The Donkey Show: A Midsummer Night's Disco is a theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...

. The production, created in a disco

Disco

Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...

-era style, was written by Diane Paulus

Diane Paulus

Diane Paulus is an American director of theater and opera who became Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University in 2009. Paulus was nominated for the Best Director Tony Award for her revival of Hair...

 and her husband Randy Weiner

Randy Weiner

Randy Weiner is an American playwright, producer and theater/nightclub owner. Weiner co-wrote the Off-Broadway musical The Donkey Show and, as one-third of EMURSIVE, produced the Drama Desk Award winning New York premiere of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More...

 and first appeared Off-Broadway

Off-Broadway

Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...

, opening August 18, 1999. The show subsequently ran for six years including venues in England, Scotland, France and Spain. In 2009, the show was revived by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for which Paulus is Artistic Director. The club/theater space used in Cambridge is called OBERON, after the king of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream.