022811 Get Out

When American Repertory Theater (ART) artistic director Diane Paulus brought The Donkey Show to Cambridge in 2009, we were dazzled — and not just by the copious amounts of body glitter and sequined booty shorts. By plopping the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the go-go dancer boxes of OBERON, Paulus transformed a Shakespearean classic into a disco opus in a way that made almost shocking sense. It also got us brainstorming about other anachronistic adaptations of classic theater: what about A Streetcar Named Desire set in a subway tunnel in 1990s NYC? (Thank heavens no one has ever entrusted us with an arts grant.) We’ll let Paulus's capable hands direct the ART's newest creative venture: Prometheus Bound, which just opened at OBERON (2 Arrow Street, Cambridge) and runs through April 2. The show is based on Aeschylus's Greek tragedy about a heroic Titan imprisoned by the all-powerful Zeus for daring to pass the gift of fire to ordinary mortals. But don't expect the script to stick to the ancient playwright's traditional prose: the ART's version was written by the Tony- and Grammy-winning Steven Sater, whose musical Spring Awakening made Broadway's collective tongue wag for its controversial examinations of teen sexuality. And the music, composed by the Grammy-winning Serj Tankian (pictured) — lead singer of System of a Down — is designed to imbue the whole affair with the air of a fist-pumping rock concert. For tickets ($25-$55) and show times, visit americanrepertorytheater.org.