justArts: How did you choose A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Alex Davis: It’s my favorite Shakespeare show, by far. Shakespeare has this tendency in his works to make these really fun, wacky, wild characters, and then he punishes them. Because in Elizabethan society, deviation from the rules of society was really frowned upon. But in Midsummer, the wacky characters he creates sort of win the day at the end. It’s in a real way a reclamation for all of the jesters who get hanged in all of his works and [for] all the funny characters who get stabbed, like [Romeo and Juliet’s] Mercutio. So that’s why it’s my favorite of all the Shakespeare plays out there—there’s a lot.

JA: As the director, did you face any challenges in staging Shakespeare for a modern audience?

AD: No, not really. We had a very strong cut from the beginning. [The performance] was only about an hour long, and it’s my personal belief that Shakespeare is accessible by basically anyone at any time. The reason that he’s still performed is because of the power of everything that he had to say about these really timeless messages—about who we are, about love won and lost, and all of these really timeless things. Translating [the play] to the modern audience was mostly just a case of adding some physicality to sort of explain some of the harder-to-understand pieces of language, [of] cutting out the monologues that don’t really do anything for modern audiences—that kind of thing. A lot of it’s in the delivery. And I can’t take any credit for that. That’s all my actors.

JA: Building on that, how did you change the play from its original version?

AD: Mostly, we cut it. We added a pinch of Glam rock, a little glitter. But other than that, it’s a fairly faithful adaptation. Some of the roles have their genders reversed, and we adopted a fairly common practice of taking Theseus and Hippolyta and double-casting them the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania. But other than that, for all of the David Bowie-trappings, it’s a fairly faithful show to the original, I think.

JA: How did you decide on the show’s punk-rock soundtrack?

AD: For one thing, I just friggin love David Bowie and Roxy Music and Lou Reed. For a while there, like in the ’60s and ’70s, the fringe was sort of taking control of the mainstream ethos in a way that I think reflected what I love about Midsummer. [The] idea that the person who was getting all the radio play was this bizarre, leather-clad androgyne with like a lightning bolt of his face was just such a fun, wild thing that I thought it fit the spirit of Midsummer. And of course, I love the music. “Heroes” is my soundtrack, every day of my life.

JA: Was there one thing you wanted the audience to take away from the show?

AD: I want the audience to come away with more of an appreciation for glam rock, if they didn’t already have it. I want to make a few converts to this idea of an accessible, fast, modern-day sort of Shakespeare. I very consciously, with the only 90-minute long cut and the very broad stereotypes and motions and wanted to take what could very easily be an incredibly insular—in this day and age—sort of playwright and kind of throw the doors wide open on it. I love how unpretentious Midsummer is. I love how there’s not really a whole lot in there that needs to have a lot of deep analyzing to really come away with a positive message from it.

I told my cast that, most of the time, when people are doing Shakespeare, there needs to be all these pauses where people can stop and take what he said and synthesize it and understand it. But if you try to do that with comedy, it kills any humor it has. The best thing to do with Shakespeare’s comedy is just to go full-steam ahead on [the audience] and power through—I like to think that is what we accomplished here.