Shakespeare Exploded Guide: Disco Divas: A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus describes The Donkey Show
SEP 1, 2009
Artistic Director Diane Paulus describes The Donkey Show
The Donkey Show retells Shakespeare’s��A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the world of 1970s disco.The enchanted woods of the Shakespeare play become the disco, where, just as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lobers escape from their real lives to experience a night of dream, abandon, and fantasy.
At Studio 54, the most iconic 1970s disco, there was a sense of freedom, of being anyone you wanted to be. It was a mecca for gays, for the outrageous – people arrived at the club, their entire bodies painted silver or gold. It was a true democracy on the dance floor, where an average Joe from Queens could rub shoulders with Elizabeth Taylor. There was also unbelievable spectacle – like Bianca Jagger riding in the club on a white horse. And, of course, there were the Studio 54 boys, the shirtless bartenders/bus boys/dancers who populated the club like eye candy. It was also a dangerous world. There was the hustle of getting into the club. The image of hordes of people standing on West 54th Street, waiting to be picked to pass the red ropes, is an indelible part of Studio 54’s lore. If you were lucky enough to get in, there were VIP rooms and parties for the inside crowd. Drugs abounded in the stairwells; pills were being popped everywhere. There was even a character known as “Rollerina” who would skate around the dance floor with a magic wand, giving out drugs from a giant bowl.
The Donkey Show tells the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream without using a single word of Shakespearean text. What became our text was disco music. Originally Randy Weiner, the conceiver and writer of The Donkey Show, considered writing new disco songs, essentially creating an original score, following the standard approach for a new musical. For inspiration, he started listening to all the great hits from the period. He discovered that the songs the show needed already existed in the disco canon – perfectly crafted, articulating all the major story points of Shakespeare’s plot. One of the first songs to make it into The Donkey Show soundtrack was Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” It was the perfect expression of Helena’s dogged pursuit of Demetrius:
Don’t leave me this way
I can’t survive, can’t stay alive
Without your love, oh baby
Don’t leave me this way, no
I can’t exist, I’ll surely miss your tender kiss
Don’t leave me this way
Aaah baby, my heart is full of love and desire for you
Now come on down and do what you gotta do
You started this fire down in my soul
Now can’t you see it’s burning out of control
Come on now satisfy the need in me
Only your good lovin’ can set me free
Don’t, don’t you leave me this way, no
Don’t you understand I’m at your command…*
The world of 1970s disco is defined by its music. Instead of creating watered down versions of disco songs, we decided to use the original music from the period. We listened to hundreds of disco songs to select the best songs to tell the story of each moment of the play.
When we did the show in its earliest incarnation, the performers just sang along to the original songs, which were played from records that our deejay was spinning live. It was as if the characters were at a real club: the deejay is playing music, and a song comes on that perfectly encapsulates the emotion the character is feeling. The character is compelled by passion and the moment to sing along out loud. There was much discussion about the validity of this approach. Many of our colleagues from the professional theater world assumed when we were serious about producing the show in a more legitimate way, we would take out those vocals, allowing the performer’s voice to take the lead. What kind of musical is this if the performer is just singing along to Thelma Houston?
In the end, we resisted any suggestion to remove the vocals.�� Who can sing those disco songs better than the original vocalist, especially if the intent is to recreate the authentic world of a 1970s disco? Would you rather hear Earth, Wind and Fire sing “Hearts of Fire” or a musical theater performer’s version of that song? Besides, the very act of The Donkey Show performers having to meet the likes of Donna Summer wailing out “Enough is Enough” has brought their performances to a higher level. It is like playing Shakespeare. The actor is always striving to meet the greatness of the text, of the characters. It is this distance between the ordinary actor and the greatness of King Lear that makes playing Shakespeare so challenging, so athletic. You are stretched to a size bigger than yourself. Just so with Donna Summer.
The worst offense you can commit when dealing with pop forms in the theater is to destroy the form by watering it down or rendering it unrecognizable, which we would have done by trying to create new disco songs or employing karaoke versions of existing disco hits.
Using the original music also layers and densifies the theatrical event. At any moment in the show, the audience experiences the music in multiple ways:
1) Remembering a personal moment associated with the song. Hearing the original track reaches outside the confines of the theatrical event and taps into the memory bank of the audience members’ larger lives. Audience members recount to us memories of where they were when they heard the song for the first time or an emotional crisis that was memorialized by the song. Pop music has that power. We adopt pop music into the fabric of our lives, which give songs a ritual meaning in our lives.
2) Enjoying the music in the present. These are great songs. To hear them blasting over the loudspeakers – to feel the bass pumping in your chest – creates an undeniable Artaudian sensory experience.
3) Hearing the music in a new way because of the context of the story. Many audience members remark to us, “I never really listened to those lyrics before.” The framing of these songs in the emotional situations of the show’s characters wakes up the songs.
The Donkey Show had its first incarnation at The Piano Store on Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This space was a former speakeasy hidden at the end of a long hall behind an actual storefront piano store. It was a very small room with the delightful feature of a wooden balcony which wrapped around the space. On our most crowded nights, we could fit eighty people in the space. The Piano Store typically used folding chairs for audience seating. Our intention, however, was to create the actual environment of a club, so we immediately removed all the chairs. The audience stood for the whole show, as they would on a disco dance floor. The show subsequently played at the legendary Pyramid Club on Avenue A before moving to El Flamingo, the nightclub in Chelsea where the show had its official Off-Broadway opening in the summer of 1999. The show has since toured to Edinburgh, London, Madrid, Seoul (where it is still running in Korean), and Evian, France. It will now be the inaugural production at the A.R.T.’s new theater club, OBERON.
What is most important about the staging of The Donkey Show is that the audience is free. They move around during the show. They dance. They drink. They cheer, jeer, and yell out to the performers. They sing along to the songs. Sometimes a song comes on, and a couple will start making out. And if you don’t want to be on the dance floor, you can purchase a ticket for VIP table seating. The famous classical pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, used to love to go to Studio 54 and watch people from the balcony. I have always resisted the label “interactive” theater for this production because it conjures up those awful scenarios of audience members being forced to participate. At The Donkey Show, true to club culture, you decide on your level of involvement. If being a voyeur is what you desire, then you take your position on the sidelines. If you would rather be in the thick of it, rubbing bodies with your fellow audience members, then, as in a rock concert, you take your position in the mosh pit.
