Sleep No More is a play. Sort of. It is staged in a “hotel” in New York City. You go in, go through the rooms and floors, walk through the “set” and experience the “actors” as the events happen around you in a very stylized and abstract way. You open doors, crawl through windows if you like, take candy from the jar…you’re inside the show. The whole thing is derived from Shakespeare and Hitchcock in similar measure, and it positively drips with the atmosphere of urban fantasy taken out of time in its blend of the 30s and Victoriana and God knows what else. So if you think you might be down for this, don’t read on.
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(tribute to the old listserv days)
Ready? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
They led us into the “hotel”, gave us a playing card as we “checked in,” took all our coats and bags and things, and sent us up the stairs to the lounge. It turns out they’re serious: you do NOT need your coat and you DEFINITELY won’t want to be carrying a bag. In fact, the most critical things you can do to be ready are to wear your running shoes and put in contacts rather than wearing glasses.
The lounge looks like half a dozen speakeasy bars: dark wood, thick scarlet velvet curtains, absinthe punch. Fog, or mist, or haze, or something drifts through the tables around the small stage (piano, bass, drums). No musicians yet, just the compere with his oily British accent calling our card numbers. Your number comes up, your group shuffles out, and a similarly unctuous Brit-accented lady lounge singer hands out…masks. Think plague masks as designed by Jason Voorhes. And your instructions are strict: no talking after this, until you leave the show. Everyone goes into the elevator, which rises – and then one person is grabbed and put off the elevator. It then descends and everyone else is allowed off…
…into a sanitarium. Or something. Beds, bathtubs, medical instruments, and then the door and the window lead outside into a maze of thorny trees, with a hut off in one corner…and then people appear. There’s a nurse in the hut. There’s another one attending to somebody in a bathtub, and you can’t even really tell if it’s male or female or what age. It looks cold and creepy and yet the temperature is starting to climb, and when you’re trying to sidle your way up to whatever the hell’s going on in the middle of that maze with fifty other people, you can tell it’s going to get uncomfortably hot before the night’s out.
Eventually you give up trying to make heads or tails of the sanitarium and just head downstairs…into an empty village. There’s a tea shop, there’s a detective agency, there’s a candy store and you can actually nick the peppermints and butterscotch and licorice allsorts from the jars. And then there’s a couple of people having a fight, or somebody crawling up the wall and suspending themselves against the ceiling, and then there’s an abandoned nightclub lounge that looks exactly like where you just came from, covered in dust and cobwebs, and all of a sudden there’s the witches’ scene from Macbeth reinterpreted as some kind of dubstep rave orgy strobelight nightmare, and before you can say “what the hell’s that?” everyone runs away.
On downstairs again, where there’s something – is that a hotel? A dining room? Does that let out into a backyard cemetery or is that a garden? That statue isn’t moving, is it? Is that another bathtub in the ballroom of that house? Are those supposed to be Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in there?
You get the idea. It turns out to be surreal and hallucinatory and dreamlike and impossible to follow. And by the time it was over, with Macbeth hanged at the coronation feast, you’re equal parts “what the hell was that?” and “They need to bring that to San Francisco so I can see it again.” It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen as “theater” and I’d totally go again if given a chance…