Me This Way' by Thelma Houston because she's desperately in love with Dimitri. "You'll never hear that song the same way again."

THE DONKEY SHOW

AMERICAN REPERTORY

THEATRE

OPENS FRI 8.21.09

THROUGH SAT 10.31.09

OBERON

2 ARROW ST.,

HARVARD SQ.

CAMBRIDGE

WED-FRI 8PM

SAT 8PM, 10:30PM

$25 DANCEFLOOR

$49 TABLES

AMREP.ORG