To further this cause, I changed the character of Lysander from male to female, thus making the marriage between Lysander and Hermia illegal on the grounds of same-sex marriage rather than the misgivings of an overbearing father. This helped the young audience relate to the high stakes involved for the couple, and brought the main conflict into a realm they could readily understand, as opposed to writing it off as an antiquated relic of yesteryear. .
All of the above textual choices made the sexual hi-jinks of Midsummer far more complicated, as the confused couplings in the narrative involved homosexual characters being tricked into heterosexual relationships, and vise-versa. The removal of the mechanicals resulted in a plot line that involved Puck turning herself (the role was cast against the gender norm) into an ass who is sleeping with Titania, the wife of her boss (Oberon). The net result was that the sexual aspect of the play's narrative was situated front and center, and the comedic sexual perversions therein seemed edgy and dirty to a contemporary audience of young adults. Ironically, I was able to manufacture the presumable reaction from Shakespeare's audience to the original text, which was risque in its time, through radically altering it to meet with the expectations of contemporary young adults, for whom the plot as written comes across as extremely tame.
Finally, the environment of the nightclub in itself contributed to the "hip " feel of the production, both because it was not a traditional theatre space, and because the very nature of sitting in a club with hip hop music playing, and wild club-like lighting felt familiar to the young adults in attendance. They simply did not feel like they were in a theatre seeing a play " an experience, they consistently told me, they had long since decided was not for them, in large part because they felt that theatrical productions were created explicitly for an older audience.
