The line yesterday full of chattering students, professors and even parents curved past the Hoff Theater, through the food court and down the hall near the Student Involvement Suite.

But this crowd wasn’t gathered for some free screening of a much-hyped film like Spiderman 3 or tickets for a concert like Art Attack. Instead, these people were here for porn – Shakesporn, to be exact.

The event was Shakespeare Undressed, a program that is part of the five-month Shakespeare in Washington celebration organized by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The event, which discussed the influence of Shakespeare’s works on the hardcore porn industry and was attended by more than 100 people, was meant to show how the Bard has been adapted over the past 400 years through a variety of pop culture mediums, said graduate students and organizers Gillian Knoll and Christine Maffuccio.

“We think it’s useful to be reminded that Shakespeare can be this low,” Maffuccio said. “He’s sort of this high culture phenomenon … but also, Shakespeare sort of informs low culture, too. It’s useful to see this whole range of Shakespeare in our culture.”

Maffuccio and Knoll organized the event after receiving an e-mail that invited university faculty and staff to dream up ideas for events that could be part of Shakespeare in Washington. A few years ago, Knoll had seen the porno, A Midsummer Night’s Cream, and an idea was born, she said.

“I immediately knew it would be a great forum for discussing Shakespeare’s adaptations,” Maffuccio said. “I saw that Shakespeare in Washington was doing all these ballets and high-brow stuff … so we contributed something low-brow.”

Delicate it was not. Crowded in the pitch-black Hoff as an awkward heaviness hung in the air and the stray giggle pierced the tension, audience members watched Juliet having sex with the Nurse, and in another scene, Romeo masturbated to a fake porno called As You Lick It. Another clip featured Hamlet’s mother Gertrude enjoying a threesome with two of her female handmaidens, then having intercourse with her brother-in-law Claudius as her husband slept in the bed beside them.

In the Midsummer Night’s Dream takeoff, a transsexual Puck curiously explores his newfound vagina as Titania and her lover Bottom, in full donkey form, get it on.

It wasn’t all flesh films, though. The event also included a discussion with three panelists – professors Ted Leinwand of the English department, Heather Nathans of the theatre department and Trevor Parry-Giles of the department of communication – and a question-and-answer session with the audience.

Shakesporn, it seems, is endless in its creativity, many in the discussion agreed. But Maffuccio and Knoll seemed to have just one question for the audience: “Who is the audience for Shakesporn? Does the porn cancel out the Shakespeare, or does it illuminate it?”

According to Nathans, the films do a little bit of both.

“They’re trying to work with the text, rather than against it,” she said. “If you get what they’re talking about, it’s funnier.”

Yet the films, Leinwand said, aren’t any more interesting than a regular porno.

“They’re profoundly boring,” he said. “Endless sea of thrusting and sucking, thrusting and sucking … One is compelled to fast forward, no matter the level of one’s deprivation.”

In fact, the entire industry of Shakesporn has a questionable – and intriguing – demographic, Parry-Giles said.

“What makes your average male consumer see A Midsummer Night’s Cream in the video store and think, ‘I have latent Shakespeare interests, and I wonder if this is a good adaptation?'” he said.

Nevertheless, Shakesporn is an incredibly intriguing adaptation of the Bard’s works, and seem to prove how resilient his plays truly are, Leinwand said.

“It’s pretty striking how durable Shakespeare is,” he said. “Shakespeare has proven eminently wackable, and what we’re seeing here is how he can take a good hit and come back as his own.”

Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.