It’s springtime in New York — prom season. At a table near the back of the dance floor, the spiky-haired blonde and her friend with crimped brown hair giggle as they take a photo of themselves all dressed up in shiny satin dresses. The spotlights rotate wildly as rock tunes blare from the speakers. Marnie Roth waves her arms in the air as the two make their way back to the surging dance floor, revealing her carnation wrist corsage.
Roth, however, is no high school senior. Sporting a shortened blue satin bridesmaid’s dress over black leggings and flats, the 36-year-old newlywed from New Jersey and her best friend, Shawna Unger, 34, of Brooklyn, are just two of the hundreds of adults attending tonight’s event, which is called “The Awesome ’80s Prom,” an audience-participation off-Broadway show in Manhattan that opened in 2004.
The show features improv actors playing characters at a 1989 high school prom, with the audience packing the dance floor as the rest of the prom-goers.
“My prom was a nightmare,” said Roth, who recalled that, when she was a high school senior back in California in 1990, her boyfriend broke up with her two weeks before the dance. Her replacement date, an actor friend, then proceeded to humiliate her when he dropped down to the dance floor and performed the undulating moves of “the worm.”
Her best friend Unger, who works in children’s book publishing and is wearing a long purple satin gown, said the three proms she attended during her high school years just weren’t a lot of fun. “It was awkward,” she said. “Most of it was spent being nervous, I think.”
The opportunity to finally enjoy the prom experience, minus the adolescent self-consciousness about sudden pimples and impressing a date, is what draws adults to events like “The Awesome ’80s Prom,” said Ken Davenport, the interactive show’s writer and director. “When you’re older, you realize that all that stuff doesn’t really matter as much.”
The theme has definitely caught on. “The Awesome ’80s Prom” expanded to Chicago, Minneapolis and Baltimore. And adults across the country have been reinventing their prom experiences on their own for several years.
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