Here I am, covered in dried sweat and someone else’s body glitter, nursing aching feet, with a glass of $4 Coke still sizzling my gut. However I am no longer in my black tights and silvery-gold lamé miniskirt (PJs being more suitable for blogging). Clearly, I just got back from the theater.

What they say about A.R.T.’s latest production, “The Donkey Show,” is mostly true. Yes, it’s an attempt at revitalizing its naughty experimental side. Yes, it blurs the lines between theater and clubbing. Yes, it’s loud and unusual and “nothing you’ve ever seen before.” And yes, there is sexiness by the bucketful.

What they left out, though, is that A.R.T. has broken new ground in theater not through format, but through Most Effective Use of Glitter-Covered Men. Throughout the show, which is a loose, very loose remix of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the four chiseled, undulating, shiny hot-pants-wearing magical fairy men worked the crowd and their torsos like nobody’s business. Dancing intermittently on their 3×3 feet raised squares and amongst the audience on the floor, they did a fantastic job of even getting the most reluctant participant to booty-shake. Between main-character “scenes,” they directed the crowds, exercising Moses-esque deftness in parting swaths of space for the performers and also guiding everyone’s gazes to the appropriate opposite end of the “club” where the action is.

In fact, the entire operation was so skillfully choreographed that the entire time I couldn’t help but marvel at how amazing it was that nothing went wrong. And so many things could have gone wrong. Here you are, putting tons of excited, clueless, bewildered, and dazed viewers in a small, strobe-lit, dark space (with alcohol!), and expecting them to move in predictable patterns so as not to get kicked in the head by Titania’s black thigh-high vinyl boot heel. But it all worked! And they did it in such an effective way that the spell of the show was not broken at all by the intermittent shufflings. You come away feeling like you just lived the most hilariously chaotic experience ever, but underneath it all was a ton of cleverly hidden planning and control. Amazing.

Anyway, these four Fairy Men with their dazzling smiles and utterly inappropriate dance moves. When I am an eccentric rich person some day, I will hire them to be my escorts everywhere. I shall name them Flame, Snowflake, Tsunami, and Pony.

As you can see, I am actually too tired/high on glitter to write a real review. But I will attempt to soldier on.

So basically, it was a great experience… experientially. Lots of fun, and good exercise, too. But from a theatrical standpoint, I’m not sure it was the best A.R.T. show I’ve ever seen. That is, if theater is be judged by traditional stuff like acting quality, plot, choreography etc. I guess I’m just a little traditional at heart, if only because my befuzzled brain still doesn’t quite know what to make of this night-club pseudo-theater idea yet.

In this case, there was hardly any acting, and all singing all had a blarey, karaoke-bar quality to it, where you could barely make out any of the words. Probably done on purpose, but still, you couldn’t tell if the singers were singing or just screaming above a recording. The performers were all masters of the comically exaggerated facial expression and bodily gesture, which was fortunate because otherwise the story would have been completely lost on me. The plot itself was utterly frivolous and had a dubious resolution at best, but again, probably done on purpose.

I think ultimately, the A.R.T. just wanted people to have fun, to not be “bored,” and to be fully immersed in the action. There was no time to be bored, which was a first for me at a play (I admit to falling a little asleep at “The Seagull”). There is so much constantly being asked of the audience: look here! Look there! Move aside, don’t get kicked in the face! Dance dance dance! This was not a play for those wanting to flex their brawny intellects, but who said all plays had to be intellectually stimulating? This one chose to stimulate the senses instead (including taste, if you partook of A.R.T.’s subtle invite to enjoy while inebriated), and it did it vigorously.

So okay, it might not have been the best “theatrical production” but it certainly brought people together. Sixty-year-old couples were dancing right alongside young Harvard students to the 70s disco hits. Members of the audience got invited up by the fairy dudes to dance on their stage-cubes. This once culminated in rhythmic ass-smacking via tambourine, to the delighted screams of nearby audience members. Come now, how can you say no to that?

I do look forward to more shenanigans from A.R.T. this year, as well as from their reinvented experiment incubator, this “Club OBERON” of theirs.