Crowds at the Disco

I'm not a fan of crowds. Being on the shorter side does not help. Hundreds of people, all taller than you, pushing for the best view of something you can't even see, people bumping into you because they're not looking down, being squeezed between two people who just didn't see you there. But sometimes you don't have a choice: The MBTA, the Statue of Liberty, Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower -- if you're going, there are going to be a ton of people. Unless you go in the middle of the night, in which case you won't see much anyway.

Probably the best crowd experience I've ever had was a few years ago, when my friends and I headed to Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA to see the Donkey Show. Now, a handful of people reading this have just gotten very nervous, while quite a few people have just thought "donkey show...why does that sound familiar?" But I'm here to assure you, this was no ordinary donkey show.

The Donkey Show is an interactive play, a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, set in a seventies disco. And the audience are patrons of said disco. Held at Zero Arrow Street, now called Club Oberon in the show's honor, the main floor is the dance floor, where the audience members dance with each other and the actors as the play is performed around them.

So why is it called The Donkey Show? You may recall that in Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon uses a potion to make Titania fall in love with the first thing she sees; the unfortunate creature is Bottom, a man who had been given donkey features as a joke by a mischievous sprite. In Shakespeare's version it is only assumed that the two spend the night together, but in Club Oberon a burlesque performed in true Tijuana Donkey Show style leaves no doubt in the mind of patrons.

We waited in line for a half hour to get inside, only to have the fog machines set off the fire alarms, leading to yet more waiting outside. But the actors waited with us, in character, chatting, dancing and performing the whole time. Knowing that we were part of the show and therefore part of each others shared experience, people were very polite. Nobody shoved their way in, nobody gouged with their elbows to get to the bar. People said hello to each other; people danced with strangers. The experience, in all, was that of renting a disco for yourself and several hundred of your closest friends.

Some of the members of my group were leery of the show before we arrived. They don't like crowds much more than I do, and some are even as short (and therefore as often stepped upon) as I am. But we were all pleasantly surprised by how well behaved this crowd really was. And the shyest of them has even mentioned hoping we return and do it all again sometime.