Leaving ASU’s Herberger Mainstage Theatre production of “Romeo and Juliet,” directed by associate drama professor Victoria Holloway, one of Shakespeare’s great ending lines came to mind:

“Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;/some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.”

Punished, indeed, is the audience for Holloway’s cacophonous modernist creation, a whiz-bang eclectica of technological silliness based on a vision that’s less about embracing “Romeo and Juliet” as an endearing story for the ages than toying within its words in an attempt to create something avant-garde from them.

That much is evident when, in Act I, a cross section of audience members is whisked away to the lobby of the campus Lyceum playhouse and lined up along the sides like wallflowers to witness a goofy Capulet ball that is then televised to the remaining audience still seated inside. Being one of the wallflowers means missing out on the love-at-first-sight meeting of star-crossed sweeties Romeo and Juliet — a crime most heinously inexcusable for sake of gimmick.

(Rainy weather prevented some opening weekend audiences from witnessing another of Holloway’s gimmicks: A sword fight staged outside the theater before intermission. But even relegated to the stage, the fights — choreographed by Edgar Landa — were as overzealously gratuitous as Juliet’s nudity.)

Holloway has done more than her fair share of “Romeo and Juliets” over her career, and perhaps this is her knee-jerk reaction against it — focusing less on taming her student cast than letting the young ones experiment willy-nilly with more contemporary trappings for their characters. Hence a Juliet (played by Sarah Tully) who’s little more than a petulant teenybopper until it’s time to show her knickers and take off her shirt; a middle-finger-flyin’ Mercutio (Matthew Keuter) straight from a PG-13 version of “A Clockwork Orange”; and an apothecary (Steve Wilcox) dressed up to be either the hero from the “Splinter Cell” video games or a baddie from the movie “C.H.U.D.” — I simply couldn’t tell. But we can pardon the student actors; their talents are largely squandered here.

Against that, we are given a love story between a bratty Juliet and a childish Romeo (played by David Ojala, who, due to Holloway, is left transparent) that’s so dismissible as just another example of teen lust that ultimately we’re left with something certainly Shakespeare never intended: A scared-straight morality play against teen suicide.

There are plenty of other excesses to catalog across this “Romeo and Juliet,” including a dance scene that, intended or not, spoofs “West Side Story” and moments that riff on Britney Spears’ schoolgirl video for “Oops ... I Did It Again.”

There are quick quips on marijuana and random nookie here and there that suggest Holloway’s trying to stage some semblance of a “cool professor” Shakespeare show. The result is discomforting at least, at most offensive for Shakespeare buffs.

I’m sure Holloway has her reasons. But what’s most evident here is the underlying one: Because she can.

Whether she should have is another matter entirely.