The Limelight is essentially a gutted out Gothic style church, and we used its architecture to our advantage, allowing the action to spill off the multi-leveled stage on which bands and DJ's normally performed, into, around, and above the enormous dance-floor upon which the audience was seated. Essentially, the nightclub itself stood in for the set, which was a choice I made at the same instant that I first entered the space, because it felt intrinsically right for the production. While I was not conscious of it at the time, I believe now that this choice worked well for the production in large part because it went against the artifice many members of my age cohort associated with Shakespeare.
All of these design choices were an outgrowth of my textual adaptation. Following the example of Charles Marowitz, whose work I greatly admired, I endeavored to alter the narrative of the play by chopping, cutting, and pasting Shakespeare's words without adding any of my own. I cut the mechanicals out of the play entirely in order to put the focus of the narrative squarely on the lovers, whose plight I felt had been maligned in each of the multitude of productions of Midsummer I had seen or acted in previously. My belief was that the seriousness of their situation, and the metaphorical impact of the fairy world upon it, would be mitigated by the subplot of the bumbling clowns. .
I wanted to promote the appeal of the production to a young demographic by portraying the lovers with a grave seriousness, and allowing what little humor there would be in this production to arise from the young adult audience members' ability to relate to the lovers' adolescent conflicts. My purpose was to remove any sense of condescension toward the lovers through taking their struggles as seriously as they take themselves. This was a choice that clearly was an outgrowth of being in my early twenties, and while I would approach the text extremely differently were I to direct it now, I feel confident in the fact that this youthful, and admittedly simplistic approach, greatly served the cause of helping younger, less sophisticated audience members relate to the play's main action.
