Every smart DJ worth his well-worn fader knows the trouble with remixes. Take an old melody, a hook, strip it from its context, give it a new beat, loop ad infinitum — and more often than not you find you’ve inexplicably stripped away what made the original song so good in the first place: Its soul.

That’s the unfortunate fate of Nearly Naked Theatre impresario Damon Dering’s so-called “heretical,” gender-bending adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s historical drama “Edward II,” its original text heavily sampled, looped back on itself and recontextualized. Dering has taken a nuanced political play — about a pathetic king whose homosexual affair proves his undoing — and transformed it into a gay fantasia, an anti-homophobia polemic.

In Marlowe’s original text, King Edward of England spends the first half of the play whining about his impossible love for the banished Gaveston, who returns to England much to the consternation of its high lords, for whom Gaveston’s lower-class status (could he be wooing Edward in the name of upward mobility?) and the king’s gushy distraction serve as embarrassment. In the second half, Edward is pitiable as his Gaveston is killed while his kingdom — and his wife — turns against him.

But in Dering’s “E2,” Edward’s simpering takes a different tone, and for the entirety of the play he is something oddly more noble, a sort of gay rights activist ahead of his time. Meanwhile, Gaveston is stripped of his duplicity (in fact, he comments on it to the audience, in several “Mr. Rogers”-like asides) and is made into a sacrificial character, a Matthew Shepard strung up and flogged with a cheesy coup de grace: An epithet written on his back in blood.

It’s hard to decipher just where Dering is aiming his bold adaptation, though it is sharply directed, wonderfully acted and brimming with Dering’s trademark wit. To what end does it serve to ferret out homophobia in feudal England? Even Dering’s usual cavalcade of nudity and obscenity feels, by play’s end, desensitizingly gratuitous.

Ultimately, turning Marlowe’s classic into a time-traveling “Laramie Project” seems witty but aimless. Those familiar with the original “Edward II” will enjoy the way Dering plays with it, but for most it will appear little more than an inside joke.

‘E2: An Adapted Edward II’
When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25
Where: Phoenix Theatre’s Little Theatre, 100 E. McDowell Road
Cost: $18, $15 for students, seniors, military and educators
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