Many of the college students in attendance told me they had been turned on to the possibility of seeing more theatre, thanks to the excitement they experienced while watching the production. These younger audience members seemed amazed, and even shocked, by how much they had enjoyed "Dream". The rub, however, lies in the fact that many older, and more experienced theatergoers recognized the production's many flaws and, as a result, were unable to become fully involved with the its narrative and themes. The production succeeded in bringing in, and entertaining, members of my age cohort, but it failed overall as a production.
The reasons for the attraction to "Dream" for young, and less theatrically experienced, audience members are easily speculated upon. One reason we were likely able to get them in the door was thanks to an excellent gimmick conceived by my co-producers at the Limelight Nightclub, where the performance took place. We "put the word out"", without officially advertising it, that if people came to see the play, they would be allowed to remain in the nightclub afterwards, thereby avoiding both the club's entry fee (about double the cost of a ticket to the play), and the long waits behind the velvet rope. Furthermore, tickets to the production were much less expensive than the nightclub entry fee. Word about this "secret" spread quickly throughout the large student population of NYU, where I was a senior at the time, and to my surprise, every performance had a line around the block of people my own age wanting to get in to see the show", i.e. get into the club for cheap with the small sacrifice of having to sit through a play beforehand. This sacrifice seemed especially small to our audience because the play ran at only about 80 minutes. .
By the second weekend, Dream had received a great deal of word-of-mouth publicity among members of my age cohort for being completely different from the stale, boring, and irrelevant stereotype most of them held about Shakespeare.